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.

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.

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.

Douglas, Aaron (1899–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catrina Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African Art ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Tribal Art ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

Aaron Douglas was an African American artist and educator often referred to as the father of "Black Art." He was a leading figure of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas is best known for his work of the 1920s and 1930s, which featured abstracted silhouettes combined with African tribal art and ancient Egyptian profile heads. European artists like Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso had been influenced by African tribal art for decades, but Douglas was among the first African American artists to blend African art with modern abstraction. Douglas produced illustrations for such magazines as The Crisis, Survey Graphic and Opportunity along with co-founding the short-lived Fire!! A Quarterly Journal Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. He also illustrated books by several well-known literary figures, including Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. He is recognized for several public murals, including the Birth o’ the Blues at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, Evolution of Negro Dance at the Harlem YMCA, and Aspects of Negro Life at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. As a professor of fine art Douglas encouraged generations of African American artists to create their own modern Black aesthetic.

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.

scholarly journals Art of Characterization in “Thank You, Ma'am” by Langston Hughes

IJOHMN ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Muhammad Javaid Anwar ◽  
Basri Sattar ◽  
Muhammad Naveed Anwar
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
American Artist ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes was an American artist, writer, and dramatist whose African-American subjects made him an essential supporter of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Langston Hughes was conceived on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. He distributed his first lyric in 1921. He went to Columbia University, yet left following one year to travel. He proceeded to compose incalculable works of verse, writing and plays, and in addition a prominent section for the Chicago Defender. He passed away from this world on May 22, 1967. (Editors, 2014) When you were younger, has anyone treated you good or bad according to your behavior? Or do you remember any incident of your life in which you made a mistake and someone offered you a chance for changing your life? Langston Hughes' short story, “Thank You, Ma'am”, distributed in 1958, catches the two circumstances. Langston Hughes was a vital and productive essayist amid the Harlem Renaissance of the mid twentieth century. He expounded on African-American life and experience. Much thanks to You Ma'am is about what happens when a high school kid and a more seasoned working lady crash on a Harlem road. There are three major topics present in “Thank You, Ma'am”: Forgiveness and Empathy, the Power of Love and Trust, and Christian Charity. At the point when Roger first grabs the handbag of Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones, she wrestles him and hauls him to her outfitted room at the back of a house. The peak of the story is when Roger does not leave.

Atomic Afrofuturism and Amiri Baraka's Compulsive Futures

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Kristin George Bagdanov
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
The Cold War

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka's musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy's agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apocalyptic conditions of black existence, including its conflicting temporalities and tenses, while much of America still believed the apocalypse was imminent, not immanent. And so it is Derrida's anti-apocalyptic missives together with Baraka's anti-nuclear musical that can offer the framework Nuclear Criticism so desperately desires for imagining the unimaginable.

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.

scholarly journals The dialectics of homeland and identity: Reconstructing Africa in the poetry of Langston Hughes and Mohamed Al-Fayturi

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-74
Author(s):  
Saddik M. Gohar
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African History ◽  
American Experience ◽  
African People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Realistic Image ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

The article investigates the dialectics between homeland and identity in the poetry of the Sudanese poet, Mohamed Al-Fayturi and his literary master, Langston Hughes in order to underline their attitudes toward crucial issues integral to the African and African-American experience such as identity, racism, enslavement and colonisation. The article argues that – in Hughes’s early poetry –Africa is depicted as the land of ancient civilisations in order to strengthen African-American feelings of ethnic pride during the Harlem Renaissance. This idealistic image of a pre-slavery, a pre-colonial Africa, argues the paper, disappears from the poetry of Hughes, after the Harlem Renaissance, to be replaced with a more realistic image of Africa under colonisation. The article also demonstrates that unlike Hughes, who attempts to romanticize Africa, Al-Fayturi rejects a romantic confrontation with the roots. Interrogating western colonial narratives about Africa, Al-Fayturi reconstructs pre-colonial African history in order to reveal the tragic consequences of colonisation and slavery upon the psyche of the African people. The article also points out that in their attempts to confront the oppressive powers which aim to erase the identity of their peoples, Hughes and Al-Fayturi explore areas of overlap drama between the turbulent experience of African-Americans and the catastrophic history of black Africans dismantling colonial narratives and erecting their own cultural mythology.

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