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The Harlem Renaissance: a Very Short Introduction
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The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural awakening among African Americans between the two world wars. It was the cultural phase of the "New Negro" movement, a social and political phenomenon that promoted a proud racial identity, economic independence, and progressive politics. In this Very Short Introduction, Cheryl A. Wall captures the Harlem Renaissance's zeitgeist by identifying issues and strategies that engaged writers, musicians, and visual artists alike.
Harlem Renaissance
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Also available as an Ebook
Harlem Renaissance Re-examined
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This completely revised edition is an expansion of the Harlem Renaissance re-examined
The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938
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The New Negro collects more than one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays published between 1892 and 1938 that examine the issues of race and representation in African American culture.
When Harlem Was in Vogue
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We return fighting -- City of refuge -- Stars -- Enter the new negro -- The six -- Nigger heaven -- A jam of a party -- The fall of the manor -- It's dead now.
Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era
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During the first generation of black participation in U.S. diplomacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a vibrant community of African American writers and cultural figures worked as U.S. representatives abroad. Through the literary and diplomatic dossiers of figures such as Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Archibald and Angelina Grimké, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt, and Richard Wright, Brian Roberts shows how the intersection of black aesthetic trends and U.S. political culture both Americanized and internationalized the trope of the New Negro.
A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927
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These were the fertile years when the residents of northern Manhattan were at the vanguard of artistic ferment, leading their downtown counterparts while at the same time playing a pivotal role in one of the most important political movements of the twentieth century: black nationalism.
Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940
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This compilation of sixteen plays written during the Harlem Renaissance brings together for the first time the works of Langston Hughes, George S. Schuyler, Francis Hall Johnson, Shirley Graham, and others. In the introduction, James V. Hatch sets the plays in a historical context as he describes the challenges presented to artists by the political and social climate of the time. The topics of the plays cover the realm of the human experience in styles as wide-ranging as poetry, farce, comedy, tragedy, social realism, and romance.
Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater From the Harlem Renaissance to World War II
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In Staging Faith, Craig R. Prentiss illuminates the creative strategies playwrights used to grapple with religion. With a lively and engaging style, the volume brings long forgotten plays to life as it chronicles the cultural and religious fissures that marked early twentieth century African American society.
African-American Concert Dance: the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond
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Early influences on Black concert dance -- Hemsley Winfield -- Edna Guy, Randolph Sawyer, and Ollie Burgoyne -- Charles Williams -- Asadata Dafora -- Katherine Dunham -- Pearl Primus
Aphrodite's Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance
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Aphrodite's Daughters introduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression. Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women—Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery—who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape.
Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic
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When Houston A. Baker, Jr., one of America’s foremost literary critics, first published Afro-American Poetics in 1988, it was hailed as a major revisionist history of both African American culture and criticism.
Harlem's Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950
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In poems, stories, memoirs, and essays about color and culture, prejudice and love, and feminine trials, dozens of African-American women writers - some famous, many just discovered - give us a sense of a distinct inner voice and an engagement with their larger double culture. Harlem's Glory unfolds a rich tradition of writing by African-American women, hitherto mostly hidden, in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader
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The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader, Shawn Anthony Christian argues that print-based addresses to African Americans are a defining but understudied component of the Harlem Renaissance.
Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
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The Harlem Renaissance, the period associated with the flowering of the arts in Harlem, inaugurated a tradition of African American children's literature, for the movement's central writers made youth both their subject and audience. W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Langston Hughes, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and other Harlem Renaissance figures took an impassioned interest in the literary models offered to children.
Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance
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Focusing on the years from 1922 to 1938, this book revisits an important moment in black cultural history to explore how visual elements were used in poems, novels, and photography to undermine existing stereotypes. Miriam Thaggert identifies and analyzes an early form of black American modernism characterized by a heightened level of experimentation with visual and verbal techniques for narrating and representing blackness.
Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance
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Rhapsodies in Black takes a fresh look at the Harlem Renaissance, contesting narrow interpretations of it as an isolated phenomenon confined to artists of color inhabiting a few square miles of Manhattan and, instead, recognizing it as a historical moment of global significance, with connections to Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the United States, in particular Chicago and the Deep South.
Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance
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Gay Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance -- Writing in the Harlem Renaissance: the burden of representation and sexual dissidence -- Countée Cullen: "his virtues are many; his vices unheard of" -- Langston Hughes: a "true 'people's poet'" -- Claude McKay "enfant terrible of the Negro Renaissance" -- Richard Bruce Nugent: the quest for beauty.
The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance
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The Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement, began attracting extensive academic attention in the 1990s as scholars discovered how complex, significant, and fascinating it was. Drawing on African American texts, archives, unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, this book highlights both the canonical figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture
W. E. B. Du Bois
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W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 was written by historian David Levering Lewis and published in 1994 by Henry Holt and Company. The book studies the early and middle years of Du Bois's life. It is the first in a two-part biography of W.E.B. Du Bois
Josephine Baker in Art and Life
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Creating the image -- Touring with Baker's image -- Opening nights -- Celluloid projections -- Living the dream -- Dress rehearsals -- Baker's scripts -- Hues of the rainbow in a global village -- Changing the world -- Legendary legionnaire -- Echoes and influences -- Eternal comeback.
Banjo
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Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known to his drifter cohorts on the 1920s Marseilles waterfront as "Banjo," passes his days panhandling and dreaming of starting his own little band. At night Banjo, Malty, Ginger, Dengel, Bugsy, Taloufa, Goosey, and even Jake of Home to Harlem prowl the rough waterfront bistros, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking about their homes.
Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean
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Eric Walrond (1898–1966) was a writer, journalist, caustic critic, and fixture of 1920s Harlem. His short story collection, Tropic Death, was one of the first efforts by a black author to depict Caribbean lives and voices in American fiction. Restoring Walrond to his proper place as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, this biography situates Tropic Death within the author's broader corpus and positions the work as a catalyst and driving force behind the New Negro literary movement in America
Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association
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In the early twentieth century, Marcus Garvey sowed the seeds of a new black pride and determination. Attacked by the black intelligentsia and ridiculed by the white press, this Jamaican immigrant astonished all with his black nationalist rhetoric. In just four years, he built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest and most powerful all-black organization the nation had ever seen. With hundreds of branches, throughout the United States, the UNIA represented Garvey's greatest accomplishment and, ironically, the source of his public disgrace.
The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance
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Schuyler was one of the most important intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. A popular journalist in black America, Schuyler wielded a sharp, double-edged wit to attack the foibles of both blacks and whites throughout the 1920s. Jeffrey B. Ferguson presents a new understanding of Schuyler as public intellectual while also offering insights into the relations between race and satire during a formative period of African-American cultural history.
The Wayward and the Seeking: a Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer
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Autobiographical selections / Reflections of an earth-being / The early days / The maturing years / The years of wandering / The cane years / The Gurdjieff experience / Fiction / Withered skin of berries / Winter on earth / Mr. Costyve Duditch / Poetry / And pass / White arrow / Angelic eve / Honey of being / Sing yes / At sea / The lost dancer / Men / Peers / Mended / One within / The blue meridian / Drama / Natalie Mann / The sacred factory / Aphorisms and maxims.
Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral
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Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement's most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don't fade with the color of one's skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.
Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist
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In paintings, murals, and book illustrations, Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) produced the most powerful visual legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, prompting the philosopher and writer Alain Locke to dub him the "father of Black American art." Douglas's role, as well as that of the Harlem Renaissance in general, in the evolution of American modernism deserves close scholarly attention - attention it finally receives in this illustrated book on his life and work.
Countee Cullen
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A major and sometimes controversial figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen fused a mastery of the formal lyric with a passionate engagement with themes social, religious, racial, and personal in such books as Color, Copper Sun, and The Black Christ.
