Radical Americas Special issue: Radical Periodicals Article ‘Watching the Waters’: Tropic flows in the Harlem Renaissance, Black Internationalism and other currents Jak Peake University of Essex;
[email protected] How to Cite: Peake, J. “‘Watching the Waters”: Tropic flows in the Harlem Renaissance, Black Internationalism and other currents.’ Radical Americas 3, 1 (2018): 13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2018.v3.1.013. Submission date: 9 July 2018; Publication date: 21 September 2018 Peer review: This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double blind peer-review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Copyright: c 2018, Jak Peake. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2018.v3.1.013. Open access: Radical Americas is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Abstract 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.