Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance

Notes

199 Notes Introduction 1. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 166. 2. Crisis, February 1926, 165. For clarity and simplicity I give here the full bibliographic information for all of the months (February–June and August–November 1926) in which the symposium’s questions and answers were printed: March, 219–20; April, 278–80; May, 35–36; June, 71–73; August, 193–94; September, 238–39; “Criteria of Negro Art,” October, 290–97; November, 28–29. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text by the month and page number. Although no responses were printed in the July issue, there was an anonymous article (134) about the emerging African American theater movement and the support it received from the New York Public Library in Harlem. The article, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” described the efforts to create and sustain an African American dramatic community. Rather than viewing the Crisis symposium as one that was limited only to the issues in which the questions and responses were printed, I propose viewing the symposium as beginning with Du Bois’s review of The New Negro in January, continuing with the publication of his “Criteria of Negro Art” in October, and concluding with his review of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven in December, a trajectory that makes 1926 a crucial year in which African American representational tactics were debated and discussed. In both the essay and the reviews, Du Bois elaborates upon his idea of “proper” Negro literature and art, even criticizing Alain Locke 200 Notes to Pages 3–5 in the review of The New Negro. Though he praised the collection, Du Bois presaged the topics that would consume the period. Noting that “Mr. Locke has newly been seized with the idea that Beauty rather than Propaganda should be the object of Negro literature and art,” Du Bois chides the other scholar, warning, “If Mr. Locke’s thesis is insisted on too much it is going to turn the Negro renaissance into decadence.” In the same review Du Bois also dismissed “the young Negro [who] tries to do pretty things.” W. E. B. Du Bois, review of The New Negro, Crisis, January 1926, 140–41. 3. Dubey delineates both the attractions and the limitations of literal representation in postmodern African American fiction. Examining Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Dubey persuasively shows how evocations of the South and concepts of magic and conjuring help writers contend with the ambivalence of postmodern urban literary representation. In contrast to the technology-inflected space of the urban setting, the South functions on the level of magic: “Magical modes of reading, which affirm literal connections between language and referent, story and place, author and community , serve to establish stable grounds for the writer’s claim to racial representation. The push toward literal meanings posits a closed circuit of community, characterized by sameness , cultural coherence, and a transparency of communication, and it allows the author a directly reflective relation to this community.” Dubey argues that Morrison’s and Naylor’s use of the literal betrays some anxiety with regard to print culture and the book as commodity ; similarly, the urge for literal representation by some proponents of the New Negro Movement displayed a willful desire for “a closed circuit of community, characterized by sameness, cultural coherence, and a transparency of communication.” The difference, of course, is that Morrison and Naylor privilege a romanticized Southern folk community, while the New Negro artists deliberately attempted to fashion an urban, cosmopolitan Northern elite. The Crisis questions aim to limit the images of blackness that will be able to circulate as “authentic.” Madhu Dubey, Signs of Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 179. 4. Gerald Early, in his introduction to My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), draws an active distinction between the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that the former took place between 1908 and 1938 and that the latter was “only a phase, a kind of peak moment” of the New Negro Movement (24). 5. Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 306, 303. David Levering Lewis, in When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1981), claims that the “failure” of the Harlem Renaissance was “inevitable,” not only because of the Great Depression but also because of the...