Chapter 19 - Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance

Summary

This chapter studies the literary representation of dancers, particularly child dancers, in Harlem Renaissance fiction, arguing that this focus can help explore anxieties about generational conflict, gender, sexuality, tradition, and urban life. Attending to representations of children provides a fresh perspective from which to examine the significance of dance both in relation to questions of cultural identity (including black modernists’ engagement with the legacies of minstrelsy) and the emotional cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance. Against the backdrop of a broader preoccupation with black childhood among social scientists, educators, and political activists, representations of child dancers were freighted with contradictory emotions that complicated discourses of racial uplift. This chapter engages with a range of texts, including Zora Neale Hurston’s “Drenched in Light” and Dorothy West’s “An Unimportant man,” to argue that dancing children sometimes embody new possibilities for the future and resistant aesthetics that defy categorization, but they make for anxious, loaded imagery that flickers between embarrassment and pride, pleasure and unease.