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Harlem Renaissance
4 articles on Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
African American cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Variously known as the New Negro movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance emerged toward the end of World War I in 1918, blossomed in the mid- to late 1920s, and then faded in the mid-1930s. The Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that main stream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously and that African American literature and arts attracted significant attention from the nation at large. Although it was primarily a literary movement, it was closely related to developments in African American music, theater, art, and politics. The Harlem Renaissance emerged amid social and intellectual upheaval in ...
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Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 6516 Includes: The Origins | The Entertainers | Alongside the Great White Way | The Writers | The Artists | Music | Personalities | The Harlem Legend | BibliographyIn the history of art and culture, some periods glow with a light that illuminates all the rest. Whether we talk about the Mauve Decade, Bloomsbury, or Paris in the 1920s, there is a sense that extraordinary personalities and forces somehow coalesced—with the intangible addition of what we call style—in a way that changed the world. The Harlem Renaissance is one of those periods in America, and its effect has yet to be fully explored. Langston Hughes always believed that the flowering began when Florence Mills took over Broadway in the black musical Shuffle Along in 1921 . Within the decade, Ethel Waters would become the highest-paid woman, black or white, on the Broadway stage. Bessie ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1148Known also as the Negro Renaissance or the New Negro movement, this artistic and sociocultural awakening among African-Americans was a national phenomenon, reverberating through many urban centers. Viewed by some scholars as a distinctly African-American experiment in modernism and/or cultural pluralism, it found many outlets, from literature, painting, and sculpture to jazz, dance, and Broadway shows.Though it peaked in 1923–1929, the movement can be dated from the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, the outbreak of World War I in 1914, or the publication of Claude McKay's poem Harlem Dancer in 1917 to as late as 1937, when Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, or 1940, when Richard Wright's Native Sonintroduced a ...
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Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Word Count: 5772 Includes: The Debate over “Negro Art” | Early Innovations: McKay and Toomer | Folk Art versus High Art: Hughes and Cullen | The New Negro | Women Writers of the Renaissance | Further ReadingThe term Harlem Renaissance refers to the efflorescence of African-American cultural production that occurred in New York City in the 1920s and early 1930s. One sometimes sees Harlem Renaissance used interchangeably with “New Negro Renaissance,” a term that includes all African Americans, regardless of their location, who participated in this cultural revolution. Followers of the New Negro dicta, which emphasized blacks' inclusion in and empowerment by American society, were undeniably spread throughout the nation, and most major cities had pockets of the African-American elite that W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed the “Talented Tenth.” Nevertheless, New York City was, arguably, the most crucial site of this movement's development and Harlem was its nexus. The early years of the Harlem Renaissance coincided ...
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