Questionnaire Responses

How do you understand the relationship between the Harlem Renaissance, modernism, and/or modernity?

I see the Harlem Renaissance as being unquestionably a modernist movement in the arts broadly considered. It was a response to modernity, and in that sense on a continuum with African American cultural expression going back generations; but also from the more limited traditional definitions of Modernism with a capital “M” that held sway in the sixties and seventies, it seems inarguable now that black writing and artistic expression of the interwar period can only be bracketed off from “modernism” as such on racial grounds. On the other hand, I wouldn’t call all African American writers of the period “modernist” any more than I would someone like Booth Tarkington. For a while it seemed as if calling the Harlem Renaissance “modernist” involved using “modernist” as a purely honorific term. But our idea of “modernism” today is quite different, generally, from the idea of it that prevailed when it was defined in relation to a few interconnected all-white coteries during the heyday of the New Criticism and shortly after.

How have your ideas about the Harlem Renaissance evolved since you first began writing about it?

The first graduate seminar I took (with John McCluskey) was on the Harlem Renaissance, in the fall of 1977. That was before David Levering Lewis’s pivotal contribution. Nathan Huggins’s Harlem Renaissance (1971) was considered the main text on the movement. I can’t remember what I wrote in that class, but looking back now, I can see that Huggins’s argument had a big influence on me in some ways (except for his emphasis on “failure” and his generally low regard for the literature itself), as did John McCluskey’s Ellisonian approach to African American and American literary history. I first began writing about the Harlem Renaissance in relation to Walt Whitman in the late 1980s, because I was teaching sophomore surveys of African American literature semester after semester, on the one hand, and classes in nineteenth-century American literature on the other, and I started out as a Whitman scholar with an interest in African American literature. I wanted to see how these different interests interconnected. There had been very little investigation of African American responses to Whitman (and vice versa). At that time, the writing of the Harlem Renaissance was generally held in low esteem and understandings of the movement were confined by the notion of its “failure,” which was considered mainly to have resulted from white involvement in it. Of course, the Black Arts movement dismissals of the Harlem Renaissance still carried considerable weight, and people studying “modernism” weren’t yet paying much attention to African American writing. “Black” and “white” modernisms were generally considered in polar opposition, and as belonging to separate fields of study, not to mention separate traditions. It was while looking behind the black responses to Whitman in the early twentieth century that a whole cultural formation emerged for me, as if out of the deep, and it kept spreading and spreading across disciplines and communities. A number of other scholars were discovering related trends at about the same time, and within a fairly short period of time it no longer seemed insubordinate to talk about “black” and “white” modernisms as interconnected, at the very least, in all sorts of complicated ways. The battle against the suppression or scapegoating of interracial relationships (which is not the same as celebrating them) seems long over now. The discussion also had moved away (beginning with Houston Baker’s book) from focusing on the movement’s “failure,” and a lot of criticism came out showing why writers who had been dismissed earlier (most notably, for me, Nella Larsen) deserved another look. Black feminist criticism in the ’80s and ’90s had a huge impact (Hazel V. Carby, Cheryl A. Wall, Deborah E. McDowell, and Ann Du Cille especially come to mind). My ideas of the movement changed somewhat between 1996 and 2006, as the significance of Marxism, on the one hand, and sexualities grew much stronger and the international aspects gained more importance for me (as for everyone else) as “transnationalism” became a buzzword, and of course as a result of work by Paul Gilroy, Brent Hayes Edwards, Michelle Ann Stevens, and others.

What do you think is the most interesting or challenging work being conducted in this field today, and why?

The blossoming of performance studies has made a big difference across the board in modernist studies, and rightly so. It seems to me especially apropos for work on the Harlem Renaissance. But I must admit that I’m not reading that much about the Harlem Renaissance lately, as I’m immersed in the 1940s.

What figures, connections, or areas of inquiry require further attention or reflection? What aspects of the Harlem Renaissance are we missing or ignoring?

I would be interested to learn more about cultural nationalist movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and the circuits in New York that were integral to the Harlem Renaissance and also fed those movements—Covarrubias on his return to Mexico, Latin American anthropologists and culture workers, the Trinidadian “renaissance” of which C. L. R. James was a part, and so on. A lot of intellectual circuits from all over passed through New York. There’s a lot of interesting work to be done there, but it would probably require loosening up the boundaries defining the Harlem Renaissance, because such movements were apparently sometimes inspired more directly by the same trends that fed the Harlem Renaissance than by the Harlem Renaissance as such. I would add that studying those movements might reawaken interest in cultural nationalisms of the time, including American cultural nationalism and black cultural nationalism, in relation to the Harlem Renaissance. Cultural nationalism and internationalism are not opposed concepts in the first half of the twentieth century.

There remains a deeply entrenched idea of the Harlem Renaissance as a little movement that was killed by the Depression. I think this is a result of a confusion between “the New Negro,” the Negro Renaissance, and the Harlem Vogue. What I think of as the Harlem Renaissance (and the term is problematic) is part of a “long” New Negro movement, or simply Negro movement, that began in the post-Reconstruction period and culminated in, say, “The Letter from Birmingham Jail.” People should look more at the institutional and ideological continuities across time and at the recursive nature of cultural change. (Houston Baker’s idea of black “renaissancism” and “the changing same” seems relevant.) Especially in modernist studies, there’s too much emphasis on abrupt breaks and ruptures, a point driven home for me most recently by Lisi Schoenbach’s book Pragmatic Modernism (2011). The Harlem nightclub culture collapsed not solely because of the Great Depression but also, and perhaps more importantly, because of the end of prohibition, yet the literary Harlem Renaissance was not dependent on the nightclub culture; it had a much broader base. We should not let the nightclub culture define the Negro Renaissance, although it is certainly important. We should also be looking at libraries, colleges, jook joints, and local institutions across the country that don’t simply evaporate because of a Harlem riot in 1935. African American writing of the 1940s shows a lot of continuities with that of the 1920s and early 1930s. The idea that support for black writers and artists disappeared in the 1930s is baseless, and I still don’t understand why it remains so popular.

The term “Harlem Renaissance” became a necessity for marketing purposes after the term “Negro” was retired from service, although it had occasionally been used before. Unfortunately this has affected the very way in which even scholars perceive what was happening in artistic expression by African Americans (and others) in the interwar period, because “Harlem” was so identified with a particular and rather localized history.

I don’t mean that Harlem was insignificant by any means. I have not changed my view on the importance of Harlem in the 1920s (or after). But I don’t think one should conflate the fascinating sociocultural phenomenon of black Harlem in that decade with what was usually called the Negro Renaissance. An excellent essay by Ernest Julius Mitchell II in the recent special African American Literature issue of Amerikastudien, by the way, does an excellent job of tracing the terminology concerning the movement and clarifying that what Alain Locke and others meant by a “renaissance” was something quite different from what “Harlem Renaissance” connotes for most people. Along these lines I might say that Kenneth Warren’s book What Was African American Literature? (2011) could have been entitled What Was Black Literature in the New Negro Movement? What ended with the demise of legalized segregation was the long New Negro movement, not African American literature, which, I would argue, was institutionalized in new and transformative ways as legalized segregation ended.

What question is missing from this survey?

I think I’ll pass on that one, with all due respect.