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WiSe 13/14: "We Who Are Dark": Writers of the Harlem Renaissance

Sophia Frese

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The 1920s saw the rise of a vibrant, polyvocal and rich African-American cultural movement that spanned a wide variety of the arts and had as its symbolic center Harlem, a neighborhood that became the hub of black life in New York. In the course of the Great Migration millions of African-Americans who fled poor labor conditions and oppressive racism in the South came to the great urban centers of the North East invigorating black communities that fought for cultural and social recognition and sought to promote a self-image independent of white, racist stereotypes. The arts in general and literature in specific became sites of struggle. African-American writers and intellectuals discussed variations of black aesthetics and reflected on their role within the quest for social and political equality in a nation that had done away with slavery merely fifty years prior, and still denied equal rights to its black citizens. This seminar will explore some of the best-known literary voices of the Harlem Renaissance. We will read novels, short stories, poetry and pamphlets by writers such as W.E.B DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, Zora Neal Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer and Marcus Garvey. The seminar will be subdivided into three sections, the first deals with literature that focuses on the national aspects of the fight for equality, the second part focuses on writers of the Harlem Renaissance who travelled to Europe, widening their aesthetic and political scope through their interaction with the transatlantic black experience. The third part investigates the role of Africa in black American literature of the period, both as an imaginary home and a concrete place, which features in the travel writings and literature of authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Langston Hughes. close