The Harlem Renaissance

ENGLISH 276LR Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course consists of close readings of the key works of African American art and literature in the period during the 1920’s initially called “The New Negro Renaissance,” and which would soon come to be known as “The Harlem Renaissance.”

Accordingly, the course begins by tracing the evolution of the trope of a “New Negro” from its beginnings in 1887, as a response to Henry Grady’s conceit of a “New South,” through its successive, often contradictory definitions over the next thirty-eight years when the Harvard-trained philosopher Alain Locke boldly deployed the term to name a burgeoning movement in art and letters.

Beyond that genealogy, the course turns to the movement itself, beginning with the publication of Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) – the modernist work whose formal experiment set the tone for the works that followed. From here it moves towards Locke's landmark anthology The New Negro (1925), and to the fiction, poetry, and criticism of the writers whose works were pivotal to the “Renaissance,” including: Langston Hughes, George Schuyler, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, Marcus Garvey, Arturo Schomburg, Countée Cullen, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Anne Spencer, Angelina Weld Grimké, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Wallace Thurman, Eric Walrond, Walter White, as well as the art of Aaron Douglass and Reinhold Reiss.  The course concludes with the publication of Sterling A. Brown’s Southern Road (1932), in the early years of the Depression, after which time the modernism of Cane would give way to the social realist documentary impulse that would reach its fullest manifestation in Richard Wright's Native Son. Throughout, the course attends to the movement's internal debates over the relation between art and politics, matters of form and representation, what constitutes a “renaissance,” and to its lasting influence on twentieth-century American thought, society and culture.