Harlem in its Renaissance: “Culture Capital” and Place Apart

Description

“In the make-up of New York,” wrote James Weldon Johnson in 1925, “Harlem is not merely a Negro colony or community, it is a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.” This course explores the tensions inherent in that statement: what does it mean to situate a “culture capital,” as Johnson calls Harlem, within another culture capital? How do we mediate between the idea of Harlem as a “Negro city” and that of Harlem as the heart of a diverse metropolis? More specifically, how do we read Harlem as both a production site for a unifying Afro-diasporic Black identity and as a point of cultural encounter, a contact zone in and from which US blacks have engaged cultures and racial constructions from across the world? How can Harlem exist in our literary imagination as a site of both cultural consolidation and proliferating impurities?

This course will serve as an introduction to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, a moment when African American cultural expression coalesced in a remarkable body of literary, musical, and artistic work. Focusing on texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and others, we will consider that moment as a landmark for African American identity in the United States. At the same time, we will explore the input of foreigners and other outsiders whose transit through Harlem fostered relationships with African Americans that significantly affected their own works as well as the establishment of arts movements and institutions in other cultural capitals. And, in keeping with the extraordinarily interdisciplinary nature of the Harlem Renaissance, we will study the music, dance, visual culture, and political discourse of the era, tracing the ways those extra-literary phenomena shaped the thinking of the writers associated with the movement. Finally, we will read together Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a late-coming meditation on the conflictive nature of Harlem and, as such, an echo of the Renaissance itself.

Texts

Cullen, Countee. Selected poems

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea

—. Selected poems

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression”

Hughes, Langston & Zora Neale Hurston. Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts

Johnson, James Weldon. God’s Trombones

Larsen, Nella. Passing

McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem

Toomer, Jean. Cane

Course reader including selections from Houston Baker, Marita Bonner, Miguel Covarrubias, Brent Hayes Edwards, Federico García Lorca, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alain Locke, Arturo Schomburg, Wallace Thurman, and others.