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The Term ''Harlem Renaissance' HARLEM RENAISSANCE by William R. Nash ^ he term ‘‘Harlem Renaissance’’ refers to the efflo- through its emphasis on blacks’ exoticism and otherness. Trescence of African-American cultural production The nightclub’s example demonstrates the complexity of that occurred in New York City in the 1920s and early assessing this crucial moment in the evolution of African- 1930s. One sometimes sees Harlem Renaissance used American culture, as it suggests the intricate relationships interchangeably with ‘‘New Negro Renaissance,’’ a term between aesthetics and racial politics that have long that includes all African Americans, regardless of their plagued black Americans. As Harlem Renaissance artists location, who participated in this cultural revolution. Fol- articulated individual and collective visions of black lowers of the New Negro dicta, which emphasized blacks’ identity, they were beset by conflicting demands that inclusion in and empowerment by American society, they use their art either to distance themselves from or were undeniably spread throughout the nation, and most bind themselves to white American culture. major cities had pockets of the African-American elite that W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed the ‘‘Talented Tenth.’’ Never- THE DEBATE OVER ‘‘NEGRO ART’’ theless, New York City was, arguably, the most crucial Perhaps the most famous examples of these conflicts came site of this movement’s development and Harlem was in a pair of essays that appeared in consecutive issues of The its nexus. Nation in 1926: George Schuyler’s ‘‘Negro-Art Hokum’’ The early years of the Harlem Renaissance coincided and Langston Hughes’s ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial with the heyday of the Great Migration, the mass Mountain.’’ In the first, Schuyler argues that aside ‘‘from movement of African Americans from southern rural his color, which ranges from very dark brown to pink, homes into major northern cities during and immediately your American Negro is just plain American.’’ For artists, following World War I. Blacks left the South in record this assertion assumes a uniformity of work based on numbers to escape oppression and to take advantage of commonality of influence; in Schuyler’s view, black artists urban economic opportunities. In places like Detroit and cannot vary substantially from their white peers. As a Chicago, this meant jobs in automobile manufacturing, result, claims to some sort of uniquely racial creative steel, and meatpacking. In Terrible Honesty: Mongrel perspective are specious at best. As Jeffrey B. Leak notes in Manhattan in the 1920s (1995), Ann Douglas argues that Rac(e)ing to the Right: Selected Essays of George S. Schuyler in New York City, which lacked heavy industry, the main (2001), this position presages the commentary of Ralph capital that migrants could accrue was cultural. Ellison and Albert Murray, and like them, Schuyler leaves This era did see a marked increase in output by African- himself open to accusations of assimilationism, charges American writers, visual artists, and musicians in New that led many students of the period to overlook him and York City; this sparked interest in black culture, especially his adherents in their study of the period. among upper-middle-class white New Yorkers, who came In contrast, Hughes argues the uniqueness of African- uptown to ‘‘experience’’ black life. Their cultural tourism American culture and a corresponding need for blacks led to significant relationships between black artists and to cultivate a sense of racial pride. He describes ‘‘the whites like Carl Van Vechten, who sought to promote mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in their work. It also sustained nightclubs like the Cotton America—this urge within the race towards whiteness, Club, a whites-only club where blacks were the staff the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of and the entertainment. The Cotton Club, where the American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as floorshows often portrayed blacks as primitives, expanded much American as possible.’’ For Hughes, the foundations opportunities for individual artists who performed there. of this assimilationist urge lie firmly in the black middle In some senses, it also limited the black community class that Schuyler praises. In order to escape their 153 HARLEM RENAISSANCE The Cotton Club. ( Bettmann/Corbis) influence, Hughes encourages artists to embrace the values from a moving target. African Americans’ declaration of ‘‘the low-down folks,’’ the masses of common people of aesthetic independence from the dominant society who ‘‘furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for came at the same time that white American artists were any artist because they still hold their own individuality struggling to extricate themselves from a set of historical in the face of American standardizations.’’ Only by doing connections to Europe. Chronologically, the artists of the this, he argues, can the Negro artist treat the most complex Harlem Renaissance coexisted with the white writers of and sensitive subjects in a manner that distinguishes him what F. Scott Fitzgerald labeled the Jazz Age. In this period individually and serves the race collectively. of modernism, writers like Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, This interpretation of the Renaissance, which celebrates T. S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and African-American art and life, and particularly several Hart Crane adopted the dictum ‘‘make it new,’’ and prominent elements of the folk tradition—for example, worked to separate contemporary American literature blues, jazz, spirituals, and vernacular speech—has long from the stultifying influence of late-nineteenth-century held sway among students of the era. In subsequent explo- American culture. The primary example of the Victorian sions of black creativity, such as the Black Arts Movement attitudes that the modernists vilified was the white middle- of the 1960s, Hughes’s ‘‘Negro Artist’’ is cited as a sacred class matriarch, who privileged reserve and decorum over text. To be sure, Hughes makes many valid claims in precision and forthrightness. his essay; however, Schuyler’s argument also accurately The notion that white and black artists found a reflects elements of the black artist’s condition in Harlem common enemy in the nineteenth-century American of the 1920s and 1930s. One major shortcoming of schol- matriarch lends some credence to Schulyer’s argument. ars of the Renaissance until relatively recently has been One can reasonably assert the power of common cultural an unfortunate tendency to fall into either the Schuyler influences that leads to similarities in works by artists orHughescamp.Todosois,ineffect,todivorcethe from different racial groups. At the same time, however, art of the Harlem Renaissance from its historical and one also finds textual evidence that supports Hughes’s cultural context. claims for a true African-American art. Strikingly, there is As Ann Douglas notes, the black writers of the anoticeabledifferenceintonebetweentheblackandwhite Harlem Renaissance who tried to distance themselves canons of the period. On the white side one finds many from white American culture were, in a sense, fleeing grim portraits like Eliot’s Waste Land, Fitzgerald’s Valley 154 HARLEM RENAISSANCE of Ashes, and the scorched landscape of Hemingway’s the terror and the beauty of rural black life in Georgia ‘‘Big Two-Hearted River.’’ and demonstrates the threat that modern urban society By contrast, a pervasive optimism informed much of presents to African-American folk culture. Parts 1 and the African-American work of the period. This might 3ofCane take place in Georgia, where Toomer himself seem surprising, given the racial oppression that African lived briefly in 1921. In Part 1 a nameless northern black Americans faced then. Douglas suggests that this hopeful male narrator describes the land and people (especially the attitude was not blindness, arguing that black artists’ women) that he meets when visiting Georgia. The interwo- optimism came largely from the existence of Harlem as ven stories and poems simultaneously emphasize the fer- a safe haven for black artists and from the recognition tility of the landscape and paint human interaction as ster- that their work received. A look at individual works of ile. The result is a celebration of a place and a way of life that the era confirms both this optimism and the literary is withering in the face of contemporary social pressures. accomplishment of those who articulated it. Toomer heightens the contrast between urban and rural black life in Part 2, which consists of stories and poems set EARLY INNOVATIONS: MCKAY AND TOOMER in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. In this section of the Scholars debate both the starting and ending points of the text, Toomer further emphasizes the sterility of urban life; Renaissance, since the arc of a cultural ethos’s rise and fall he also contrasts the openness of the southern landscape is necessarily imprecise. One might mark the beginning with a series of images that emphasize confinement. In with Claude McKay’s poem ‘‘If We Must Die,’’ a work that Part 3, ‘‘Kabnis,’’ Toomer fuses his themes in the story asserts a strong sense of self in the face of extreme oppo- of Ralph Kabnis, a transplanted northerner who comes sition. McKay, who immigrated to the United States from to a southern community to teach and to write about Jamaica in 1912, wrote the poem in response to the racial his experience. Because he has decided what he will find violence that occurred immediately after World War I and before he ever gets there, however, he cannot create into the early 1920s. As blacks demanded recognition of anything meaningful. Toomer juxtaposes Kabnis with and respect for their military service to the nation, whites Lewis, another northern migrant who, in contrast, is able responded with murderous anger and forceful oppression, to write about the community. Ultimately, Lewis and which in turn sparked a series of race riots.
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