The Harlem Renaissance

This state of affairs is all the more striking when we compare the literary and artistic productions of the Harlem Renaissance to another cultural development that centered in Harlem at about the same time: the rise of jazz as the predominant form of American music, and indeed arguably as America's outstanding cultural contribution to the world. This, moreover, was a movement that was scarcely noticed by the intellectual leaders of the Harlem Renaissance:

Harlem intellectuals promoted Negro art, but one thing is very curious, except for Langston Hughes, none of them took jazz--the new music--seriously. Of course, they all mentioned it as background, as descriptive of Harlem life. All said it was important to the definition of the New Negro. But none thought enough about it to try and

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the 1920s among Americans white and black--The Great Gatesby comes to mind. These forces worked across the spectrum of self-conscious intellectual activity, beginning in the schools. Like white children, black children were taught that the speech of their fathers was not proper English ... The tales they had heard the old folks tell were not the stuff of culture; they would read Jane Austen and Thackeray and dream of English romance (p. 63). The point of special emphasis here--though perhaps not fully explicated by Huggins--is "like white children." In attempting to address the problem of black American cultural identity, the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance were, though they were not clearly aware of it, first having to deal with the broader problem of American cultural identity. White writers were just beginning to break out of this trap. In an earlier generation, American literature as a whole had expressed the polarities of the minstrel-show conventions; Mark Twain as Jim Crow, Henry James as Jim Dandy. Only at about the same time as the Harlem Renaissance itself were a new generation of (white) writers such as Hemingway and Faulkner beginning to define an idiom independent of these polarities. It
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1497
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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