Browning the Dark Princess

Brown Beauty ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 193-224
Author(s):  
Laila Haidarali
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Asian Indian ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
African American Male ◽  
The Political ◽  
Transnational Activism ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Indian Princess

Chapter 5 explores how brownness appeared in Harlem Renaissance fiction as an index of growing sentiments around transnational activism. Focusing on W. E. B. DuBois’s novel, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), this chapter analyzes the novel’s narrative device of brownness with a focus on the representation of an Asian Indian princess as the main female protagonist and love interest of the African American male hero. This chapter also explores DuBois’s intellectualizing on the “race concept”; it highlights the political, social, and legal shifts in understandings of race while considering how these meanings shaped views of New Negro womanhood.

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.

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.

scholarly journals The African-American Intellectual of the 1920s: Some Sociological Implications of the Harlem Renaissance

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 155-172
Author(s):  
Robert L. Perry ◽  
Melvin T. Peters
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
High Water ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
African American Art ◽  
Cultural Brokers

This paper deals with some of the sociological implications of a major cultural high-water point in the African American experience, the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance. The paper concentrates on the cultural transformations brought about through the intellectual activity of political activists, a multi-genre group of artists, cultural brokers, and businesspersons. The driving-wheel thrust of this era was the reclamation and the invigoration of the traditions of the culture with an emphasis on both the, African and the American aspects, which significantly impacted American and international culture then and throughout the 20th century. This study examines the pre-1920s background, the forms of Black activism during the Renaissance, the modern content of the writers' work, and the enthusiasm of whites for the African American art forms of the era. This essay utilizes research from a multi-disciplinary body of sources, which includes sociology, cultural history, creative literature and literary criticism, autobiography, biography, and journalism.

Autochthonomous Ambiguities

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-186
Author(s):  
Myriam J. A. Chancy
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
The State ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter concludes the study by examining exchanges between African American and Afro-Caribbean contexts, as expressed in Harlem Renaissance texts. Jacques Rancière’s concepts of engaged spectatorship and subject emancipation are used to analyze intra-African Diasporic exchanges in postcolonial contexts. The chapter focuses on works by writers of the Harlem Renaissance with specific attention to their apprehension of Haitian history and folklore as an expression of autochthonomous realities. The chapter argues that what made it possible for Harlem Renaissance writers to identify with cultures and aesthetics produced by other writers and cultures of the African Diaspora was the movement’s professed search and advocacy for an African American sensibility that would birth a “New Negro” not defined by the state, or by a history of subjugation. Works by Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay show an impulse that was not one of domination, such as we see reflected in traditional travel texts, but one of af/filiation (as defined in previous chapters).

New Negro and Genteel Protest

2018 ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Second Step ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Sterling Brown ◽  
Countee Cullen ◽  
Gradual Transformation ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Scholarly accounts of the Harlem Renaissance often foreground its politically radical and aesthetically innovative aspects. This tends to obscure the continuing strength of genteel ideas in African American writing of the period. This chapter traces the productivity of the sonnet during the Harlem Renaissance to its productive revisions of the genteel tradition. Drawing on a range of previously neglected poems, it situates Claude McKay’s epochal “If We Must Die” against the gradual transformation of the protest sonnet over the 1910s. In a second step it shows how genteel conventions shaped the subversive variety of protest that Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, and Helene Johnson explored from the mid-twenties. The ambivalent position of the sonnet in between gentility and protest, the chapter argues, is behind the difficulties that scholars like Houston A. Baker have faced in assessing the interplay of formal mastery and deformative self-assertion in the Harlem Renaissance sonnet.

Demography and Ethos

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Robert Reed
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Racial Consciousness ◽  
The Political ◽  
Deep South ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Black Metropolis ◽  
Head Count ◽  
The City

The political economy of the 1920s were intricately linked to the demographic changes, emerging social structure, level of racial consciousness, cultural and aesthetic expressions, and religious practices and activities of this pivotal period in Chicago's history. This chapter focuses on demographics and the thinking accompanying the expansion of this population. Between 1910 and 1920, the African American population of Chicago increased by 148.5 percent. By 1927, a head count around the city in all three of the major geographical divisions found 196,569 persons of African descent in residence. The demographic growth of the Black Metropolis rested firmly on the continuous in-migration of primarily adults from the South—not only from the plantations of the Deep South and small towns but also cities such as Birmingham, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Mobile. Chicago's new Negro personality also bloomed and grew enormously in terms of an expanded African American worldview, expectations, and accomplishments.

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.

scholarly journals “He Mought, en Den Again He Moughtent”: The Ambiguous Man in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Tuula Kolehmainen
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
African American Male ◽  
First Impressions ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
European Education

In this article, I discuss Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel, Tar Baby, through the lens of a trickster tale on which the novel is loosely based. Tar Baby invites one to choose sides between Jadine, the African American female protagonist with a European education and worldviews, or Son, the bearer of a more traditional African American cultural heritage and values. Son is initially constructed as other, and his representation is based on negative stereotypical notions of the African American male. First impressions need to be revised later, as the text plays with the readers’ sympathies about Son. Even his survival is left open at the end of the novel and the range of options of how to categorize Son would seem to reflect the readers’ perceptions back on themselves. In this way, Morrison sets up a trap in which any reader making too easy or essentialist definitions of the character will fall. Thus, the most important expression of the trickster tale is the novel’s name: the novel itself is the tar baby. Moreover, the most important construction of tar lies in the ambiguous representation of Son.

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.

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