can you tell us about the harlem renaissance?
The first thing I have to tell you about the harlem renaissance is that it actually happened knowingly. Perhaps not just in Harlem, and not always under that name: It was more often called the Black Renaissance or New Black in its own time. but it happened positively in the minds of those who made it between the red summer of 1919 and the depths of the great depression in the early 1930s. the harlem renaissance took shape as an avant-garde movement at the time, not just a background training provided by later historians to account for the vitality and fashion of modern black art. Like Futurism, Surrealism, and the rest of the European avant-gardes, the Renaissance was conceived and publicized by a small, self-conscious crowd of artists and intellectuals. from the entrepreneurial old school of w.e.b. du bois, jessie fauset, and alain locke, to the bohemian new school of helene johnson, richard bruce nugent, and wallace thurman, this crowd sought columns and social reform while betting on the rise of an unprecedented cohort of black creators. as they collectively saw it, an entire generation of African Americans, born around 1900 and relatively unscathed by the heritage of racial slavery, was unapologetically intent on becoming black “new blacks.” one of the lasting achievements of the renaissance, in fact, was to undermine the condescending expectation that black literature would come from one major writer at a time.
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but the harlem renaissance broke with the European avant-gardes by declining a characteristic stylistic “ism”. a handful of notable Renaissance writings read something like the wasteland in its broken and inhospitable imagism. much more of this writing presents the social changes of black modernity through realistic or romantic lenses, or through what critics have called a “vernacular modernism” that draws on distinctive idioms of black speech and music. Langston Hughes’s incorporation of the stanza A-A-B Blues in his poem “The Weary Blues” comes to mind in this regard. So does Zora Neale Hurston’s lyrical transcription of the Negro Southern dialect in her novel, The Eyes of Him Were Watching God, its sounds and figures inflecting not only her characters’ dialogue, but also the dominant voice of her narrator. the harlem renaissance was the rare avant-garde movement comfortable with formal variety, not to mention dedicated to the retrospective historical dynamics of cultural renaissance. Committed to the new and the new black, harlem modernism nonetheless tied its drive toward the revival of a classical past, one located in what was still glimpsed of African culture before the twin wounds of the Atlantic slave trade. slaves and European colonialism. Pan-Africanist anti-imperialism; the Reformed Western Renaissance; post-abolitionist anti-racism; Modernist Avant-Garde: All of these international forces inspired the Harlem Renaissance as well as the resettlement of Manhattan’s growing black population onto Central Park.
That brings us to your top pick, claude mckay’s harlem shadows poetry collection. can you tell us about it and why you put it first?
harlem shadows comes first because it is a book of many firsts. It was the first and only collection of American poetry by the Jamaican McKay; the first substantial poetic volume, if not the first published book, of the Harlem Renaissance; and more self-indulgently, the first mckay play i fell in love with, the book that prompted my edition of his collected poems and later, the first marseilles romance publication: mckay’s lost novel i pieced together with gary holcomb. The Shadows of Harlem would be worth listing here for just one of its ingredients: the influential, often mythologized, sonnet “If We Must Die.” its stately Shakespearean lines, forged in the race riots and labor wars of 1919, were greeted as the new black’s call to arms. “If we must die,” Mckay’s unflappable, non-racialized speaker urges, “let it not be like pigs / hunted and locked up in an inglorious place.”
“the harlem renaissance was the rare avant-garde movement comfortable with formal variety”
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but much of the collection captures mckay at the height of his invention, whether in prose or poetry. At its ironic best, it transplants enabling rage to the heart of the sonnet form, its fourteen-line formula the first among “the oldest traditions,” mckay rationalized, “suited to my most revolutionary passions and moods and without law”. Published in the 1922 wonder year of experimental modernism, Shadows of Harlem dramatizes what became the counter-Renaissance habit of reinvesting standard, seemingly white forms with innovative black content. Less generically, the collection reflects the simultaneous presence of Black Marxism, Caribbean immigration, nostalgic herding, and rapid urbanization on the Harlem scene. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown is not the only recent reader to note that none of McKay’s assorted love poems in the shadows of Harlem “would have been written if it hadn’t been queer.” along with its other firsts, the collection qualifies as early testimony that the renaissance would be, in the words of henry louis gates, “certainly as gay as black,” and not “exclusively any of these.”
next is the passing of nella larsen, which was recently adapted as a film. what is this novel about?
i chose nella larsen’s impressionistic but mathematically plotted book of fiction, first published in 1929, for two reasons. first, because it was, as you say, adapted in 2021 as a beautiful black and white film by english director rebecca hall. Second, because it is the lack of categorical exclusivity, so to speak, that Gates insisted on. With the Freudian intensity of the first wave, the step explores the psychology of racial step, the internal dilemmas faced by light-skinned African Americans as they cross the color line that separates white from black. but it distinguishes itself from the surprisingly broad subgenre of the novella by pushing the transmission in dozens of intellectual directions, and this in less than a hundred pages, in the cramped space of a novella that effectively passes for a novel.
