The New Harlem Renaissance Studies

Correction 08.17.21: Towards the end of page 378, "Springarn Medal" should read "Spingarn Medal". The HTML version of the article has been corrected.

Discarding critical premises that once narrowed the field of scholarly vision, the New Harlem Renaissance Studies has brought fresh energy to the analysis of early twentieth-century African-American literature. A gradual decentering of the canon has directed renewed attention to marginalized writers, especially women. Neglected texts have been rediscovered, republished, and restored to consciousness. Periodization has loosened, bringing the texts from Cane to Their Eyes Were Watching God into dialogue with work from the shadowed decades on either side. And while an awareness that the Renaissance was never limited geographically to New York is nothing new—Sterling Brown stated the case emphatically a half century ago—its full consequences are finally emerging as critics investigate the multiple sites of African-American creative activity and the movement's crucial international dimensions. Meanwhile, the exclusive focus on literature, painting, and other "high" forms of artistic expression (to which blues were always a partial exception) widens to include cultural production of many kinds—a process that not only bears its own fruit but also greatly enriches the context in which the art may be understood. Criticism bringing theoretical concepts and approaches drawn from cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, gender and "whiteness" studies, and elsewhere to bear on the Harlem Renaissance has had a most productive decade and has much yet to reveal.

As students of other modernisms have intensified their concentration on modernity, the New Harlem Renaissance Studies, too, connects cultural expression with a seemingly unlimited array of contemporaneous intellectual and social formations. The Renaissance now appears—as George Hutchinson anticipated in 1995—neither autogenous nor isolated from all but the most obviously "racial" modern phenomena.¹ Indeed, the Renaissance and "white" Anglo-American modernism are seen to share extensive cultural contexts, and what Daylanne English, in one of the books under review, calls the critical "segregation of modern African-American intellectuals from the dominant literary, philosophical, and scientific debates of the modern period" is clearly insupportable (22). That the New Harlem Renaissance Studies and the New Modernist Studies should correspond in so many ways—as, clearly, they do—is an appropriate and constructive development for both of these interwoven fields.

Almost all these new tendencies are richly illustrated in the four works under consideration here, of which one is a resurrected Harlem Renaissance novel, one is an anthology of short fiction, and two are works of criticism. Each of these books is valuable (though they are not all equally so), and collectively they attest to the very real merits and continuing promise of the current trends in Harlem Renaissance Studies.

When Washington Was in Vogue is an epistolary novel of 1925-26 originally published serially in the Messenger as The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair. Besides displaying the clever new title and the subtitle A Love Story, its jacket identifies the book as "A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance." Adam McKible explains in an introduction that he "discovered" the novel while researching modernist little magazines for his doctoral dissertation. He identifies the author, Edward Christopher Williams, as "the first professionally trained black librarian in America" and helpfully summarizes Williams's life and character. The introduction concludes with a section (addressed more to a lay audience than to fellow scholars) on the novel's historical background.

The novel recounts the experiences of its protagonist, Davy Carr, among the black bourgeoisie of early-1920s Washington. Davy, a careful social observer, comments trenchantly, though sympathetically in the main, on the mores of the community in which he finds himself. He gradually falls in love with Caroline Rhodes, the daughter of his landlady, although he himself is slow to realize this. As McKible explains, "Much of the book's pleasure derives from Davy's ability to write about his milieu so perceptively while also being unable to see the love blossoming right under his own nose" (xvi).

Though unquestionably forgotten, Williams's novel was never actually "lost"; it simply lay disregarded in the pages of the Messenger.² What McKible has done in preparing this edition, besides making the novel available for the first time in book form, is not exactly to "discover" it, but to assert its value—to insist, in fact, that this work stands with the best canonical Harlem Renaissance fiction and deserves similar attention. The claims he makes for When Washington Was in Vogue are not modest. Is this really, as McKible declares, "an important addition to the twinned canons of American and African-American literature" (xxxi)? Does the novel evince the "great insight and . . . deft style" that McKible attributes to it? Is it "indeed an American novel of the first order" (xxxiv)? The answers to these questions turn out, astonishingly, to be yes, yes, and yes. Williams's novel is indeed a work of considerable significance, and a delightfully accomplished piece of writing.

