Selected Articles and Book Chapters
- Miller, Nina. “Femininity, Publicity, and the Class Division of Cultural Labor: Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion.” African American Review, vol. 30, no. 2, [Indiana State University, Saint Louis University, African American Review, African Americ The cultural promise and imperatives characterizing the Harlem Renaissance foregrounded the bourgeois African American woman as the icon of racial achievement, despite the fact that her very existence as a bourgeois black woman ran counter to mainstream racial prejudice. For the woman herself, this situation produced an obligation to perpetually "perform" her identity, a problem that is addressed in Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1924 novel "There Is Confusion."
- Way, Elizabeth. “Dressing to Pass during the Harlem Renaissance: Fashion in the Novels of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen.” Fashion Theory, vol. 24, no. 4, 2020, pp. 535–566. The 1928 novels, Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset and Quicksand by Nella Larsen each center on an educated, middle-class black woman navigating her fluctuating identity within American society. Both authors illuminate their heroines' desires and frustrations within evolving, liminal urban spaces where traditional discriminatory restrictions could be tested and subverted through passing-not just through race, but also through class and gender norms. Fauset and Larsen continually highlight fashion as an essential tool for passing, as well as being the embodiment of their characters' elusive new identities. Fauset's Angela is a fair-complexioned Philadelphia woman whose elegant style is steeped in nineteenth-century ideals of ladylike bourgeois whiteness. It is also key in allowing her to pass as white and gain access to higher education and society. Larsen's Helga is a biracial teacher whose interest in fashion and rejection of respectability politics alienates her from her college's southern black bourgeoisie. She flees north in search of freer expression, yet eventually runs into the opposite extreme, manipulated and stereotyped through fashionable clothing. Fauset's and Larsen's narratives complicate the idea of passing as taboo and demonstrate black women's understanding of fashion as agency to unlock new, and often uneasy, opportunities and identities.
- Langley, Jerry, and Sandra Govan. “Gwendolyn Bennett: The Richest Colors on Her Palette, Beauty and Truth.” The International Review of African American Art, vol. 23, no. 1, 2010, pp. 7–15. One of the most versatile and important figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Gwendolyn Bennett faded into obscurity during the second half of her life and remains largely unknown. As well as being a talented painter and illustrator, Bennett distinguished herself as a poet, journalist, short-story writer, arts administrator, and art educator. With, among others, Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes, she helped found Fire, a small magazine that was intended as an outlet for young African-American artists, and she published articles, poetry, and illustrations in other publications. She was presented with awards for her art work, and, through her reviews, helped to introduce African-American artists to a wider public. Divided between her interests in the visual arts and writing, she did not focus completely on any medium to develop her full potential in it.
- Vukelic, Tatjana. “Understanding Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Acta Neophilologica, vol. 40, no. 1-2, 2007, pp. 99–107. The work of Zora Neale Hurston, in particular, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, has been the object of more than a decade of critical attention. But, in addition to the critical consideration of Hurston's writings, her work has received the level of institutional support necessary for Hurston to enter the American literary mainstream. The article addresses the issue of black women literary tradition and the search for freedom and identity in the white American social and cultural environment.
Research on The Harlem Renaissance
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Featured Resources
Books and eBooks:
Harlem Renaissance by
A finalist for the 1972 National Book Award, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant" and "provocative," Nathan Huggins' Harlem Renaissance was a milestone in the study of African-American life and culture. Now this classic history is being reissued, with a new foreword by acclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad. As Rampersad notes, "Harlem Renaissance remains an indispensable guide to the facts and features, the puzzles and mysteries, of one of the most provocative episodes in African-American and American history." Indeed, Huggins offers a brilliant account of the creative explosion in Harlem during these pivotal years. Blending the fields of history, literature, music, psychology, and folklore, he illuminates the thought and writing of such key figures as Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. DuBois and provides sharp-eyed analyses of the poetry of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. But the main objective for Huggins, throughout the book, is always to achieve a better understanding of America as a whole. As Huggins himself noted, he didn't want Harlem in the 1920s to be the focus of the book so much as a lens through which readers might see how this one moment in time sheds light on the American character and culture, not just in Harlem but across the nation. He strives throughout to link the work of poets and novelists not only to artists working in other genres and media but also to economic, historical, and cultural forces in the culture at large. This superb reissue of Harlem Renaissance brings to a new generation of readers one of the great works in African-American history and indeed a landmark work in the field of American Studies.
