Chapter 7 - Romans à Clef of the Harlem Renaissance

Summary

This chapter focuses on romans à clef of the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932) and Richard Bruce Nugent’s Gentleman Jigger (2008), read together, foreground the tensions between originality and derivativeness, individual “genius” and collaboration that were being negotiated more broadly in the modernist art of the period. On the one hand, both Infants of the Spring and Jigger are invested in models of artistry that valorize “individuality” and “genius” over “standardization” and derivativeness. On the other hand, the texts themselves – which explicitly address the question of plagiarism through differently inflected scenes describing the same event – suggest that a model of authorship or artistry that does not accommodate collaboration, borrowing, and even outright theft is gravely deficient.