In this Book

  • Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919
  • Book
  • Barbara McCaskill, Caroline Gebhard
  • 2006
  • Published by: NYU Press
summary

The years between the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of World War I mark a pivotal moment in African American cultural production. Christened the “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem” era by the novelist Charles Chesnutt, these years look back to the antislavery movement and forward to the artistic flowering and racial self-consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance.

Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem offers fresh perspectives on the literary and cultural achievements of African American men and women during this critically neglected, though vitally important, period of our nation's past. Using a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the sixteen scholars gathered here offer both a reappraisal and celebration of African American cultural production during these influential decades. Alongside discussions of political and artistic icons such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and James Weldon Johnson are essays revaluing figures such as the writers Paul and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the New England painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Georgia-based activists Lucy Craft Laney and Emmanuel King Love.

Contributors explore an array of forms from fine art to anti-lynching drama, from sermons to ragtime and blues, and from dialect pieces and early black musical theater to serious fiction.

Contributors include: Frances Smith Foster, Carla L. Peterson, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Barbara Ryan, Robert M. Dowling, Barbara A. Baker, Paula Bernat Bennett, Philip J. Kowalski, Nikki L. Brown, Koritha A. Mitchell, Margaret Crumpton Winter, Rhonda Reymond, and Andrew J. Scheiber.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-ix
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. xi-xiv
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  1. Introduction
  2. pp. 1-14
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  1. Part I: Reimagining the Past
  2. p. 15
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  1. 1. Creative Collaboration: As African American as Sweet Potato Pie
  2. pp. 17-33
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  1. 2. Commemorative Ceremonies and Invented Traditions: History, Memory, and Modernity in the“New Negro” Novel of the Nadir
  2. pp. 34-56
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  1. Part II: Meeting Freedom: Self-Invention, Artistic Innovation, and Race Progress (1870s–1880s)
  2. p. 57
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  1. 3. Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister
  2. pp. 59-73
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  1. 4. “Manly Husbands and Womanly Wives”: The Leadership of Educator Lucy Craft Laney
  2. pp. 74-88
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  1. 5. Old and New Issue Servants: “Race” Men and Women Weigh In
  2. pp. 89-100
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  1. 6. Savannah’s Colored Tribune, the Reverend E. K. Love, and the Sacred Rebellion of Uplift
  2. pp. 101-114
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  1. Part III: Encountering Jim Crow: African American Literature and the Mainstream (1890s)
  2. p. 115
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  1. 7. A Marginal Man in Black Bohemia: James Weldon Johnson in the New York Tenderloin
  2. pp. 117-132
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  1. 8. Jamming with Julius: Charles Chesnutt and the Post-Bellum–Pre-Harlem Blues
  2. pp. 133-145
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  1. 9. Rewriting Dunbar: Realism, Black Women Poets, and the Genteel
  2. pp. 146-161
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  1. 10. Inventing a “Negro Literature”: Race, Dialect, and Gender in the Early Work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson,and Alice Dunbar-Nelson
  2. pp. 162-178
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  1. Part IV: Turning the Century: New Political, Cultural, and Personal Aesthetics (1900–1917)
  2. p. 179
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  1. 11. No Excuses for Our Dirt: Booker T.Washington and a “New Negro” Middle Class
  2. pp. 181-196
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  1. 12. War Work, Social Work, Community Work: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Federal War Work Agencies,and Southern African American Women
  2. pp. 197-209
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  1. 13. Antilynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimk
  2. pp. 210-230
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  1. 14. Henry Ossawa Tanner and W. E. B. Du Bois: African American Art and “High Culture” at the Turn into the Twentieth Century
  2. pp. 231-249
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  1. 15. The Folk, the School, and the Marketplace: Locations of Culture in The Souls of Black Folk
  2. pp. 250-267
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  1. Topical List of Selected Works
  2. pp. 269-279
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  1. About the Contributors
  2. pp. 281-284
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 285-298
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