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The Circle Association's Weblinks to
The Harlem Renaissance
visitors to the Circle's
African American Links pages. Last update 9/5/98
This site was awarded a Times Pick by the Los Angeles Times on 7/28/98.
Outside of the art world, people rarely think of the renaissance period describing the written word. This habit has extended, as well. to the Harlem Renaissance; however, the written word was a very important part of this period. There had been Negro writers for at least 140 years. Perhaps, the best known were Charles W. Chestnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Chestnutt's novels included The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line , whereas Dunbar, primarily a poet, was best known for his novel The Sport of the Gods . Chestnut's writing, though moving away from the plantation romanticism which had glorified slavery, possessed realistic flavor, and it emphasized relations based on the divisions of the black and white races rather than developing the interior lives of its characters.
At the same time, and to some extent today, most African Americans found positive value in the stereotypical puritan compulsions to order, frugality, temperance, decorum, and frigidity which had always served to distinguish the civilized (i.e., whites) from the darker peoples they enslaved or colonized who had to be tutored because they embodied just the opposite of many of these characteristics. With Jean Toomer's publication Cane , and, in 1924, with Jessie Redman Fauset's There is Confusion . Unlike their predecessors, these works dealt with our people as people and not as objects to be manipulated for some or other racial propaganda. Langston Hughes, in 1930, published Not Without Laughter , the first Harlem Renaissnce novel to gain wide reknown. Writers such as Claude McKay, created fictional characters who were heroes because they were primitives and free from the Puritan ethic. Painters, sculptors, and musicians were "uplifted" by the popularity of Africa forms of Picasso and Matisse and the adoption of jazz by heralded european composers.
In the 1920's African-Americans seemed to have passed through some rite of passage. As if for the first time, we began, in significant numbers, to be self-assertive and racially conscious. A popular, at the time, term describing such people was "The New Negro" expressed movement from the world of Booker T. Washington to that of W.E.B. duBois and Marcus Garvey. More than anything else, the Harlem Renaissance was a marker of the shift of the Black intellectuals from the South to the urban North. Thus, the Harlem Renaissance expresses a time, an orientation, a spirit, and more than a location, for its representatives can be found outside of New York City; for example, Philadelphia and Chicago both possessed reflections of the Harlem scene.
Voices from the Harlem Renaissance , edited by Nathan Irvin Huggins [Oxford University Press $16.95] is a fine collection of over 120 selections from the political writings and arts of the Harlem Renaissance. The above paragraphs were adapted from the 8 page introduction in Huggins' book.
Thus, the Circle Association presents, for your interest, web links to pages devoted to the general Harlem Renaissance.
LINKS
in the order we find them.
= NEW to all our pages!!!
Phat African American Poetry
Book contains works of the Harlem
Renaissance poets: Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Georgia
Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, Claude McKay.
The
Library of Congress' African American Mosaic Exhibition
A
complete Harlem Renaissance site at the university of colorado
Historical Photographs photographs and captions provided by Bettie Cole, and are being used in the book she is...
A Jean Toomer: Four web pages consisting of a biography, samples of his work, a bibliography, and photos.
Voice of the Shuttle: Minority Studies page
Harlem Renaissance book The Garden Thrives
Harlem Renaissance: New York in the Twenties
The Harlem Renaissance: A Selected List
The Black Experience in America, Chapter09
Harlem: Mecca of the new Negro
Harlem's Schomberg Center for Research in black culture
Altavista search turned up 4000+ links (I only checked 50)
Infoseek search turned up 2000+ links
Lycos search turned up 500+ links
Yahoo search turned up 17 links
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