Why shouldn’t black-born bystanders be seen as courageous contributors to the American tradition of self-creation? (“if one is the type, all it takes is a little courage”). why do some successful transients wish to return to their original racial communities? (“if I knew that, I would know what race is”). Despite their racist pretensions, why do white Americans seem like easier targets for passing fantasies than blacks? (“maybe because there are so many more, or maybe because they’re safe and don’t have to bother”), above all, how is the racial passage of queer desire for its straight cousin similar and different, and vice versa? hall’s film, like a recent scholarship, wonders if passing is basically a lesbian text that passes for a racial one. Beyond Larsen’s deliberate ambiguity at this point, culminating in a sudden murder mystery compressed in the last few pages of the book, going straight on reveals what we would now call the intersectional nature of Harlem Renaissance writing. here and elsewhere, this writing unites racial identities with categories of class, gender and sexuality, region, nation and empire, and so on, categories not always advertised in racially defined American art.
your third selection is cane by jean toomer, a text difficult to classify in terms of genre. what can readers expect from this one? how does it compare to styles found in modernist writing?
As you suggest, readers can expect difficulties (rewarding difficulties, I hope) from the staff. Released just a year after Harlem Shadows, it’s also about to celebrate its 100th anniversary in the public domain. Of all the Harlem Renaissance books, Cane best confirms Richard Poirer’s half-joking saying that “modernism is what happened when reading turned grim.” part of its complexity comes from toomer’s mixing and quilting of genres. he crafts not just poetic prose (these are in all modernist literatures), but punctuated poetic prose surrounded by prosaic poetry. Stand-alone poems, some first published elsewhere, are sprinkled throughout the first two-thirds of Cane’s fragmentary narrative. they vary in design from the existential conundrum of “nullo” to the anti-lynching crest of “portrait in georgia” (“braided brown hair, / coiled up like a lynchman’s rope”). there are unconnected micro-stories, also poetic, many with the names of isolated black women (“karintha”, “fern”, “esther”, “avey”, etc.), all variations on the theme of the abandonment of a feminized black south. there is a final closet drama, “kabnis,” that marries free verse with fiction even as his antihero, a brilliant but rootless black male artist, fails to marry the violent contradictions of black popular life. (Any resemblance between this protagonist and the toomer himself is not coincidental.) the method in cane’s modernist madness is to map the great migration—the exodus from south to north that turned harlem into a black mecca—as a mosaic of displacements doomed to bleed beauty. . “The folk spirit was walking to die in the modern desert,” toomer explained elsewhere, “that spirit was so beautiful. his death was so tragic.” only a shape-shifting modernist text, capable of making quick cuts between genres, characters, and migratory landscapes, could do the necessary dueling.
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Despite its conclusion that the Harlem Renaissance’s popular salvage project was over before it began, The Harlem Renaissance couldn’t get enough of Jean Toomer. Nothing short of a bestseller, the cane nonetheless became the most beloved model of the Harlem writers who followed. like the albums of the velvet underground, each of the few hundred copies purchased seemed to produce ten tribute works. langston hughes, for his part, raised cane in the most remembered manifesto of the renaissance, “the black artist and the racial mountain”: “[e]xcept the works of du bois…, cane contains the best prose written by a black man in america . Toomer’s book only grew in the estimation of African-American writers throughout the modernist century. In choosing an inscription for Zora Neale Hurston’s restored tombstone in 1973, Alice Walker turned not to the Florida mud of her God-gazing eyes, but to the “Georgian twilight” of cane. Aside from its poetic delights, Toomer’s rare text is vital reading for anyone curious about what the Harlem Renaissance valued most and how its preferences were actively passed on.
your fourth choice is very different from the first three in that when harlem was all the rage it’s a historical book. what is it about?