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered
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This unique recording tells the Harlem Renaissance story through the spoken word and live music of some of its most famous works.
Mules and Men
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Mules and Men is a treasury of black America's folklore as collected by famous storyteller and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings and tall tales that have formed an oral history of the South since the time of slavery.
The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader
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This book is the definitive collection of the writings of Wallace Thurman, providing a comprehensive anthology of both the published and unpublished works of this bohemian, bisexual writer. Widely regarded as the enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance scene, Thurman was a leader among a group of young artists and intellectuals.
Louis Armstrong
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Louis Armstrong.'Satchmo.'To millions of fans, he was just a great entertainer. But to jazz aficionados, he was one of the most important musicians of our times--not only a key figure in the history of jazz but a formative influence on all of 20th-century popular music. Set against the backdrop of New Orleans, Chicago, and New York during the'jazz age', Collier re-creates the saga of an old-fashioned black man making it in a white world.
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
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The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career, including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.
Bessie
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Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918
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Hubert Harrison was an immensely skilled writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist who, more than any other political leader of his era, combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a coherent political radicalism. Harrison's ideas profoundly influenced 'New Negro' militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his synthesis of class and race issues is a key unifying link between the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement: the labor- and civil-rights-based work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist platform associated with Malcolm X.
Regina Anderson Andrews: Harlem Renaissance Librarian
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The first African American to head a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL), Regina Andrews led an extraordinary life. Allied with W. E. B. Du Bois, Andrews fought for promotion and equal pay against entrenched sexism and racism and battled institutional restrictions confining African American librarians to only a few neighborhoods within New York City. Andrews also played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance, supporting writers and intellectuals with dedicated workspace at her 135th Street Branch Library. After hours she cohosted a legendary salon that drew the likes of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Her work as an actress and playwright helped establish the Harlem Experimental Theater, where she wrote plays about lynching, passing, and the Underground Railroad. Ethelene Whitmire's new biography offers the first full-length study of Andrews's activism and pioneering work with the NYPL. Whitmire's portrait of her sustained efforts to break down barriers reveals Andrews's legacy and places her within the NYPL's larger history.
His Eye is on the Sparrow: an Autobiography
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I was never a child. I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. Thus begins this autobiography.
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
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A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro -- the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness.
Van Der Zee, photographer, 1886-1983
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The career of the African-American photographer James Van Der Zee spanned 80 years. Van Der Zee is best remembered as the eyes of the Harlem Renaissance, and this book reproduces some of the thousands of photographs he took between the wars in New York's Harlem.
Portraiture & the Harlem Renaissance : the Photographs of James L. Allen
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Published in conjunction with the exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery 19 January-11 April 1999
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
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The Norton Critical Edition of this influential Harlem Renaissance novel includes related materials available in no other edition. Known only as the "Ex-Colored Man," the protagonist in Johnson's novel is forced to choose between celebrating his African American heritage or "passing" as an average white man in a post-Reconstruction America that is rapidly changing. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1912 text.
Paul Robeson - A Life of Activism and Art
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Paul Robeson was, at points in his life, an actor, singer, football player, political activist and writer, one of the most diversely talented members of the Harlem Renaissance. Swindall centers Robeson's story around the argument that while Robeson leaned toward Socialism, a Pan-African perspective is fundamental to understanding his life as an artist and political advocate.
In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line
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Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook, Nella Larsen lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. Her writings about that life, briefly celebrated in her time, were lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many. In his search for Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding her, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror.
Dorothy West's Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color
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Dorothy West is best known as one of the youngest writers involved in the Harlem Renaissance. Subsequently, her work is read as a product of the urban aesthetics of this artistic movement. But West was also intimately rooted in a very different milieu—Oak Bluffs, an exclusive retreat for African Americans on Martha's Vineyard. She played an integral role in the development and preservation of that community.