Location: Mugar Stacks E185.6 .H858 2007 and OnlinePublication Date: 2007
Harlem Speaks: a living history of the Harlem Renaissance by
Harlem Speaks showcases the lives and works of the artists, writers and intellectuals behind the stunning outburst of African American culture in the three decades after World War I. In the tradition of the New York Times bestseller Poetry Speaks, the book combines each subject's key works with biographical and critical essays by leading Harlem Renaissance authority Cary Wintz and other experts. The integrated audio CDs feature music, poetry and literary readings, interviews, radio broadcasts, discussions and speeches, bringing the Harlem of legend to vibrant life once again. Hear, see and read the best of: Langston Hughes Claude McKay Zora Neale Hurston Richard Wright Duke Ellington Ethel Waters Josephine Baker Marcus Garvey Alain Locke and more The audio also includes never-before-released interviews conducted by Pulitzer Prize-uwinning author David Levering Lewis. Evocative and encompassing, Harlem Speaks places you at the zenith of this vital cultural movement.
Location: PS153.N5 H267 2007 and OnlinePublication Date: 2007
Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, A Biography of the Harlem Renaissance by
Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West led a charmed life in many respects. Born into a distinguished Boston family, she appeared in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, then lived in the Soviet Union with a group that included Langston Hughes, to whom she proposed marriage. She later became friends with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who encouraged her to finish her second novel, The Wedding, which became the octogenarian author's first bestseller. Literary Sisters reveals a different side of West's personal and professional lives--her struggles for recognition outside of the traditional literary establishment, and her collaborations with talented African American women writers, artists, and performers who faced these same problems. West and her "literary sisters"--women like Zora Neale Hurston and West's cousin, poet Helene Johnson--created an emotional support network that also aided in promoting, publishing, and performing their respective works. Integrating rare photos, letters, and archival materials from West's life, Literary Sisters is not only a groundbreaking biography of an increasingly important author but also a vivid portrait of a pivotal moment for African American women in the arts.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2011
Aphrodite's Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance by
The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed moment for racial uplift, poetic innovation, sexual liberation, and female empowerment. Aphrodite's Daughters introduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression. Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women--Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery--who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape. She examines the varied ways these poets articulated female sexual desire, ranging from Grimké's invocation of a Sapphic goddess figure to Cowdery's frank depiction of bisexual erotics to Bennett's risky exploration of the borders between sexual pleasure and pain. Yet Honey also considers how they were united in their commitment to the female body as a primary source of meaning, strength, and transcendence. The product of extensive archival research, Aphrodite's Daughters draws from Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery's published and unpublished poetry, along with rare periodicals and biographical materials, to immerse us in the lives of these remarkable women and the world in which they lived. It thus not only shows us how their artistic contributions and cultural interventions were vital to their own era, but also demonstrates how the poetic heart of their work keeps on beating.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2016
The Crisis Reader: stories, poetry, and essays from the N.A.A.C.P.'s Crisis magazine by
After its start in 1910, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races magazine became the major outlet for works by African American writers and intellectuals. In 1920, Langston Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was published in The Crisis and W. E. B. Du Bois, the magazine's editor, wrote about the coming "renaissance of American Negro literature," beginning what is now known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Crisis Reader is a collection of poems, short stories, plays, and essays from this great literary period and includes, in addition to four previously unpublished poems by James Weldon Johnson, work by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 1999
Selected Films:
- Wall, Cheryl, et al. Zora Neale Hurston : Jump at the Sun. Kanopy Streaming, 2014. Zora Neale Hurston, path-breaking novelist, pioneering anthropologist and one of the first black women to enter the American literary canon (Their Eyes Were Watching God), established the African American vernacular as one of the most vital, inventive voices in American literature. This definitive film biography, eighteen years in the making, portrays Zora in all her complexity: gifted, flamboyant, and controversial but always fiercely original.
- Alexander, Elizabeth., et al. Furious Flower I Conversations with African American Poets, 1960-1995. California Newsreel, 1998. A four part video anthology of African American poetry with leading poets reading and discussing their own works. Part one features verse from the Harlem Renaissance to the Blacks Arts Movement of the 1960s.
- Massiah, Louis. W.E.B. Du Bois : a Biography in Four Voices. California Newsreel, 1996. W.E.B. Du Bois was the consummate scholar-activist whose path-breaking works remain among the most significant and articulate ever produced on the subject of race. His contributions and legacy have been so far-reaching, that this, his first film biography, required the collaboration of four prominent African American writers. Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka narrate successive periods of Du Bois' life and discuss its impact on their work.
