Introduction: Revising a Renaissance

Summary

In the popular imagination, the Harlem Renaissance is closely associated with the Jazz Age, with rent parties, clubs, cabarets, jazz, and blues. Langston Hughes did much to cement such views of the period, announcing in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940) that “it was the period when the Negro was in vogue,” a spectacular cultural boom that came to a sudden halt with the onset of the Depression. In fact, the Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement, was characterized by remarkable diversity that cannot be limited to a linear narrative of boom and bust, and more fiction by black authors was published in the 1930s than in the 1920s. The unprecedented flowering of black cultural production in visual art, literature, dance, and music from the late 1910s to the 1930s encompassed jazz and blues poetry by Sterling A. Brown and Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston’s lyrical renderings of folk culture in the South, George Schuyler’s unusual blending of satire and science fiction in Black No More (1931), militant editorials in The Messenger, and modernist cover designs by such artists as Aaron Douglas and Laura Wheeler Waring.