The importance of the novel lies especially in its good-natured riposte to the scathing representation of African-American bourgeois society, particularly in Washington, that Cane, The Big Sea, and other key New Negro texts have rendered settled truth for decades. A few critics have been warning readers for some time that we were accepting uncritically one side of a generational conflict.³ But there is nothing quite like a work of the imagination to humanize a long-dismissed group and its culture. As a first-rate, full-length novel of manners written by a figure who stood outside every circle associated with the Harlem Renaissance, When Washington Was in Vogue also lends substance to the commonplace that the Renaissance was hardly confined to Harlem. As Emily Bernard points out in her useful afterword, the novel gives us a memorable heroine, as well, in Caroline Rhodes—a Jazz-Age New Woman who is unconventional, articulate, intelligent, and, unlike so many of her sisters in Harlem Renaissance fiction, "unapologetically" brown-skinned and not a bit "tragically colored" (283-84).

Williams is a stylish and witty novelist with a sharp eye for social fashions and human foibles, and a fine ear for the spoken and written language of his class. Among his better-known contemporaries, he is perhaps most comparable with Rudolph Fisher, and next with Jessie Fauset. But several attributes set him apart, among them a humorously rakish quality that, as McKible suggests, extended from Williams's own character to his fiction. Davy Carr moves in a polite world in which sexual intercourse outside marriage is beyond the pale, and this frees Davy and his crowd to indulge in a heterosexual sensualism that would be impossible in a society that lacked such clear and impermeable boundaries.⁴ If Davy's capacity for aesthetic appreciation of the features, figures, and couture of his female acquaintances is not in itself extraordinary for a youngish bachelor, the openness and eloquence with which he records his admiration is remarkable, as is his ability to carry on the most outrageous flirtations in complete innocence:

I sat between Miss Barton and Mrs. Hale. . . . Surely never in my mundane existence have I had the honor of being the thrice fortunate thorn between two such roses—real American beauties! The looking was deadly to the right or to the left. . . . Then we toasted marshmallows and roasted peanuts, and I had the exquisite pleasure of being fed from time to time by the loveliest hands in the world—on both sides of me—and if in the process of taking marshmallows from the fingertips of Beauty, I now and then missed the marshmallows and got more than my share of the fingertips, who can blame me?

(19)

Through Davy Carr, Williams presents his Washingtonians as a charming and literate "smart set," progressive if never radical, and racially engaged if never egalitarian. They are not at all, as Langston Hughes would have it, "altogether lacking in real culture, kindness, or good common sense."⁵ In Williams's more generous view they are an amiable and usually graceful elite. Williams is, however, quite aware of the shortcomings of which Hughes complained; his Davy Carr is a strong and frequent critic, for example, of the interracial color snobbery that he sees in the friends he otherwise admires. He makes no excuses, either, for the tendency of some in his class toward insularity and gossip, or for the showy materialism that one character attributes to a racial "inferiority complex" (46). It is clear that Williams and Hughes are talking about the same people. But for Williams, they require sympathetic correction; for Hughes they are irredeemable, and racial progress must take place on another front altogether.

My one complaint about this edition is that it makes so few concessions to the teachers and scholars who are bound to form a large part of the audience for any rediscovered Harlem Renaissance novel. From the design of its dust jacket and its repeated billing as "A Love Story" to the tenor of its introduction, the book is clearly being marketed to a general public. That in itself is not a problem. But if a reader happens to be unfamiliar with, for example, Tosti or Shand, or does not know the provenance of "Duna" or "the pitiful story of Dechelette and poor little Alice Doré," or has not read Dorland's Age of Mental Virility or Stribling's Birthright, the book provides no help at all. The assumption seems to be that readers would rather not know, if enlightenment requires the insertion of a footnote. Yet for the public to whom it seems addressed, the occasional note explaining even such less-obscure references as James Weldon Johnson, Octavus Roy Cohen, and the Dyer bill would not be out of order. In any event, When Washington Was in Vogue, while probably light in incident for some readers' tastes, merits serious consideration and soon ought to be finding its way onto college syllabi for exactly the reason McKible gives: that Williams has "captured," with skill and craft, "a time, a place, and a psyche previously undocumented by authors of his era" (xxxiv).

