The Harlem Renaissance

Situated in the North of New York City, right above Central Park, Harlem became a vibrant center of African American cultural activity in the -roaring 1920s.- The legendary Cotton Club featured Jazz geniuses such as Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton, and actor-singers like Paul Robeson enjoyed wide-ranging fame. The 1923 show Runnin' Wild sparked the Charleston dance craze and the musical comedy Shuffle Along (1921) launched a series of popular black reviews. Above all, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary movement. In essays and conversations, young talented African Americans explored the possibilities of finding a distinct black voice in white America. Charismatic W.E.B. DuBois explored The Souls of Black Folk, and philosopher Alain Locke, professor at the all-black Howard University, assembled essays in the anthology The New Negro (1925), a landmark work that praised the Harlem Renaissance as black America's -spiritual coming of age.- The outstanding literary achievements of writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer were to influence the decade heavily and had a lasting impact on African American literature in the twentieth century. We will discuss selected pieces of fiction, poetry, and drama and analyze their cultural, political, and literary implications and repercussions. We will, however, also take into account those voices who assessed the movement critically as Langston Hughes did in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940) when he wrote: -The ordinary Negroes hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn't raised their wages any.- A tentative list of literature to be discussed will include the political writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey as well as selected pieces of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Marita Bonner, Richard Bruce, and Claude McKay. Anglistik - Amerikanistik Universität Siegen SoSe 2012 Univ.-Prof. Dr. Schmidt Kerstin