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Research in African Literatures 31.3 (2000) 195-198



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Book Review

The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White


The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, by George Hutchinson. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard UP, 1995. xiv + 541 pages. ISBN 0-674-37263-8 paper.

Although the Harlem Renaissance is a well-documented period in American and African American literary history, relatively few texts have been written that focus exclusively on the Harlem Renaissance. Hutchinson's work is an expansive contribution, one that challenges earlier texts and polemically indicts certain African American scholars for what Hutchinson perceives as a glaring oversight, the lack of a thorough evaluation of interrelationships between Harlem Renaissance figures and the white intellectual community and publishing world of the day.

Two texts that have stood as significant statements on the Harlem Renaissance, Nathan Huggins's Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford UP, 1971), which was for many years the foremost work dealing with the period, and David Levering Lewis's When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981), are initial focal points of Hutchinson's critique. The very title of Lewis's study, When Harlem Was in Vogue, is considered erroneous because "many whites interested in the movement continued to support black cultural advancement and civil rights throughout the Depression and beyond" (23). Hutchinson, who counters the longstanding assumption that the Harlem Renaissance was spawned by an interest in primitivism and the exotic, claims that there should be a more comprehensive view of the period and that analyses such as those of Huggins and Lewis are flawed because of their reliance on race.

In addition, a number of other African American scholars, such as Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West, are challenged by Hutchinson: Gates and Baker "define an 'autonomous' African American literary tradition in ways most Harlem Renaissance writers explicitly rejected" (Hutchinson 4-5). Hutchinson objects to the binary opposition of black and white, maintaining that the separation between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance--the presentation of white and black modernists as oppositions--a perspective he attributes to Houston Baker, results in the dualistic fallacy that reifies certain structures of racial dominance. Though he challenges these oppositions, he does acknowledge that race has been a "powerful social determinant" (26).

To a great extent Hutchinson attributes the faults of racial interpretations primarily to black intellectuals. Harold Cruse is considered to have presented an "oversimplification of the literary scene," and other black critics, Chidi Ikonné, George Kent, Wilson Moses, as well as canonized writers such as Langston Hughes are viewed as having fallen short of presenting the interactions of white intellectuals and black modernists (16, 19).

Connecting the Harlem Renaissance to international publishing initiatives based in New York, Hutchinson argues that key intellectuals, especially Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, were influenced by white philosophers such as William James and John Dewey. Moreover, Harlem Renaissance writers expressed an interest in American cultural nationalism and should be considered more closely in relation to American modernism [End Page 195] and global transnationalism. Other areas of influence derive from white modernism--the presentation of "Negro themes" by white playwrights, the influence of Irish and Russian folk theatre, and the vernacular poetry and regional fiction of the Chicago Renaissance writers Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay.

The book maintains that the Harlem Renaissance occurred during the growth in corporate capital, the expansion of the publishing industry, and the rise in American cultural nationalism. The "print culture of New York" allowed for interactions between white and black intellectuals and the creation of social situations that led to an exchange between "pragmatist philosophers, Boasian anthropologists, socialist theorists, and new journalists"(6).

The text blends philosophical analysis, biographical/literary interpretations, and publishing history. Part 1, "American Modernism, Race, and National Culture," expands the discussion of pragmatism, Boasian anthropology, and cultural pluralism. Hutchinson questions definitions of modernism that leave out African American modernists and certain white modernists, thus hiding a "kinship" that can be understood through an analysis of pre-World War I "intellectual movements" and "institutional transformations" that underlie "the new movement in...

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