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Introduction
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
introdUction steven c. tracy Even the seasoned critic writing on the subject under consideration here can fall unconsciously and automatically into writing Harlem Renaissance rather than Chicago Renaissance. That is how prominent the Harlem movement still is in the minds of scholars of African American literature: it is mere second nature to write “Harlem” with “Renaissance.” Not that the Harlem Renaissance is not supremely important. Some scholars believe—though fortunately not all of them—that not much of literary value was written by African Americans before the pivotal era that produced Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Anne Spencer, and others. The literary, indeed cultural, outpouring of the Harlem Renaissance produced unprecedented publishing opportunities in journals like The Crisis, Opportunity, The Messenger, The Survey Graphic, The Nation, Garvey’s Journal, Negro World, and many others, white- and black-run, as well as journals that had both white and black editors, as did Liberator when Mike Gold and Claude McKay were coeditors. Attention that had been experienced previously only by stray African American writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt focused on a larger group of African American writers. And when the Harlem Renaissance ended, its destruction fueled by the stock market crash and, in some ways, by attraction to leftist political movements that actually predated the crash and provided positive impetus for a number of social, political, and literary issues in the lives of African Americans, it seemingly left a gulf not filled until the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. That gulf has been more in African American literary criticism than in actuality. Thelate1930sthroughthe1950s—roughlythetimeperiodofwhatRobertBone first labeled the “Black Chicago Renaissance”—were not just years when isolated individuals like Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin or Gwendolyn BrookswhollydominatedtheAfricanAmericanliteraryscene.Butthecenterthat could not hold in Harlem had moved to another prominent destination of the 2 • steven c. tracy great Black migration—to Chicago. To many, the Chicago Renaissance seemed to be less consciously a “movement,” with policies, activities, organs of publication, and purposes of its own. Actually, many critics have regretted the “Renaissance” label, for both Harlem and Chicago, because neither was an actual rebirth or resurgence that brought immediate, profound epochal changes. However, each represented avant-garde political, social, and artistic thinking that eventually produced a stage upon which African American writers could redefine their relationships to American society and the world; therefore, calling each a Renaissance is not really problematical in the sense of the term as a renewal of vigor, energy, or life produced by a newly minted but broad-ranging vision. Indeed, what we call movements are frequently somewhat loose aggregations of writers, few of whom fit all of the criteria later established by critics for the “group,” that resist wholly satisfactory definitions. However, the Chicago Renaissance did have its influential major figures (Wright, Brooks), its major influences (Naturalism, Chicago School of Sociology, leftist politics), its clubs (John Reed Clubs, South Side Writers Project), and publishing organs, both black and white (The Anvil, The New Anvil, the New Challenge), and important newspapers like the Chicago Defender, the Chicago Bee, and the Chicago Whip. It also had manifestos such as Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” written in New York and attempting to establish and delineate a sharp break from the Harlem Renaissance, though of course still sharing some values. And, like the Harlem Renaissance, it had an urban scene teeming with important musical and artistic activity, and recording and museum opportunities that were magnets for budding artists. Perhaps what it lacked that the Harlem Renaissance had was the level of a sense of self-awareness as a group with particular aims and expectations from both within and without. Surely, Black Chicago Renaissance figures knew who they were, knew what cities and neighborhoods they were in, met with each other socially and professionally, and read each others’ works. But the milieu of the Roaring Twenties, literary patronage and publisher interest, and postwar optimism and sense of purpose gave way to a movement in Chicago less optimistically galvanized into action. The Harlem Renaissance, after all, had failed to produce the high regard and social equality it was assumed the production of great literature would bring. A more jaded, bitter outlook replaced some of that optimism, and, though there were of course liaisons and associations between white and black artists in the Harlem Renaissance...