The Harlem Renaissance

New York City’s plethora of editors and publishing houses and zeal for literature made it an ideal location for budding black writers. Harlem’s literary renaissance was conceived under these pre-existing conditions, and it became the first significant African-American artistic movement to capture the eye of the broader public.

The Harlem literary movement was never a “cohesive” movement, but rather a product of “overlapping social and intellectual circles” (Hutchinson, 1). Harlem writers each had unique perspectives on the newly sprouted urban landscape and competing visions about the future of the African-American race, but these divergences were all bound together by a desire for racial self-assertion and self-definition in the face of white supremacy.

A central question that clung to the core of the Harlem Renaissance literary movement was how race was to be represented. Fierce debates about how the black man was to be depicted ravaged black literary circles, reinforcing the notion that the literary movement was anything but unified. The general strategies of New Negro writers was to produce literature that appealed to a greater audience (particularly white readers) in hopes that the literature could make a difference in race relations and ideally break down the racial barrier that permeated America during the time. The line of logic that these writers used was that “literary models were common property: intrinsically neither black nor white,” and that black and white Americans could co-exist within the same cultural community (Dorsey). However writers’ idealism was met with issues of interpretation. Since the literary canon was opened up to whites, white Americans took it upon themselves to interpret blackness along the lines of the European literary tradition. This countered the initial goal of carving out their own identity against white visions, beliefs, and stereotypes.

During the height of the Renaissance, Harlem itself became a subject and a theme of popular fiction and poetry of both black and non-black writers. Non-blacks especially milked the opportunity to write about Harlem for commercial success, and many white writers found that their pieces gained best-seller status. Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven was a critical, yet controversial, success that delved in the seedier side of Harlem by describing sex, alcohol consumption, gambling and other acts that occurred. For nearly a decade, “imaginative literature about black Harlem became inescapable” (De Jongh, 33).

Langston Hughes, pictured above, was a renowned writer of the Harlem Renaissance.