Questionnaire Responses

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

In the twenty-first century, the idea of the Harlem Renaissance has done nearly as much traveling as the transnational corporations said to define our time. Foreign allies of the renaissance have been visited and revisited, transporting the rebirth to Marseilles and Paris noir, London and Dublin, Kingston and Port-au-Prince, Mexico City and Moscow—not to mention the South Side of Chicago and northwest Washington, D.C. Harlem Renaissance studies has thus joined the new modernist studies at large in taking a transnational turn, though in this case a turn unusually attuned to the destructive cosmopolitanism of imperial racisms and the productive failures of intradiasporic translation. Close on the heels of the spatial enlargement of the field of the Harlem Renaissance has come temporal enlargement, of course: it does not take a believer in planetary “deep time” (a talisman of literary-critical immortality if there ever was one) to recognize that exploded political boundaries hasten expanded periodizations. It strikes me, in fact, that the most consequential work now being done in the vicinity of Harlem Renaissance studies proposes various models of elongated renaissance time. If renaissance scholarship in the first decade of the twenty-first century was steered by critics who read African American modernism through other continents, the second decade may well be led by those who read this modernism through untapped years and moments, episodes of the black modern before and after Harlem. Judging from an otherwise diverse cluster of books published in 2010 or 2011, a transtemporal turn is brewing even in domestically focused literary history.

On the one hand, transtemporal renaissance scholarship appears to be going backward—but in a good way. Picking up on Henry Louis Gates’s earlier backdating of the trope of the New Negro and Houston Baker’s counterintuitive (and later renounced) tracing of Afro-modernism to the 1895 Atlanta Compromise, James Smethurst’s book The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (2011) reroots the emergence of modern black literature in an extended turn-of-century matrix classically associated with black cultural retreat. Training a wide and discursive lens on what can be called the “long nadir,” a period unfolding from the defeat of Reconstruction in the South through the triumph of the Harlem Renaissance in the North, Smethurst maintains that an era of African American history marked by tragic reversals also nurtured a prescient embrace of the modern U.S. metropolis. This embrace, he contends, fostered the rise of a postbellum African American literature just as considerable—and just as appreciably modern—as the literature of the Alain Lockean renaissance proper. In Smethurst’s account, the Harlem movement thus rejoins and concludes the longue durée of the long nadir. Jeopardized in the process is our conviction of Harlem’s privileged access to the culturally prospective, to what comes ever after in the African American grain. Gained, however, is the likelihood that pre-jazz-and-cocktails voices such as Pauline Hopkins and Paul Laurence Dunbar were “in many respects our first modernists” (215). Thanks to their charting of “the territorial racialization of the city” characteristic of U.S. modernity, these African American authors may have “first raised many of the concerns, stances, and tropes associated with U.S. modernism” (3). Smethurst concludes that the regressive regime of legal segregation ironically promoted early access to the groundwork of the modern—an argument effectively restated, beneath all the controversy baiting, in Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011). Not just a playful case for its author’s structural unemployment, Warren’s book inventively encapsulates and diffuses the event of the Harlem Renaissance within a broader Jim Crow–prompted black modernism (born 1896; died 1954) that he conflates with the whole of African American writing.

On the other hand, a second branch of transtemporal renaissance scholarship appears to be going forward—but in a duly nonprogressive way. Lawrence P. Jackson’s massively well-researched The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (2010) aspires to do for post-Harlem writing what David Levering Lewis did for the writing of Harlem’s vogue, vivifying literary history at the granular level of the rounded artistic personality. One preliminary title of Jackson’s book—“A Renaissance of Indignation”—emphasizes that its connection to Harlem Renaissance studies is not confined to Lewis’s example alone. What became The Indignant Generation details a literary time “markedly different from the black writing boom of the 1920s” (7) but configured and oriented all the same like the boom before it. African American “writers, critics, and poets from the second half of the 1930s through the end of 1950s” (8) may have been patronized by academics as a random set of the isolated or as the sparring partners of a single defining figure, Richard Wright. Yet they in truth composed a glittering renaissance-style collective protagonist, Jackson insists, a cohort of “amazingly mature and brilliant black writers” (10) who together cemented “a twenty-five year movement and historic group” (12). This bloc migrated cityward in the footsteps of the Harlem avant-garde, “circulating in and through the intellectual hubs” (10) of Washington, New York, and up-and-coming Chicago. And it glimpsed a second Carl Van Vechten, the representative white “custodian of black letters during the 1920s and 1930s,” in the “visionary white liberals” of the 1940s and ’50s (13). The indignant generation negated the Harlem generation, in other words, not so much by puncturing New Negro presumptions as by reinventing renaissance habits for midcentury, arming them to survive the Great Depression, New Deal and newer liberalisms, and the growth of grittier black cultural capitals. Jackson himself thus retains some of the staple tropes of Afro-renaissancism as he stretches beyond the limits of Jazz Age black Manhattan. Not coincidentally, he joins a 2011 book, Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage’s The Muse in Bronzeville, a long-awaited history of the post-Harlem “Chicago Renaissance,” in projecting African American modernism as a kind of long peak or sustained anti-nadir formed from a string of urban rebirths.

What will become of Harlem Renaissance scholarship in the wake of such creative expansions, both forward and backward, of renaissance time? What happens to a hothouse vogue redefined as a regular item of modernist business? For one thing, for better and worse, the elongated timeline stands to map African American modernism more neatly onto the recently extended core years of its Anglo-American counterpart, 1890 to 1960. For another thing, this timeline promises to detach its subject from what remains of place-keyed Harlem nostalgia. African American modernism may never again qualify as a period concept uniquely enthralled by uptown’s golden age, by the transitory proximity of the Savoy Ballroom, the Stutz Bearcat, and the Dark Tower salon. Above all, perhaps, the elongated, “trans-Harlem” timeline of African American modernism invites a modest proposal for an imaginary disappearance (modest at least in comparison with the thesis that African American literature disintegrated before Toni Morrison’s first novel): namely, that we begin to explore the counterfactual possibility of an Afro-modernism free from Harlem’s clock-setting arrival. The enhanced before and after of present-day Harlem Renaissance studies, this is to say, suggests there will be revealing trails to follow if we act as if Harlem was never in vogue.