Faces of Blackness: The Creation of the New Negro and Négritude Movements in Harlem and Paris

This article explores the cultural and ideological link between the New Negro Movement of Harlem and the Négritude Movement of Paris from 1920s to the 1940s. It examines how the works of African American, Caribbean, and African authors such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sedar Senghor amongst others are, despite their different backgrounds, united by the common themes of racialized oppression, cultural alienation, and pride in their African heritage. The article also addresses social, cultural and theoretical shortcomings of the New Negro and Négritude movements, which have resulted in widespread criticism of theories of Black culture and identity. Lastly, it explains how the values promoted by New Negro and Négritude literarure remain useful in catalyzing social change today.

West Africa and the African Diaspora

West Africa and the African diaspora share an intertwined history. From the earliest moments of the development of the diaspora, West Africans and members of the African diaspora have sought ways to connect to each other. They have done so through the exploration of cultural links, travel back and forth between West Africa and the diaspora, and the development of shared philosophical and political movements. They have celebrated the idea of a collective “African” identity shaped by people on both sides of the Atlantic including the Pan-African Movement, the New Negro Movement, and Negritude. The late 20th century has seen the travel of diasporic subjects to West African countries including Ghana, the Gambia, and Senegal, which have fashioned themselves as African homelands. Artists, activists, and migrants continue to travel back and forth between West Africa and various points in the African diaspora and, in doing so, shape the contours of the Black Atlantic World. The continuous communication and contact between West Africa and the diaspora constitute an ongoing dialogue that has led to cultural innovations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Circling the Boundaries of the Tradition

This chapter is not so much concerned with reviewing, assessing, or critically analyzing the body of Yerby’s work, as it is with delineating the writer’s relationship to these major literary moments that have characterized the black literary tradition at the midpoint of the twentieth century. To simply dismiss Frank Yerby as a peculiar case in African American writing is to miscalculate how significant turns in his literary career reflected dominant movements and trends, as well as formal and thematic innovations and limitations that have characterized the trajectory of African American literature from the early 1930s to the 1940s. This period ranges from the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement to an era of social realism in African American fiction.

Chicago’s Letters Group and the Emergence of the Black Chicago Renaissance

This chapter unearths the history of a literary circle formed in 1927 to publish a journal called Letters and foster appreciation of black literature. Its leader was Chicago Defender city editor Dewey Roscoe Jones, whose reviews in his weekly “Bookshelf” column established him as black Chicago’s premier literary critic and commentator on the Harlem Renaissance. Most participants in Letters were university students, but they were joined by several older writers, including poets Fenton Johnson and W. H. A. Moore. Future Black Chicago Renaissance luminaries Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis visited occasionally but felt unwelcome. Recovering this missing link in cultural history deepens scholarly understanding of the New Negro movement beyond 1920s Harlem and of early evolution of an African American literary tradition in Chicago.

The Black Creole Vision of Archibald J. Motley Jr.

This essay explores how Archibald J. Motley Jr. developed into the successful, notably iconoclastic, artist he became. In 1918, Motley announced his aesthetic independence, his embrace of “art for art’s sake,” in a manifesto in the Chicago Defender -- a significant precursor to later debates associated with an artistically-inclined New Negro movement dominated rhetorically by W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Unlike such Chicago peers as William Farrow and Charles C. Dawson, Motley pursued his exceptionalist path without artistic, social, or financial support from Chicago's Black elite. Motley also described himself as a black Creole, or "French Negro." This unique ethnic heritage, his racially-exclusive associations within the art world, and his residence in the overwhelmingly white Englewood neighborhood amplified his sense of uniqueness.

“More than Equivalent to a Year of College”: Hubert Harrison and Informal Education in Harlem's New Negro Movement

Background/Context Spurred on by the mass migration of African Americans from the South and blacks from the Caribbean, Harlem by the 1920s was defined by its association with New Negro culture and was widely known as the “mecca” of black life. The New Negro movement, as the period was called by contemporaries, has become a focus of scholars interested in black radical politics. Still, there has yet to be a focused study of the underlying educational experiences that helped create the New Negro movement and the mass political awakening that accompanied it. Focus of Study This paper takes as its focus Hubert Harrison, an Afro-Caribbean immigrant who arrived in New York City at the dawn of the New Negro movement and became a leading public intellectual and educator of the movement. In particular, it focuses on Harrison's participation and influence in several dimensions of the network of informal education that emerged as a part of Harlem life in the first part of the 20th century: street oratory, educational forums, and the black press. After a brief overview of Harrison and his political development, I examine each educational practice, discussing both Harrison's contribution and the wider culture of radical education he helped to create. I argue that at the foundation of the New Negro movement—and the burgeoning political consciousness among inhabitants of the uptown neighborhood in New York—was a system of education unlike anything that could be found inside a classroom. It was dynamic, democratic, and for many black residents moving into Harlem, inspirational. Research Design This paper uses archival materials from Hubert Harrison's papers at Columbia University. Those include newspaper clippings, diary entries, and pamphlets for talks and courses, among other material. It also draws upon newspapers and reports from the period as well as secondary literature on the topic. Conclusions/Recommendations While education scholars have often grappled with the limits of school as a mechanism for changing society, the history of Harrison and informal education in Harlem reveals the importance of political education outside the classroom in creating and sustaining social movements. For Harrison and the Harlemites of the 1920s, street oratory, educational forums, and a radical black press served as essential mechanisms for broadening what historian Robin D. G. Kelley has called the “black radical imagination.” Yet the educative experience of blacks arriving in Harlem is not so different from the experience of others who have participated in social movements in the 20th and 21st centuries. The challenge for scholars is not to identify and study political movements that can be linked to various forms of schooling, but to identify the educative dimensions of social uprising that take place beyond the walls of the classroom.

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

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.

Jean Toomer (1894—1967)

Jean Toomer (26 December 1894—30 March 1967) was an American writer associated with literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. He was born as Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C., and changed his name to Jean Toomer at the beginning of his writing career in 1920. Toomer is primarily known for his critically acclaimed book Cane (1923), an experimental collage text of narratives, dramatic pieces, and poems. He also published essays, literary reviews and criticism, poems, dramatic texts, and stories in journals and newspapers. Though opposing reductive racial categories, Toomer was in close contact with the New Negro movement, initiated by Alain Locke, while he was working on Cane. Being of multiracial descent, he could easily pass for white, and lived both as black and white at different stages of his life. After the publication of Cane, he rejected all racial classifications. In the early 1920s, Toomer turned toward the spiritual ideas of George Gurdjieff, whose school of higher consciousness and spiritual self-development he followed and taught himself until 1935. In his later life, he became interested in Quakerism. With the exception of a collection of aphorisms, Toomer did not publish any more books after Cane during his lifetime.