Ebony Rising, which distinguishes itself from other recent anthologies as the only one to offer a "comprehensive" collection of Harlem Renaissance short fiction, brings additional material into the spotlight—and the classroom. With fifty-two stories dating from 1914 to 1940 and written by thirty-seven different male and female authors, the book gives readers a broad sampling, within its single genre, of Harlem Renaissance creative output. Several well-considered decisions by editor Craig Gable make Ebony Rising the vital anthology that it is. The expansive timeline along which he envisions "the Harlem Renaissance Era" enables him to include writing that, he argues, "predates" the Renaissance yet "segues into it"; it also allows readers to see that such "transitional figures" as Richard Wright and Chester Himes "appeared in the midst" of the Harlem Renaissance and not merely in its aftermath (xiv). Gable has arranged the stories in strict chronological order, giving readers a sense of an unfolding literary movement instead of the usual congeries of authors. Reading the book sequentially, one is permitted to observe both historical and stylistic change, rather than being introduced, yet again, to a gallery of isolated geniuses. In making his selections, Gable deliberately showcases the generic variety and geographic diversity of Harlem Renaissance fiction. He has also chosen to omit certain heavily anthologized stories, which not only makes room for other selections but also avoids reinforcing the impression that a small canon of works defines the best of the movement. Determining which familiar stories are indispensable and which can be done without is a dangerous project for an editor, but Gable's choices strike me as defensible even where I might have wished for others.

A number of stories in Ebony Rising have been seldom reprinted since their original publication; a few have never been reprinted at all. One of the pleasures of this anthology is the opportunity it affords readers to discover some unknown gem of short fiction. In his introduction to the book, Darryl Dickson-Carr particularly commends S. Miller Johnson's "The Golden Penknife," a 1925 story of Russian immigrants whose plot turns on the suspicion of one main character that another has "colored" blood. This story is certainly remarkable, though not altogether successful. Johnson's writing deploys a Jazz-Age irony that is sometimes sharp, sometimes ham-fisted. One of his most impressive passages is an extended scene in a cabaret that translates into prose the atmosphere of Hughes's jazz poems of about the same time. Elsewhere, though, the story is marred by bathos, as in the interactions between Anna and her suspect lover Tervanovitch, or in the heavily foreshadowed yet still not quite convincing ending. Yet "The Golden Penknife" remains a significant "find" from an author who, apparently, produced only one story in his life. Readers who have not already discovered Ottie B. Graham or Eloise Bibb Thompson will find still more to be impressed with in these equally obscure writers.⁶

Readers will also find themselves, I think, freshly impressed with a number of the more canonical authors. Gable's sometimes unexpected choices among the works of these better-known figures helps keep Ebony Rising from traversing too much familiar territory. But the contributions of Toomer, Hurston, Walrond, Fisher, Larsen, Hughes and Bontemps—and, I would add, Gwendolyn Bennett—remind us, each in its own way, that these artists did possess an uncommon command over words and technique.

Dickson-Carr's general assessment of the stories in Ebony Rising is accurate: they "represent a qualitative range extending from competent, engaging journeywork, to the finely honed craft of the mature artist, to the avant-garde" (xxii). While almost all the stories collected here are imaginative and provocative, quite a few are primarily ideas outfitted with a little flesh and blood to give them body. Some stories are tarnished by predictability or mawkishness, some by clumsy writing or cliché. Not all of the experiments are equally successful. But some unevenness is to be expected in an anthology designed to cross-section an era. In compensation, the representative range of the stories allows us to observe how, for example, the "genteel" prose style slackens its grip over the years while modernist techniques add new colors to the writers' palettes, even in stories that are not particularly experimental—see, for instance, Bontemps's light-handed deployment of what Hugh Kenner once dubbed the "Uncle Charles principle" in Joyce ("He was one of the most handiest boys Adina had ever set eyes on" [362]).

Although Ebony Rising has perhaps more than its fair share of typographical errors, editor Gable has helpfully endowed the collection with a substantial apparatus. The stories from each year are preceded by a page or more of information: a list of the year's historical events, pertinent statistics such as the current U.S. unemployment rate and the number of reported lynchings, and cultural data such as the winner of the annual Spingarn Medal and a bibliography of important African-American books. Appendices include a biography and a bibliography for each author; tables of the prize-winning works of short fiction from the Opportunity and Crisis literary contests; a bibliography of scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance; and, of special benefit to teachers, a table of thematic elements linking the various stories within the collection. A particularly salient detail emerging from the appendices is the markedly scant output from many of the contributors to Ebony Rising. Too few, one more than suspects, had the five-hundred pounds per year or the room of one's own that they needed to practice their craft, or the publication outlets in which to market it. The loss is clearly ours as well as theirs.

