The Harlem Renaissance in the American West: The New Negro’s Western Experience ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz (review)

The geography of African American modernism extends far beyond the predictable terrain of Harlem. Part of a transnational turn, books such as Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora (2003) exceed this well-known site to examine black intellectual and creative work articulated via diasporic experience. Others, such as Thadious Davis’s Southscapes (2011), reassess more familiar regions in African American literature to untangle how place shapes race. Few, however, turn to the far West. While the New Western History and Literature, in tandem with Chicana/o, Native, and Asian American studies, have incorporated the study of race, scholarship dedicated to the black West remains relatively uncommon, represented by names such as Quintard Taylor in history, or Blake Allmendinger, Michael K. Johnson, and Eric Gardner in literature. While some discuss the Harlem Renaissance, none center it.

Released on the heels of two 2008 collections of writing by black New Mexican and Angeleno Anita Scott Coleman, who published widely in Harlem venues, The Harlem Renaissance in the American West is the first anthology devoted to the interplay of the black West and New Negro Renaissance. Editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz suggest that to turn westward is to “argue that the Harlem Renaissance … was a truly national phenomenon and must be understood as such” (2). Fourteen essays center on particular sites throughout a broadly defined West, from Houston to Helena, New Mexico to Minneapolis. The looseness of this geography gestures at continuing definitional complexity in western studies. The essays, however, remain within the nation-state, focused on a US, not trans-American, West. The collection, therefore, has less in common with transnational African American studies than studies of black regionalism.

Although literary regionalism boomed during this period—from western women such as Mary Austin to Southern Agrarians to Harlem Renaissance associates such as Zora Neale Hurston—articulating a black western regionalism is not this book’s project. As the editors assert, “literature … was only one of a number of outlets for black creativity” (2). Furthermore, this volume is not an analysis of the West’s representation and meaning in African American art. Instead of focusing on the West in modern black artistic production, it focuses on modern black artistic production in the West and is overall more historical than literary in orientation. The unifying concerns are thus to document African American creative expression, the impact of the greater Harlem Renaissance, ideas and themes associated with the New Negro movement, and the ways whites reacted to the foment of black culture in the locations under study.

Given this approach, the essays are more informative than argumentative, detailing contours of black western communities, recording visits by Harlem mainstays such as Langston Hughes or Marcus Garvey, and charting key publications, artists, and institutions like nightclubs, political organizations, or churches. As a result, they are useful for researchers getting their feet wet studying particular black western locations and introducing figures such as Dallas folklorist John Mason Brewer, whose privately printed creative writing is detailed in Michael Phillips’s essay. The suggestions for further reading and selected bibliography are boons in this regard. Inconsistent citation style across essays, however, as well as thin documentation for some, makes tracking primary source material difficult.

Readers familiar with Douglas Flamming’s Bound for Freedom (2005) or his essay on Arna Bontemps in the collection Over the Edge (1999) will notice familiar characters and claims, in addition to attention to lesser known poet and memoirist Elizabeth Laura Adams. Jean Van Delinder’s “Harlem Renaissance in Oklahoma” tells a notable multiethnic story of black Oklahoma’s emergence from slaves and citizens of removed Indian nations before it discusses Jim Crow’s impact on black social, commercial, and musical worlds. The significance of Oklahoma in the wider black imaginary is largely unexamined—for more on black-Native Oklahoma...