Introduction

I had the good fortune to be one of a small group of eight, ten, perhaps a dozen young men and women who, met in the street, the libraries, the churches, and the cabarets of Harlem; which was at the time the Mecca, the intellectual and artistic focal point of the black world of the twenties. By the middle of the decade, some inspired individual with an unbelievably wild or perhaps inspired rhetorical or poetic gesture declared this period should be known as the Harlem Renaissance. At the time now one stopped to think how absurd, illogical, incongruous it was that a few young, black, inexperienced writers, artists, and scholars, coming together for the most part from lowly backgrounds such as ours should even aspire to the eminence that comes to mind when you think of the great Renaissance of the 15^th and 17^th century Italy… In like manner what we young blacks were tinkering with in the 1920s in our poems and songs, pictures and novels was nothing less than a revival, a stirring of the souls of black folk which had continued to beat though ever so faintly from man's first appearance on earth to our troubled time.

—Aaron Douglas¹

The essays for this special issue of American Studies primarily come from "Aaron Douglas and the Arts of the Harlem Renaissance," an interdisciplinary conference held in conjunction with the Spencer Museum of Art's exhibition, "Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist," on the University of Kansas campus on Friday, September 28 and September 29, 2007.

As we can see from the above Douglas quotation, Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance were cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and I wanted the conference to have that same spirit. Hence, it would not simply be another gathering where art historians talked to art historians; we wanted to go beyond that world. I invited speakers from a variety of disciplines: cultural history, visual art, music, literature, dance, theater, as well as art history. Moreover, the art historians I invited, especially, Richard Powell, have radically expanded the perimeters of that field. I modeled this conference after my more than decade experience of meetings of the Jazz Studies Group at Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies where we enriched our understanding of jazz by situating it within a great variety of contexts, from visual art, to literature, to politics to religion, to New Orleans and to numerous others.

The goal of the conference was to assess the complex constellation of artists, writers, and political and creative thinkers who comprised the Harlem Renaissance and to highlight Douglas's place within it. Whereas the exhibition "Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist" presented works created by Douglas throughout his career, the conference was an opportunity to focus on the Harlem Renaissance, the era during which Douglas made a name for himself and with which he is most closely associated.

The presenters were a talented and inspiring group and I am delighted that most could transform their presentations into polished essays.

In the beautifully written and textured, "The New Negro Era and the Great African American Transformation," Professor Gerald Early, of Washington University, St. Louis, examines how the Great War shaped the New Negro. "I would argue, "he originally notes," that the war made African Americans a truly modern national consciousness and this, in turn, helped to make the New Negro Movement possible."

In "The Flat Plane, the Jagged Edge: Aaron Douglas's Musical Art," Professor Robert G. O'Meally, of Columbia University, through scrutinizing Douglas's flat planes and jagged edges, theorizes "the relationship between music and visual art" and moreover, expands his insights by examining Duke Ellington's "musical flatness" and Romare Bearden's Douglas influenced "musical collages." One of O'Meally's most tantalizing and informative statements in the essay is: "The black American communities where Douglas grew up and found his voice as an artist, both in the Midwest and in New York, were music-centered. In sacred and secular settings, women and men, working-class and otherwise, were not only influenced by music; they were washed in the ubiquitous flow of musical sound: culturally...