The Sounds of Black Laughter and the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes

2008 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Chasar
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Sterling Brown ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

scholarly journals The Depths of My Africa: Travelogues on the Land of Ancestors by Claude McKay and Langston Hughes

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-236
Author(s):  
Daria D. Kuzina
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
The Real ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance ◽  
New Look

The article is devoted to the image of Africa in the travelogues by poets Claude McKay (A Long Way From Home, 1937) and Langston Hughes (The Big Sea, 1940), the significant figures of Harlem Renaissance; and also compares this image with Africa in the poems of both writers. The image of Africa as the land of ancestors and the foremother of the Negro people was popular among the artists and philosophers of the Harlem Renaissance, but at the same time, it was often idealized. That is why meeting a real Africa becomes, to some extent, a moment of truth for an African-American artist, the reason to take a new look at himself and his values. Biographies of Hughes and McKay reveal why equally motivated, at first glance, writers united by a common dream of a black peoples home, when faced with the real Africa, react to it in exactly the opposite way. The article shows that young cosmopolitan poet Langston Hughes did not find respond to his poetic ideals in real Africa and after that forever divided Africa into real and poetic, while Claude McKay, who kept up the reunification of the Negro people and had traveled around the whole Europe, only in Africa for the first time in his life went native. At the same time, Hughes is significantly influenced by his mixed origins and McKay - by his colonial background. The article contains materials of correspondence, fragments of the travelogues never been translated into Russian before.

Locke, Alain LeRoy (1885–1954)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Chalk ◽  
Cocoa Williams ◽  
Sarah Fedirka
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Jessie Fauset ◽  
Graduate Degrees ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Alain Locke was an American philosopher, editor, and critic whose influence helped to inscribe modernist aesthetics within the history of black artistry, which he defined in philosophical and political as well as artistic terms. His guest editorship of the March 1925 Survey Graphic magazine’s special edition on race, which he titled "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" and which he edited and extended to create his anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life, is generally considered a seminal moment in the founding of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1925, The New Negro includes contributions from what Locke called the rising generation of "Negro Youth" writers, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen. Locke's introduction to the volume announced a new age in African American aesthetics, one which abandoned the direct political objectives of racial uplift and dedicated itself to merging folk art with artistic experimentation. Locke was born in Philadelphia, received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard, and was the first African American Rhodes Scholar. His philosophical theories focused on race relations, cultural relativism, and pluralism, interests he extended to his promotion of writers and artists now associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography

1987 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Stein ◽  
Wayne F. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Gwendolyn Bennett's “The Ebony Flute”

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 744-755
Author(s):  
Belinda Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Assistant Editor ◽  
Cover Art ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

IntroductionGwendolyn Bennett (1902-81) is often mentioned in books that discuss the harlem renaissance, and some of her poems Occasionally appear in poetry anthologies; but much of her career has been overlooked. Along with many of her friends, including Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, Bennett was featured at the National Urban League's Civic Club Dinner in March 1924, an event that would later be “widely hailed as a ‘coming out party’ for young black artists, writers, and intellectuals whose work would come to define the Harlem Renaissance” (McHenry 383n100). In the next five years Bennett published over forty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, such as Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; she created magazine cover art that adorned two leading African American periodicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and the National Urban League's Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several magazines, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!; and she wrote a renowned literary column, “The Ebony Flute.” Many scholars, such as Cary Wintz, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, and Elizabeth McHenry, recognized the importance of Bennett's column to the Harlem Renaissance in their respective studies, but their emphasis on a larger Harlem Renaissance discussion did not afford a detailed examination of her column.

scholarly journals A Magnificent Blond Beast: Exploring the Implications of Harlem Renaissance Writer Wallace Thurman as Ghostwriter of a Forgotten Celebrity Gossip Memoir

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
Whit Frazier Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Saturday Evening ◽  
Celebrity Gossip ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the original blonde bombshell Peggy Hopkins Joyce. According to Hopkins’ biographer, however, Basil Woon, an English playwright and gossip columnist was supposed to have been the ghostwriter of this book. My paper will address this discrepancy by focusing on the lack of evidence supporting the Woon theory, and through an analysis using stylometry, close reading and an examination of historical documents, I will argue that Thurman is the more likely candidate as a ghostwriter for Hopkins’ memoirs, just as Hughes suggests. I will be looking specifically at the way the text, which is presented to the reader as a diary written by Hopkins from her early youth to the present day, satirizes the shallowness and excesses of the “roaring twenties.” I will argue that the text is clearly ironic and satirical in style and approach and not only satirizes celebrity, but also a society that unselfconsciously celebrates celebrity, much the way Thurman satirizes the excesses of the Harlem Renaissance in his novel Infants of the Spring. In conclusion, I will show how this book, which has been largely dismissed as celebrity gossip, is transformed into something highly literary by the way Thurman, as ghostwriter and editor, takes Hopkins’ life story and turns it into a satire of the excesses of an era.

On Art and Such

2019 ◽  
pp. 84-118
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Primary Site ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter charts the debates on art and aesthetics that preoccupied writers during the Harlem Renaissance. It is argued that because African Americans had made slight political and economic progress they turned to the arts as the primary site for social justice. The questions generated by the ensuing aesthetic debates about the purpose of racial art, its form, its audience, and the efficacy of cultural difference, reverberated throughout the twentieth century. This chapter also analyzes the formal innovations made by African American essayists. It is shown through the examples of Alain Locke’s intellectual detachment, Langston Hughes’ fiery polemic, George Schuyler’s acerbic satire, and Zora Neale Hurston’s “jagged harmonies” that the essayists of the Harlem Renaissance both formulated and enacted the aesthetic they proposed in their writings.

Modernism and the Affects of Racial Blackness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
George Schuyler ◽  
Focus Point ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) and Hughes's response in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) provide a focus point to understand how African American artists and intellectuals imagined their relationship both to Western modernization and avant-garde cultural modernism. This chapter stands as a separate essay from Barrett's surviving manuscript, as it appears to be intended for a different publication; its inclusion here is meant to supplement discussion from the previous chapters, although Schuyler and Hughes did not tackle the gender and sexuality aspects of Barrett's arguments so far posited in this book.

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