Children's Literature and the "New Negro"

Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Katharine Capshaw Smith. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004.

Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance is a timely addition to scholarship on both African American literature and children's literature of the early twentieth century. The scope of Katharine Capshaw Smith's work makes it a particularly welcome follow-up to DonnaRae MacCann's award-winning White Supremacy in Children's Literature (Routledge 1998), which focused on the relationship of African American children to mainstream children's literature from 1830 to 1900. Dr. Smith moves us to the next stage, focusing on the emergence of an African American children's literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Smith looks at major players in African American children's literature in roughly chronological order, starting with the Crisis magazine "Children's Numbers" of the 1910s and ending with Arna Bontemps's publication of The Lonesome Boy in 1954. Characterizing her own work as "a recovery effort," Smith argues that "[n]eglect of children's literature has prevented scholars of the New Negro Renaissance from documenting the cultural movement in full" (xxiii), and that "[t]hrough plays, pageants, magazine pieces, dialect poems, picture books, poetry collections, anthologies, biographies, and novels, New Negro writers famous and obscure asserted their commitment to childhood as a means of cultural production" (xxiii).

Since, as Smith herself states, "most scholars agree that the cultural Renaissance dissipated by the late 1930s" (163), the scope of this book may surprise some readers given its titular focus on the Harlem Renaissance. But as Smith shows, many of the key contributors to African American children's literature who began their work during the teens and twenties continued that work into the 1940s and beyond. Early chapters focus on material that is clearly within the temporal context of the so-called Harlem Renaissance; the writers discussed in later chapters are, as Smith argues in the case of Rose Leary Love, among the "unfurling tendrils of the New Negro Renaissance" (148). In another move that problematizes the use of "Harlem Renaissance" in her title, Smith self-consciously "devotes attention to the female writers [like Love] who were invested imaginatively and philosophically in the cultural awakening, but who were unable or unwilling to travel to urban centers like Harlem or Washington, D.C." This de-centering is central to Smith's feminist argument "for an expansion of the parameters of the Renaissance to reflect women writers' creative productivity" (xxii).

So while a more accurate title for this book might have used the less familiar but also less geographically specific term "New Negro Renaissance," the complexity of Smith's historical vision is a strength. Paul Laurence Dunbar is by anyone's reckoning a precursor to, not a participant in, this cultural moment, but readings of his dialect poems were popular well into the century, so it is appropriate and useful to discuss these performances side by side with texts produced during the time period. Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes are major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, but did most of their writing for children later in the century. Smith includes them because their writing for children reflects a version of "New Negro" ideology, as does the work of Carter G. Woodson, another major contributor to African American children's literature who began work—in Washington, DC—during the Harlem Renaissance and continued beyond it.

Smith ultimately "resists an evolutionary model" that would see the later works by Hughes and Bontemps as the "culmination of the field"; instead she looks at a number of carefully contextualized moments as "spikes or eruptions" (xxv–xxvi) in African American children's culture, each of which demonstrates multiple approaches to the project of shaping and empowering African American children (and often, as we will see, adults). Unlike many academic books, in which chapters or essays turn out to be isolated and unconnected forays into a broadly defined field of inquiry, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance...