Intro


Black Aesthetic:
▪ The racial aesthetic of the Harlem Renaissance focused on the folk; used such forms as spirituals, blues, ballads, and folk sermons and preaching as models for their own writing. James Weldon Johnson calls for a form that will express the Negro's spirit, '. . . A form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos . . . of the negro'.
▪ In Crisis (1926) Du Bois challenges white standars in the 20s: that plays must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual association what it means to be a Negro, subject matter must be black life, the plays must be performed in black neighborhoods since Du Bois feels that the main function of black theater is to interpret black life for black people. Du Bois is painfully conscious of the fact that white people sneeringly set the standards for black intellectual and artistic excellence.
▪ Langston Hughes in his famous manifesto, 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' (1926) asserts that the middle-class black artist has been cut off from authentic working-class culture and can only become a great artist by embracing black working-class culture and overcoming the desire to be white. The black artist must find the beauty of black culture and himself. Hughes celebrated the black urban proletariat instead of the rural black folk, that is, celebrated the hordes of black folk who came north to Harlem.
▪ Alain Locke's (along with other artists and intellectual of the 20s) racial aesthetic insists on Africa as a source of African American art and civilization; that black art must seek out new styles and that its characteristic idioms draw on the forms and values of Africa.
▪ 30s - many major black writers turn to Marxism. Richard Wright argues for a black literature based on the black folk tradition but unlike the writers of the Harlem Renaissance he did not want his art limited to the indigenous folk culture. He wanted to place the black struggle within the contex of the global struggle of 'minority people everywhere' and to borrow from any tradition that led to the liberation of his people. By fusing folk with Marxist values, both tradition embodying the struggle for freedom, the writer would create a tradition that would call for revolutionary action; he envisioned the writer as an agent of social change.

Poetry:
▪ Countee Cullen - Color (1925).
▪ Exploration of the black voice as it consciously recognised and mined black folklore; in their attempt to find a voice expressive of their racial consciousness, they turned to cultural tropes abounding in the universe of folk parlanse. Poets who explored the unique vernacular resources of the blues, spirituals, proverbs, tales, and sayings - e.g. James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Streling Brown.
▪ Sterling Brown - folk poet. His most significance achievement is his sublte adaption of folk form to the literature. Experimenting with the blues, spirituals, work sons, and ballads, he invented combinations that at their best retain the ethos of folk forms and intensify the literary quality of the poetry.

Drama:
▪ Most prolific dramatist that era - Willis Richardson and Randolph Edmonds. Richardson's The Chip Woman's Fortune (1923) was the first serious pl ay by an African American writer to be produced on Broadway.
▪ Garland Anderson's Appearances (1925), Wallace Thurman's (& white William J. Rapp) Harlem (1929) - plays produced on Broadway.
▪ Langston Hughes - Mulatto (1935), Little Ham (1935), The Emperor of Haiti (1935), Don't You Want to be Free? (1937), which traced the history of African Americans from slavery to the play's own time.
▪ Richard Wright's Native Son was produced on Broadway by Orson Welles and John Houseman in 1941.



Harlem Renaissance



'The novel of the Negro Renaissance' by George Hutchinson

Works include:
▪ Jean Toomer - Cane (1923)
▪ Jessie Fauset - There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun
▪ Nella Larsen - Quicksand (1928), Passing (1929)
▪ Rudolph Fisher - The Walls of Jericho (1928), The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)
▪ Claude McKay - Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929)
▪ Arna Bontemps - God Sends Sunday (1931), Black Thunder (1936)
▪ Wallace Thurman - The Blacker the Berry... (1929), Infants of the Spring (1932)
▪ George Schuyler - Black No More (1931)

Temporal borders:
▪ The beginning - 1910 (the founding of the NAACP), 1914 (WWI), 1917 (Claude McKay's poem 'Harlem Dancer'
▪ Peak years - 1923-1929
▪ The end - 1937 (Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God)
▪ Richard Wright's Native Son heralded a new phase of hars realism in African American writing.

Central to the movement then known as the 'Negro Renaissance' was the effort of black writers and artist after WW I to re-conceptualise 'the Negro' independent of white myths and stereotypes that had affected African Americans' own relationship to their heritage and each other; also independent of Victorial moral values and bourgeois shame about those features of black life that whites might take to confirm racist beliefs.

New Negro: the insistence in so many spheres on self-definition, self-expression, and self-determination, a striving after what Locke called 'spiritual emancipation.' the many debates during the Harlem Renaissance years regarding art and propaganda, representation and identity, assimilation versus militancy, and parochialism versus globalism, have enriched the persepctives on issues of art, culture, politics, and ideology that have emerged on the African American scene since the 30s.

Reasons for the burst of black-authored fiction in 20s and 30s:
▪ The Great Migration from the rural South and the Carribean to Northern cities,
▪ New intellectual currents concerned with cultural pluralism and anti-racism,
▪ The dramatic growth of the black middle class and of literacy from Reconstruction forward,
▪ Transformation of the American culture industry after 1915,

Harlem:
▪ a highly race-conscious sophisticated community - something unprecedented in American history
▪ The center of several new civil rights organisations, such as the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, and Marcus Gravey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. Through Garveyism black people found a much needed outlet for race pride and self-assertion.
▪ Many black journals (Crisis, Opportunity, and the Messenger).
▪ Mentors and supporters both white and black (Du Bois, Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, Jessie Fauset, Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson etc.)

Themes:
▪ Contemporary life and its social and cultural instability - its 'modernity'
▪ Meaning and value of racial identity as such
▪ The black working class people, the folk style (McKay's Home to Harlem, Hughes's Not Without Laughter, Bontemps's God Sends Sunday etc). The construct of 'folk' serves as a kind of medium or metaphor through which authors coming from different ideological, geographical, social, and aesthetic positions compete in the struggle to define a modern collective project for racial advance.
▪ Passing as white (Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, Nella Larsen's Passing)
▪ Black music and dance - early jazz, blues, spirituals, ballads, folktales. Often aim to create novelistic equivalents to popular black music (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Arna Bontemps)
▪ The vogue of the Negro - the popularity of black music and literature with white people, but coming with very restrictive bounaries: blacks being exluded from nightclubs, literature had to come with an element of 'African', sarcams toward black 'primitivism' etc.
▪ Criticism of the Harlem Renaissance itself, cynicism, bleak conclusions about the natue of the renaissance (Thurman's The Blacker the Berry... and Infants of the Spring; Shuyler's Black No More)

W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the intellectuals identified as the eadership cadre of the Renaissance; he was politically aware, an activist.
▪ The Souls of Black Folks (1903) - an essay, sociological study, musicology, fiction, autobiography, philosophy. Encapsulation of the racial situation in the USA - 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of color line'. Concept of double conscioussness - an American and a Negro, two souls, two warring ideals in one dark body.
▪ The Quest of the Silver Fence (1911), Dark Princess (1929)
▪ Themes of Du Bois's novels: perprations on the beautiful yet tragic South; noble, educated, African Americans, who will lead their less forunate peers to a brighter future; the championing of black womanhood and its corollary, respect for black manhood; an attack on lynching; the recognition of the ways race, for black folk, has been made to stand in for a permanent low-class status; and the affirmation that poor whites are not, at least materially, any better off than their similarly deprives black neighbors.

Langston Hughes - short stories, novels, plays, operas, two memoirs, children's books
▪ Poetry collections - The Weary Blues (1926), Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). Autobiographical novel - Not Without Laughter (1930). Manifesto 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' (1926).
▪ He was the most experimental and versatile poet of the Renaissance. Goal - to discover the flowe and rhythm of black life; he never tired of exploring the color, vibrancy, and texture of black culture and the people who created it.
▪ Rich in vernacular speech, humour, and musical influence. Empathy with the average men and women and love for, and pride in, African American cultures. A fusion of black literature and music, drawing on both the ryhthms and the images of blues and jazz to create a singularly American poetry. He sought to combine the musical forms of the blues, work songs, ballads, and jazz stylings with poetic expression in susch a way as to preserve the originality of the former and achieve the complexity of the latter.
▪ Themes of his works:
▫ The hard life of the rural dweller
▫ The meaning of the African diaspora
▫ African American music
▫ America's tortured race realities
▫ Miscegenated family tragedies
▫ Enduring, wise, ironic black folk

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961):
▪ There is Confusion (1924) -for the black to come into their own, they must overcome what white supremacy has brought them: intraracial colorism, class snobbishness, internalised racism, self-defeating bitterness bred by white prejudice, lack of racial pride, even excessive moral earnestness among talented idealists of the race.
▪ Fauset revises conventional literary forms and themes by using the figure of the mulatto as metaphor to explore identity and difference as they concern black generally and black women specifically.

Zora Neale Hurston - a folklore collector, anthropologist; born and raised in the deep South.
▪ Works: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), black American folklore Mules and Men (1935), second volume of ethnography based on field work in Jamaica and Haiti Tell My Horse (1938), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), an autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Seraph on the Suwanee (1948).
▪ Style and language - uses metaphoric richess of everyday speech. She marks as beautiful and evocative the language of average, even poor, black people. She dramatically transforms the uses of literary dialect and its relation to narrative voice.
▪ Hurston depicted ordinary people in ways that went beyond the romantice, socialist view of many of her contemporary writers. Her purpose is 'to show the world the glory of African American folklore and language and the central role it plays in sustaining the community'. Folklor was priceless for her; it constituted the 'arts of the people before they find out that there is any such thing as art.' Her effort was to write fiction according to the aesthetic principles that undergirded oral culture.
▪ Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) - an intense love story gone defunkt. Portrays Southern black in all their specifity of loving and longings, their richly descriptive speech, their particular American and Afreican syncretic culture.
Janie - an everyday heroine, sensual woman who longs to be taken seriously. Her seach for love and self-expression. A rural Southern black woman who yeanr for something more than a partnership and marriage.



Richard Wright


'Everybody's protest novel: the era of Richard Wright' by Jerry W. Ward Jr.

Works include:
▪ Uncle Tom's Children (1938) - short stories that depict the racial climate in American South
▪ Native Son (1949)
▪ The Outsider (1953)
▪ Savage Holiday (1954) - psychoanalysis, matricidal impulses
▪ The Long Dream (1958)

Richard Wright stuck to the purpose of using fiction to illuminate conditions and possibilities as they affected blacks and whites in America, paricularly in matters of social psychology. The novel, for him, was a weapon against culturally sponsored ignorance as well as a medium for expressing his intellectual and artistic vision.

Genre:
▪ Protest fiction? - the confining space accorded to his novels in the 40s and 50s. Protest is a position, not a genre. His novels instruct; they challenge beliefs about the human condition. They remain in dialogue with the past and the present, responding to and transcending the situational imperatives of their time.
▪ Unique development of the thesis novel or the novel as essay.

Native Son (1940):
▪ Wright boldly outlined a frightening aspect of race in America: the possibility that incipient pathology among yound adolescents who were consistently denied the chance to develop healthy psycho-social identities might manifest itself in extreme violence.
▪ Central question - given the racial mores of USA or the racial contract that governed life in the US, would it ever be possible for black men and white men who were linked by a common history to achieve a common humanity?
▪ The first two part 'Fear' and 'Flight' are a ripping story of despair and crime. The third, 'Fate', is a full-blown essay on economic determinism and racial outcomes disguised as a lawyer's defense of a guilty client.

The Outsider (1953): realm of philosophy and the human condition
▪ A critique of Communism through the prisms of race and existential longing.
▪ Cross Damon, a working-class intellectual, a man quite dissatisfied with the 'normal' responsibilities of a social being. He longs for the absolute freedom that is possible only outside the process of history.
▪ Not essentially about black people, but about the twentieth-century man.

The Long Dream (1958): autobiographical dimension.
▪ American South as a primal scene for the drama of race; relations between black and white people.
▪ Themes: the problems of growing up as a black male in a Southern middle-class environment, racial hypocricy; bonding between father and son.
▪ De jure segregation, the fact that some whites were willing to sponsor black criminal activities when they could share the profits. Living the ethics of Jim Crow.
▪ Multilayered exposure of dilemmas that always deferred the American Dream for a Southern black family that yearned to be upwardly mobile. Wright exposes the deep structures of racial behaviours and the habits of the heart that remain constant despite change, that transform dreams into nightmares. (change was cosmetic rathern than systemic).




