Travel with the “giants” of the Harlem Renaissance

PurposeHarlem Renaissance Party by Faith Ringgold follows a young boy and his uncle as they visit the “giants” of the Harlem Renaissance. Lonnie and Uncle Bates travel through Harlem to meet historical figures, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Madam CJ Walker and others. They also visit historical venues where Black artists performed. Such venues included the Cotton Club, the Harlem Opera House and the Schomburg Library.Design/methodology/approachAs students study the end of the Civil War and the early 1900s, they should learn about the causes of the Great Migration that led Black artists to flee from the south to larger cities in the north. In addition, Jim Crow Laws and other discriminatory practices prevented Black artists from performing their crafts. The Harlem Renaissance has had lasting effects on arts, music, literature and dance. In addition, students should use credible sources to gather information and documents about historical events and people.FindingsThese inquiry-based activities also integrate arts education and history to reach diverse student populations as they gain meaningful experiences interacting with authentic documents.Originality/valueAs students study the end of the Civil War and the early 1900s, they should learn about the causes of the Great Migration that led Black artists to flee the south to larger cities in the north. In addition, Jim Crow Laws and other discriminatory practices prevented Black artists from performing their crafts.

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

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.

Brother to Brother and the “Place” of Film in Black Queer History

This chapter considers the ways in which Black film enlists the past when engaging in present struggles. It demonstrates how Rodney Evans’s film Brother to Brother (2004) redresses the elision of queer history from accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. Through a close reading of the film’s spatial metaphors, sound design, and visual form, the chapter shows how realism and the disruption of habituation exist side by side as mechanisms for new visions of Black queer life. It concludes that Evans harnesses the power of sound and image to remake history and to account for Black queer desire and erotic life.

Bodies Resounding

This article explores the significance of the body in decadent writing about music. It focuses on the fictional and nonfictional writings of the American journalist and critic James Gibbons Huneker (1857–1921). Huneker’s texts demonstrate the striking ways in which literary decadence aligns musical experience with nervous illness and madness, how it dwells on the materiality of sound as it is sensed through the body, and how it frames musical talent as fundamentally shaped by the gender, sexuality, and race of performers and listeners. The article concludes by examining those decadent musical cultures that Huneker’s writings overlook, such as the Harlem Renaissance, to demonstrate how literary texts present new modes of decadent community emerging from embodied and affective responses to music.

Harlem Renaissance:

Harlem Renaissance foi um movimento que surgiu na década de 1920, por professores/as, pesquisadores/as, escritores/as e artistas negros/as nos Estados Unidos, com mais intensidade no bairro do Harlem da cidade de Nova Iorque. Esse movimento renascentista foi uma possibilidade de enfrentamento às construções de preconceitos e estereótipos acerca da população negra. Foi um momento de “auto-escrita”, no qual negros e negras utilizaram da literatura, música, pintura e teatro para falarem de si próprios em primeira pessoa, para relatarem seus medos, vitórias, angústias e anseios a partir da perspectiva e subjetividades de quem vivenciava esses sentimentos, e não mais pautado pelo olhar de quem está de fora.