Modern Sentimentalism and the New Negro

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-148
Author(s):  
Lisa Mendelman
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Recent Scholarship

Chapter 4 focuses on Jessie Redmon Fauset’s acerbic use of sentimentalism to diagnose the tensions inherent in New Negro femininity and artistic production, as exemplified by her novel Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral (1929). Fauset’s anti-didactic Künstlerroman highlights the conflicted demands of Harlem Renaissance/New Negro ideology and the particularly fraught position of the black female writer. The chapter extends recent scholarship on racial feeling and the gendering of double consciousness to theorize Fauset’s sentimentalism as an ironic and melancholic mode that registers the New Negro woman’s unique form of self-estrangement. Plum Bun ultimately proposes racial laughter as an apt response to the position of a black female artist in late 1920s America: a mode that is at once an adaptive gift of internal distance and a creative prison of the same.

scholarly journals “For a few days we would be residents in Africa”: Jessie Redmon Fausct's “Dark Algiers the White”

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-114
Author(s):  
Claire Garcia
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
New Negro ◽  
International Dimension ◽  
Recent Scholarship

American scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance has, until recently, been strongly U.S.-centric, but the work of many of the important writers of the New Negro-era has an international dimension, as writers attempted to place the African American struggle for political and civil rights and cultural authority in larger, often global, contexts. Recent scholarship has revealed that the term, “Harlem Renaissance,” used as a rubric to characterize the flowering of black culture-building and political activism in the first years of the 20th century is something of a misnomer.

Sketching Out America’s Jazz Age in British Vogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Kalich
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
New Negro ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter investigates the contributions to modernism of Dorothy Todd’s British Vogue (1922-1926) as the magazine traced the evolution of Bloomsbury in England and the Jazz Age in America. While scholarship on this periodical has traditionally focused on the publication of Bloomsbury artists in the magazine, this chapter examines Todd’s displacement of the high/popular cultural binary through her unflagging support of jazz music and avant-garde literature. Furthermore, in examining Anne Harriet Fish’s and Miguel Covarrubias’s cartoons and illustrations, the chapter reveals the era’s use of visual humour as a means of coping with deeper anxieties regarding women’s increasing independence and the emergence of African-American culture as a fixture in mainstream, American culture. Analysing the construction of the Modern Woman and the New Negro in a commercial magazine demonstrates readers’ initial introduction to Bloomsbury and the Harlem Renaissance, broadening our understanding of modernism’s function in commercial settings.

Enter the “New Crowd” Journalists

Race News ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Professional Relationships ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Marcus Garvey ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
News Events

The militant racial politics of the alternative black press and modernist sensibilities of the Harlem Renaissance seeped into the commercial black press in the 1920s as journalists reprinted and debated editorials, covered news events, and nurtured diverse professional relationships. The radical editors of the New Negro Movement – including Cyril Briggs, Marcus Garvey, Hubert Harrison, A. Philip Randolph – denounced capitalism and imperialism and promoted Pan-Africanism. Commercial newspapers normalized literary writers' modernist perspective by serving as an arena for contesting the conservative politics of respectability, as illustrated by George Schuyler’s columns. Many publishers reinforced this change in newswriting by shifting to tabloid sensationalism, the era's defining journalistic mode.

Johnson, Georgia Douglas (1877?–1966)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Stephens-Lorenz
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Normal School ◽  
New Negro ◽  
School Class ◽  
Georgia Douglas Johnson ◽  
Oberlin College

Georgia Douglas Johnson was a multitalented artist of the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance era who wrote poetry, plays, short stories, music, and newspaper columns from her home in Washington, D.C. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia and was a member of Atlanta University’s Normal School class of 1893. She studied music at Oberlin College and wrote songs from 1908 until 1959.

Burleigh Spirituals and the Harlem Renaissance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Professional Singers ◽  
Carl Van Vechten ◽  
New Negro Renaissance ◽  
Art Style ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter examines the controversy between Harry T. Burleigh and his colleagues and critics over the issue of spirituals during the Harlem Renaissance. Although Burleigh was still regarded as the pioneer and by most as the master arranger of spirituals during the mid-1920s, there were dissenting voices. Henry Krehbiel, for example, warned against oversophistication of African American folk music “by standardizing its form, making it conform to the standard of music of European conception.” Carl Van Vechten also criticized Burleigh and his colleagues for relying on the Hampton and Fisk collections for most of their arrangements. This chapter considers how Burleigh came to be the target of criticism from some of the most outspoken of the younger Harlem or New Negro Renaissance voices, as well as his counterargument that the movement was chauvinist and separatist, or sacrificed what he felt were basic artistic standards. It also discusses Burleigh's belief that the vast repertoire of spirituals must be preserved in simpler versions accessible to untrained singers, as well as in art-style transformations for professional singers.

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