While its thesis that black masculinity has been historically warped by economic and social injustice is hardly revelatory, the value of Nathan Grant's Masculinist Impulses lies in its careful teasing out of several writers' analyses of black masculinity even where such analysis is not the most prominent or obvious feature of the texts. Grant shows that Toomer's stories "Esther" and "Fern," for example, are not simply portraits of two Southern African-American women, but portraits of those women in relation to the battered and fragmented psyches of the black men who interact with them. In another valuable sequence, Grant closely examines the differently flawed masculinities of Logan Killicks, Jody Starks, and Tea Cake Woods in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Starks, for example, is attractive at first because his "ambition and energy" suggest a masculine drive capable of "nation-building," but this drive soon devolves into class consciousness, control of others, and an "anticommunitarian" isolation of himself and Janie from their neighbors (133-35). Grant has a sharp eye for unexpected relations between texts as well—for the common symbol or motif that connects Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain with Their Eyes, or Toomer's "Bona and Paul" with his "Blood-Burning Moon" and "Avey." His method of reading across texts reveals an almost poetic sense of relation between them.

Hampering the presentation of his insights, Grant's prose tends to flutter among ideas rather than pursuing clear argumentative lines. One typical paragraph starts by presenting Toomer's opposition of man and woman, but quickly turns from sex to race in his play Natalie Mann. After reiterating a point from the previous page about the character Merilh's portraits, the lengthy paragraph then continues with a few sentences on the erasure of black identity and a digression on the Young America group of writers before trailing off with a quote from another critic on Toomer's response to that group (28-29). Much of the text reads this way, with fine local observations and sophisticated theoretical ideas suggesting many things but never quite coalescing into an argument.

What happens at the level of the paragraph is reproduced in the book's overall structure. Masculinist Impulses devotes two chapters to Cane alone and two to Hurston's four novels. One chapter on a pair of mid-career novels by John Edgar Wideman—Reuben (1987) and Philadelphia Fire (1990)—follows; another on Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day concludes the book. The Toomer chapters, predictably, would gain much force and coherence from condensation. The Hurston chapters, while less distended, are strangely constructed. The first, for example, inexplicably begins by discussing her last novel and proceeds more or less backward from there. This forces Grant to grapple with some of the most problematic aspects of Seraph on the Sewanee and Moses, Man of the Mountain—Joe Kelsey's advisory role in Jim's rape of Arvay, and wise Mentu's sexist advice to Moses—before establishing a general pattern or thesis that might contextualize these troubling scenes. One result is that the chapter sometimes has an air of special pleading in its exertions to complicate those moments, as when Grant argues that Mentu's "is not, finally, a sexist utterance, but rather a fulfillment of a more wholesome theme . . . the achievement and then the securing of the harmony of the entire nation" (114). The fact that it is aimed at "nation-building" does not cancel the passage's regressive import, its assignment of intellect to man and a supporting role to woman.

Grant's rationale for bypassing all black fiction between Hurston and Wideman is that in the period between the Harlem Renaissance and postmodernism, he does not find the pattern he is seeking:

Naturalism, as the dominant form of literary expression in American writing after about 1940, left little room for male characters, black or white, to combat systematic racial and class oppression through alterity and, as an element of that alterity, principled associations with women. If the metropolis as symbol of capitalism had failed man the agent of nature, then particularly in defense of his generations to follow, he was impelled to meet this foe with an unwavering, masculine force, while the recipe for such force usually included women's subordination.

(149)

Toomer and Hurston, Grant argues, expressed "possibilities for new and vibrant senses of the black masculine" that lay uncultivated until revived by a postmodern sensibility (214-15). He is by no means alone in positing a continuity between Hurston and certain contemporary writers that waves away almost everything between. But can this keen, inventive reader, capable of rereading "Esther" as a story about Barlo and Seraph on the Sewanee as sympathetically feminist, really find nothing anywhere in Richard Wright, Chester Himes, or Ishmael Reed that might also surprise us? Nothing in Maud Martha, Jubilee, or Brown Girl, Brownstones that anticipates what he locates in Wideman and Morrison? And even if this is indeed the case, might there not be some value in devoting attention to one or more seemingly antithetical figures?