david lewis’s 1981 book is not one of those that proves the self-awareness of the harlem renaissance. instead, it is an elegant and opinionated intellectual history written with the benefit of half a century of hindsight. For Harlem Renaissance scholars of my generation, the second edition of “new literary historians” formed in the late 1980s and 1990s, when Harlem was all the rage, was a common enemy. We resented his accusations of new black naïveté—American racism was not a “misunderstanding that the blunt prose of honorary college graduates could greatly mitigate,” Lewis scoffed—and his implication that all cultural politics were a contradiction in terms. . We define our revisionist takes on the renaissance against its strict focus on uptown new york society, the well-connected black “talented tenth,” and your average harlem writer absent-minded enough to assume “that race relations in The United States was susceptible to the assimilationist patterns of a Latin country”. Our studies of the radical origins and cosmopolitan reach of the Harlem movement gave the negative impression of Lewis’s emphasis on the local and the liberal. Thirty years later, though, it’s easy to see how much of his book we inhale and admire. While I can’t help but question his restrictive and dismissive thesis, it is the story I recommend to friends and students seeking a readable introduction to Harlem’s rise as “the black capital of the world.” Lewis remains the least tediously aloof writer on the Renaissance to ever wield a thick footnote. only when harlem was in vogue could marcus garvey’s ideology be described as a “farrago of booker washington and mussolini”, and only there could this description seem well founded.
the following is the whimsical life of saidiya hartman, beautiful experiments: your final selection. He has been praised for Hartman’s ability to seamlessly weave archival studies with biographies. tell us about it.
Whimsical Lives, Beautiful Experiments, published in 2019, does not present itself as a book about the harlem renaissance. The words “Harlem” and “Renaissance” appear as a pair exactly once in its 441 pages, and it has been much more recognized for the power of Hartman’s historical-fictional “critical storytelling” than as a rival when Harlem was all the rage. . But this intimate feminist record of “social upheaval” still strikes me as the most significant recent work of Harlem Renaissance scholarship. Hartman’s cast of filibustering black women, rescued from the condescension of posterity through a mix of archival research and imaginative storytelling, are new blacks before the fact. before “gay men, lady-lovers, and queers [who] congregated at the ubangi club,” years before “black communists and socialists preaching on harlem street corners took notice” of working girls of the city, the self-modernizing “reconstruction of life” of these women began intimate life.” Whimsical Lives takes the story of Harlem’s renaissance from the boulevard up and tackles the question of what 90 percent of black New Yorkers, mostly unnoticed by Lewis and company, were doing as Harlem braced itself for the fad. Langston Hughes, speaking cynically in the wake of the Great Depression, and calling his working class paycheck to paycheck, complained that “ordinary blacks hadn’t heard of the black renaissance. and if they had, it would not have increased their wages at all.” Rather, Hartman asserts that ordinary black women in search of extraordinary lives produced an intermittent revolution in consciousness sooner than passing, harlem, cane shadows.
With this eclectic package of selections, how do you tackle the anthologized texts on the Harlem Renaissance that many readers may first turn to for an introduction to the period?
At the beginning of the interview, I tried to emphasize both the group mentality and the stylistic variety of the harlem renaissance writers, their similarities and differences with the talkers of the modernist avant-garde. An enduring legacy of this collectivity and variety is the tradition of Renaissance anthologies, public records of private debates, and of the continuing diversity of Harlem’s literary methods. The semi-official revelation of the revival came in the form of Alain Locke’s 1925 collection The New Negro: An Interpretation, still in print alongside a full-size facsimile of the original classic Negro press magazine issue. Locke’s compilation was followed by retrospective anthologies by scholars Nathan Hughgins (Voices of the Harlem Renaissance), David Lewis Lewis (The Harlem Renaissance Portable Reader), Rafia Zafar (The Harlem Renaissance’s two-volume set of novels). The Library of America) and the Venice K team. Patton and Mauren Honey (Double Take: A Revisionist Anthology of the Harlem Renaissance, which aims to rectify “the continuing emphasis on male writers”). Volume one of the third edition of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature concludes with a salutary selection of Harlem Renaissance writings carefully edited by Brent Hayes Edwards. Although Norton probably doesn’t need the money, it’s worth mentioning that this and other collections are useful add-ons to the single-author selections discussed above. Regardless of what it was, the harlem renaissance was a movement that believed that the five perspectives alone could not capture black literature, much less the black experience.
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