Blues novel


'The Blues novel' by Steven C. Tracy.

Works include:
▪ Home to Harlem (1920, Banjo (1929) by Claude McKay
▪ The Blacker the Berry (1929) by Wallace Thurman
▪ Quicksand (1928) by Nella Larsen
▪ Not Without Laugher (1930) by Langston Hughes
▪ Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
▪ The Colour Purple (1982) by Alice Walker

Blues - an emotion, a technique, a musical form, and a song lyric.
▪ As an emotion, blues is most frequently associated with sadness, a saddness crucially related to African American experiences in slavery and the Jim Crow era, but there are also many celebratory, 'happy' blues songs that suggest that the blues are not just laments or complaints in their surface content. Thus, blues perfomance may well not be an expression of sadness but a creative celebration of not only the overcoming of hardship but of the nature of human existence in an imperfect world.
▪ The blues as an assertion of autonomy and a consolidation of power in the context of a world that wishes to diminish or eliminate that power.
▪ The technique of the blues is the way that the instruments, style, and structure of the music are manipulated to produce and expess such ideas. The blues provide a basic structure free enough to accomodate individual temperament, abilities, and creativity.

Blues first appearsin 1890s; the principal catalyst for its emergence at that time may have been the maturing of Afircan Aericans born after the Civil War, a generation surrounded by the paradox of new freedom and mobility on the on hand, and increasingly harsh exploitation and marginalization on the other. Just so, the blues seem uncannily to distill the theme of self-determination, set in a context of social adversity and expressed through the universal currency of intimate personal relaitonships.

Ways the blues may find expression in the novel:
▪ A reference in a title (Clarene Major's Dirty Bird Blues (1996)
▪ Using blues singers as characters, utilizising selections from songs or perfomances, including musical notations, lyrics, or descriptions of perfomances and audience reactions
▪ Subject matter (relationships)
▪ The form of the blues lyric with its call-and-response structure
▪ Characteristics associated with the blues in literal or symbolic ways: call-and-response patters; off-beat pharsing or unexpected accentual patterns that suggest syncopation; techniques of melisma and glissando reflected in the way an author 'worris' or handles variously an issue or emotion in the text; the blues singer's 'voice masking' techniques that create a persona with a different or alternate voice from the everyday speaking voice; progression by the type of associational thought patterns sometimes found in folk blues.

A number of these elements are also found in other African American vernacular music traditions, such as spirituals, jazz, and gospel music. Thus, specific references to the blues as a genre need to be apparent: the blues should likely be present concretely and substantively in its social, historical, political, musical, and/or aesthetic context.

Themes:
▪ Personal relationships between men and women, also homosexual relationships
▪ Loneliness, frustration, isolation, sexual desire

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952):
▪ Combines the blues tradition with elements of naturalism, also existentialism.
▪ Like the blues lyric, the novel is a first-person reflective lament-turned-celebration through the creative force of the speaker. Ellison generates an individual voice and style thoroughly rooted int he African American vernacular tradition, offering communal concerns through the voice of an individual member of the community.
▪ The heroes of the novel are all connected in some way to the blues. Louis Armstrong is the matrix through which most of Ellison's metaphors in the introduction flow. The concept of invisibility; the creation of poetry; the fluid concept of time relation to improvisation, boxing and violation of chronology in the narrative as it flashes back in chapter I; the recognition and management of dichotomies, polarities, and uncertainties - all these are explored in the context of Armstrong's artistry. Armstrong, the preached, and the boxer are all creators, fighters, and proselytizers as they upset the status quo and push boundaries, syncopators who make observers and listeners aware of the offbeat, the space between the beat, and its importance to overcoming the metronomic regularity and oppressiveness of racist and middle-class existence. Armstrong is the musician as unconscious trickster figure whose music employs encoded messages and techniques to communicate social, political, and aesthetic messages to the astute listener.
▪ Peter Wheatstraw - demonstrates for the protagonist the value of the folk tradition in passing on the wisdom of the elders, the advantages of wariness and improvisation, and the uses of creativity to combat the narrow or invisible identities alloted to the African American in urban America. He is strength, originality, energy, possibility. Existentialism - Wheatstraw makes his choices and takes responsibility for his actions in the face of radical determinism.