Perhaps because their very compactness demands it, Grant's concluding chapters on Wideman, Morrison, and Naylor are the best written and most closely argued in the book. And even with its weaknesses of structure and argumentation, Masculinist Impulses offers more than enough of value in its acute sifting of texts to recommend it to readers interested in literary representations of black masculinity.

Daylanne English's Unnatural Selections, which examines eugenics as a shaping force for both modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, is even easier to recommend. Eugenics, English reminds us, was once so ubiquitous in American culture as to have "attained the status of common sense" (1), and its influence crested at just the Harlem-Renaissance/high-modernist moment. Moreover, despite its present reputation, eugenics was regarded in its heyday as a forward-thinking, even idealistic science and was likely to be espoused in some form by progressives seeking to improve the lot of humanity or at least of their own "race." Eugenics crossed racial lines easily, as black thinkers as well as white agonized over dysgenic intraracial breeding habits. For African-American leaders, eugenics formed a natural part of "racial uplift" programs.

In this stimulating study, English moves fluently between canonical and noncanonical texts, black writers and white, literary and cultural studies. Her opening chapters (after a useful introduction) pair W. E. B. DuBois and T. S. Eliot, one a key "arbiter and editor" of the Harlem Renaissance, the other of Anglo-American modernism. The book then segues to female writers, first with Gertrude Stein, and then, returning to the Harlem Renaissance, with the authors of antilynching protest plays dating from 1916 to 1930. A chapter on the eugenic "family studies" to which hundreds of (white) women employed by male scientists as "field workers" contributed concludes the analysis. Each chapter holds its share of revelations.

English's first chapter rebuts previous critical studies that have attempted to dissociate DuBois from eugenics. The superiority of the "Talented Tenth," she demonstrates, had an assumed biological basis, and DuBois fretted, as white eugenicists did, over "the evils of differential birth rate (the period's code term for overpropagation by the lower classes)" and the deficient breeding of the elite. English reads his 1928 novel Dark Princess as a "eugenic fantasy" that looks forward to the triumph of an "emerging eugenic breed," a projection of his Talented Tenth (48). Under DuBois's editorship, the Crisis often told this "family story" pictorially—for example, in its "Men of the Month" pages, designed to resemble family photo albums and thus to create an illusion of kinship among unrelated individuals. The ill-conceived marriage between DuBois's own daughter, Yolande, and the gay poet Countee Cullen forms the centerpiece of the June 1928 Crisis, and DuBois uses his editorial in that issue to pontificate on African-American "breeding" and the beginnings of "a new race." Both privately and publicly, English concludes, DuBois's politics were "shaped by his particularly utopian, heterosexual vision of a world 'remade' by the united intellectual, political, and reproductive efforts of first-rate men and women of color" (59). At the same time, DuBois's eugenics remains closely related to his political progressivism, his feminism, his defense of the mulatto against racial purists, and other generally admired elements of his thought.

In the rather startling chapter that follows, English shows that Eliot, by contrast, was hardly attracted to eugenics at all. His "troubling racial and class politics," she suggests, have led critics— Donald Childs most recently—to misread Eliot as a committed eugenicist when, in fact, he repeatedly satirized, mocked, and otherwise disparaged eugenic thought. Ironically, it was Eliot's commitment to religion, his conservative rejection of progressive politics, and his "squeamish" response to sexuality that saved him, so to speak, from eugenics. The prospect of science intervening in human reproduction was repellent to Eliot for any number of reasons; and, pluralist as well as elitist, he had no desire either to "eliminate" or to improve the genes of society's "lower layers" (77). Stein's Three Lives, on the other hand, emerges from English's analysis as either a feminist text complicated by eugenic anxieties or a eugenic text complicated by feminist sympathies. Each chapter in Stein's triptych, English argues, registers "a preoccupation with fertility and its failed regulation" (109-110), which she interestingly connects with Stein's ambivalence toward "medical authority"—including her own as an ex-medical student—at the moment of the medical profession's takeover of obstetrics. A sustained close reading shows that the text, despite good intentions, "pathologizes" its black, immigrant, and working-class heroines. Melanctha's hybridity, for example, determines her fate, for in Stein, as in eugenic theory, mulattoes are essentially unfit.

Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and other New Negro women writers had their own uses for eugenic ideas as they indicted the "racial terrorism" of lynching in plays that depicted black women as renouncing motherhood in horrified protest. On stage, it is always the "very best" African-American men who are massacred and their equally eugenic female counterparts who opt for childlessness or even commit infanticide rather than offer up children to the lynchers of the future (126). Eugenics thus yields a modern language for voicing revulsion against the practice of lynching; that is, lynching can be portrayed as grotesquely dysgenic. English further contends that the antilynching dramatists' key trope of elective childlessness linked racial with feminist protest. Besides producing new victims of racial oppression, childbearing for educated, middle-class black women—especially the repeated childbearing urged on them by male race leaders concerned with differential birth rate—threatened to debar them from the hard-won opportunities of New Womanhood and New Negrohood. The antilynching playwrights, English asserts, "were clearly protesting interracial oppression . . . but they were protesting, as well, a specifically modern intraracial and gendered oppression—that is, African American ideologies of uplift that emphasized black women's domestic and reproductive value" (122). In this way, English recuperates the plays from the critical consensus that dismisses them as aesthetic failures—maudlin, repetitive, and incredible—and resuscitates them as important cultural documents touching on "an extraordinarily complex, vexed, and recurrent topic" for the African-American middle class (26). Her fine close reading of Grimké's Rachel bears out this thesis.

English's final chapter on the eugenic field workers, who ranged over the countryside to identify and study supposedly dysgenic families, makes for fascinating if appalling reading. The field workers, English argues, must be regarded as New Women because of their professionalized status and relative independence; yet their work, carried out with all the idealism of earnest reformers, brought the full force of pseudo-science and misguided government to bear on unsuspecting rural men and women who failed to meet emergent middle-class standards of industriousness, domestic virtue, and prudence. Thousands of those deemed "feebleminded" were removed from the gene pool through institutionalization or compulsory sterilization. In this chapter, English focuses on the field workers' status, discomfiting to us, as professionally and socially mobile, energetically activist, yet thoroughly regressive New Women; on their "expert" understanding of eugenic and dysgenic qualities in their subjects; and on the relation of their work to the transformations of gender, class, and values with which it coincided. She also claims, intriguingly, that the field workers "created a new genre" in their largely unpublished writings, "[c]ombining personal narrative, travel narrative, interviews, genealogical data, and statistical analysis" (175). Regrettably, the chapter offers little actual discussion of that genre, which English describes in passing as "compelling" and "remarkable."

Like most critical works of such ambitious scope, this one has its foibles. One is the frequent recurrence of a small set of favorite quotations; for instance, Eliot's statement that he sought writers for the Criterion who represented "the best people of each generation and type" is quoted on five different occasions. Lines from Calvin Coolidge, Nella Larsen, and others are similarly replicated, giving the impression that English has mined the available evidence to exhaustion, which is actually far from the case. One wonders, too, about some of her examples of eugenic discourse. When the editors of the Messenger disparaged the "old crowd" of African-American race leaders for failing "to adapt itself to the changed conditions," recommending "young men who are educated, radical and fearless" as substitutes, were they really employing "social Darwinist terms" in a "quasi-biological self-selection as racial leaders" (61)? Likewise, the quotation from Eliot that I cited a moment ago is, in its original context, strictly literary-critical in import, and it appears less "metaphorically eugenicist," as English would have it, than metaphorically classist. And the book's conclusion, which gestures somewhat sketchily at eugenic survivals in present-day social policy, does not inspire the same confidence as the substantive chapters.

Still, Unnatural Selections is a compelling critical study—one that absorbs and enlightens as it brings together diverse texts and argues persuasively for theses that are often unpredictable and even counterintuitive. With its thoughtful and unembarrassed side-by-side consideration of white and black modernism; its sensitive attention to the intersection of race, gender, and class; and its productive cultural turn, English's book illustrates some of the best attributes that the New Modernist Studies and the New Harlem Renaissance Studies hold in common.