Winfield, Hemsley (1907–1934)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Paris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

An early initiator of Black modern dance, Hemsley Winfield first gained recognition as an actor and director of the New Negro Art Theater in New York City. Galvanized by his success, Winfield founded the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group in 1931. Like other emerging African-American exponents of the new dance, including Edna Guy, Alison Burroughs, Ollie Burgoyne, and Charles Williams, Winfield consciously drew on the philosophy of the New Negro movement, which promoted the use of art to advance racial consciousness and heritage during the Harlem Renaissance. Despite his premature death at age 26, Winfield set a significant starting point for Black modern dance at the crossroads of the Harlem Renaissance, American modernist primitivism, and the emergent modern dance movement. In so doing, Winfield modeled new possibilities for male dance artists, along with his contemporaries Harald Kreutzberg and Ted Shawn.

scholarly journals ‘Watching the Waters’: Tropic flows in the Harlem Renaissance, Black Internationalism and other currents

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jak Peake
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Dominant Term ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

The ‘Harlem Renaissance’ is now a dominant term for what is commonly used to describe a cultural movement that emerged between the First and Second World Wars. The term became the hegemonic around the early 1970s, displacing similar, yet distinct, alternatives including the New Negro, the New Negro movement and the Negro/Black Renaissance. This essay traces a genealogy of such terms, metanarratives and historiographical currents. The aim here is to demonstrate how the hegemony of the term Harlem Renaissance is linked to its institutionalization as a subject and the rise of Black studies in the United States. The weighting of Harlem as a geographical reference point both localized and nationalized the subject area which resulted in a selective historiography and diminished the transnational dimensions of the New Negro and the Negro Renaissance. The framework is trans-American and the scope transnational, while the chronology covers an inner 1890s–1940s period, and a broad outer period which begins in 1701 and spans post-WWII writing. In marking these flows, this essay problematizes the notion of distinct political or cultural channels of the ‘movement’ or ‘movements’. Recent scholarship attentive to some of the limitations of earlier Harlem Renaissance studies has illustrated the intertwined relationship of political, often radical, and artistic-aesthetic aspects of early twentieth-century black cultural activity and the key role played by Caribbeans. Drawing on these insights, this essay outlines that the transnational aspects of a black-centred cultural phenomenon have been better understood through a greater emphasis on Caribbean cross-currents.

McKay, Festus Claudius ‘Claude’ (1889–1948)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sören Frölich
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Working People ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Claude McKay was a Jamaican poet, novelist, essayist, activist, and editor. He is best known for his involvement in the New Negro movement of the early twentieth century (also known as the Harlem Renaissance). He helped introduce radical politics and a sophisticated use of Primitivism into African-American literature and wrote important political poems like ‘If We Must Die’. Today McKay is best known for his 1928 novel Home to Harlem. A lifelong traveller, he provided crucial connections between US racism and international struggles. He also was an avid Marxist and associated with the Communist Party until late in life, when he converted to Catholicism. He angered and alienated writers, critics, and even friends with his aversion to the black elites and genteel literary critics. Long valued as an exponent of Primitivism in the Harlem Renaissance, in recent scholarship he has been recognized for his radical poetry, his writings in Jamaican Patois, his international efforts, and his theoretical considerations of race and gender to political struggles of black working people across and beyond the United States.

scholarly journals Reviews and Interviews

Text Matters ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 293-319
Author(s):  
Tomasz Fisiak ◽  
Wit Pietrzak ◽  
Antoni Górny ◽  
Krzysztof Majer ◽  
Bill Gaston ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Charles I ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Timeless Radcliffe: A Review of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic - Tomasz Fisiak Yeats’s Genres and Tensions: A Review of Charles I. Armstrong’s Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) - Wit Pietrzak Review of Anna Pochmara’s The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011) - Antoni Górny “Artful Exaggeration” - Krzysztof Majer (University of Łódź) Interviews Bill Gaston Transcultural Theatre in the UK - Uilleam Blacker Talks to Joanna Kosmalska (University of Łódź)

Sahdiji, an African Ballet (1931): Queer Connections and the “Myth of the Solitary Genius”

2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (S1) ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
Victoria Phillips Geduld
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Dance History ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
William Grant Still ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

In May 1931 the ballet Sahdji premiered at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York: with a libretto by Harlem Renaissance's Alain Locke and Richard Bruce Nugent, music by composer William Grant Still, the ballet by Thelma Biracree, and dedicated to the Eastman School's Howard Hanson, the work was set in Africa and performed by dancers in blackface. In 1934 the work was performed with an all-black cast in Chicago and revived in Rochester through 1950. Sahdji demonstrates that the participants shared two tenets: the desire to create high art, and the belief in African forms to achieve artistic aims. Locke and Nugent had a small shared world that included Lincoln Kirstein. Locke wrote about The Rite of Spring, and Sahdji became Locke's African answer to Spring. Sahdji begs for a reinvigoration of dance history that credits philosophical underpinnings of the American ballet to the Harlem Renaissance and its queer connections.

The Center Cannot Hold

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Ewing
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
West Indians ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
The First World War ◽  
New Theater

This chapter explores racial politics during the First World War, which acted as a catalyst in which old and richly drawn contests of authority and power were shifted on their axis, disrupted, and transformed. From the ascendant black capital of Harlem, a militant “New Negro” movement had emerged, its proponents hoping to more dramatically leverage the “new theater” created by the war to reshape global relations of race and class inequality, to celebrate militant and respectable black masculinity, and to replace an old cadre of elitist and ineffectual black leadership with a new brand of uncompromising mass politics. Joining the stream of West Indians heading for New York, Marcus Garvey was a fortunate witness to the birth of the New Negro movement. By the end of the war, thoughts of returning to Jamaica forgotten, he had begun to pull the movement's center of gravity toward himself and his organization.

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.

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