The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters (review)

Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar's The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters, an edited volume that revisits the widely studied and debated Harlem Renaissance, delivers on its promise by covering a broad swath of new territory in fourteen original essays. A product of a 2008 University of Connecticut conference, the book features the type of enterprising scholarship that characterizes the best of such gatherings and, as many of the contributors acknowledge, posits ideas whose full exploration should continue beyond the pages of the collection.

The book begins with Mónica González Caldeiro's "African American Representations on the Stage: Minstrel Performances and Hurston's Dream of a 'Real' Negro Theater," which addresses the foundational nature of theater to modern African American aesthetics and provides useful cultural contexts for understanding the Harlem Renaissance as a whole. Caldeiro's thesis—that Hurston "tried to reverse the image of the African American people that had been represented on the stage since the nineteenth century" (8)—may too narrowly frame Hurston's play Polk County "as a counterattack on the stereotypes of blackness so prominent on the Broadway stage" (16), yet her indisputable conclusion that Hurston's dramatic corpus "still remains a treasure waiting to be rediscovered, studied, and produced" (18) points toward the need for ongoing archival scholarship. While Caldeiro describes how Hurston drew on minstrelsy, in "Border Crossings: The Diasporic Travels of Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston," Myriam J. A. Chancy identifies sources for Hurston's canonical novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in Haiti, where it was written. By identifying the Kreyol derivations of several aphorisms that have come to characterize the novel's US Southern vernacular, Chancy compellingly argues that Their Eyes Were Watching God "engag[es] in a dialectical relationship not between 'white' and 'black' but of 'black' to 'black'—not in resistance but in acknowledgment of the store of knowledge embedded in the black diaspora experience" (131).

Ogbar wisely allows such implicit dialogues to play out between chapters. A section titled "Class and Place in Harlem" opens with Jacqueline C. Jones using African American press coverage of the marriage of W. E. B. Du Bois's daughter Yolande and the poet Countee Cullen as a window onto the larger social implications of their relationship. In the next chapter, Aija Poikāne-Daumke looks to Rudolph Fisher's short fiction for sociological insight into areas such as joblessness: "Fisher shows that the demand for jobs was often far greater than their supply. The lack of jobs bred urban criminality and poverty in Harlem" (71). While useful qualitative data could be gleaned from Fisher's stories, Poikāne-Daumke's findings seem obvious or, in the case of her implication that joblessness causes "urban criminality" in the same way it causes poverty, unsophisticated. Ogbar organized the anthology so that the subject of labor markets is immediately addressed from a very different perspective by the section's third and final article. Jacob S. Dorman's "Back to Harlem: Abstract and Everyday Labor during the Harlem Renaissance" uses statistical data from Urban League reports to give readers a sense of Harlem beyond its romantic literary ideal. While providing a strong analysis of the era's low wages and high rents (78-79), Dorman uses vivid details such as how the absence of sinks in many 1920s households further burdened domestic workers (82).

Perry A. Hall shares Dorman's concern that the social history of the community that inspired the movement has been neglected. In "Perspectives on Interwar Culture: Remapping the New Negro Era," Hall criticizes George Hutchinson's Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995), for example, because of its "construction of the 'Renaissance' as fundamentally a literary movement [which] separates it (and the separation is indeed arbitrary) from a larger historical conjuncture" (199). Hall seems more encouraged by scholars, most notably Barbara Foley, who locate the movement in the context of its "militant...