Chapter 5 - Thurman and Fauset’s Portraits of Harlem’s Regional Artist

Summary

This chapter resumes our tour of America's Northeastern region in the 1920s, led by its literary hero, the young artist character. Let us detour into uptown Manhattan, pausing above 110th Street. Harlem, a neighborhood comprising just 3.63 km2 of the borough, is loaded with cultural mythologies, especially apropos its precipitation of the New Negro Renaissance c. 1919–1935, popularly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance: a cultural revolution that resulted from the Great Migration of Black Southerners to cities above the Mason–Dixon line. The Künstlerroman played a strategic role in contending with Harlem's geographical mythologies, as a self-reflexive subgenre that narrativized the Black nationalist hero who emerged out of the bloody Red Summer of race riots in 1919: the New Negro. With a nod to the cultural nationalism of the period popularized by literary critical publications including Van Wyck Brooks's America's Coming of Age (1915), the African American intellectual Alain Locke's exegesis on the Old and New Negro in his influential New Negro anthology (1925) indicated that

if in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least … celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age (Locke 16).

For Locke's collaborator W. E. B. Du Bois, the harbinger of the New Negro's getting-of-wisdom was the young artist, whom he felt was crucial to the development of a durable African American literary tradition. Du Bois and Locke's 1924 co-written essay for The Crisis, “The Younger Literary Movement,” peddled Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and Jessie Redmon Fauset's There is Confusion (1924) as leaders of a generation of literary works that were “[marking] an epoch” by creating feats in literature that unambiguously negated the lie of Black inferiority (Du Bois and Locke 288). Adjacent to the cultural federalism of the WWI context, which saw white literary critics including Brooks revive Ralph Waldo Emerson's Young American in Literature to consolidate a white nativist national tradition, the Young New Negro led Black nationalism's program of Du Boisian cultural uplift. As that figure was conceived by influential intellectuals such as Du Bois and Locke, its antagonist was the “immature” Old Negro, a tropological fixture of the peasant rural South often associated with provincialist, sentimental local color fiction.