1. Schooling the New Negro: Progressive Education, Black Modernity, and the Long Harlem Renaissance

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-54
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Progressive Education ◽  
New Negro

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.

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.

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.

Feeling Universality and Thinking Particularistically: Alain Locke, Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, and the Harlem Renaissance

Prospects ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 289-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Helbling
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
The South ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Howard University ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
The World ◽  
Younger Generation

In 1925 in The New Negro, Alain Locke announced to the world that something new, “something beyond the watch and guard of statistics,” had taken place in the racial alembic of 20th-century America. Although the “Sociologist,” the “Philanthropist,” and the “Race-leader” were not unaware of this “changeling,” this New Negro, they were unable to account for what they saw. A new awareness was needed, for these authorities were unable to see beyond the limits and assumptions of their professional interests. For this reason, it was Locke's intent, as a professor of philosophy at Howard University, to announce, to identify, and to help bring to life this renaissance of the spirit. Not unlike W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, Locke challenged his generation to see the world with fresh eyes. But, whereas DuBois took his reader to the South, to “historic ground,” Locke looked over the terrain of a “younger generation … vibrant with a new psychology.” Harlem, not Georgia, was the center of his attention. And, unlike DuBois, Locke did not seek to reveal “the strange experience” of being a “problem” but celebrated the pride of being black in America.

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