Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.

This chapter analyzes the rich essayistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940). Through the visual arts, music, and literature, many African Americans responded to the changing national and international dynamics of the 1920s as an opportunity to leverage their creative arts and redefine their place within the nation. Poetry and fiction were the literary genres African Americans increasingly employed for these efforts. More ubiquitous was their frequent complement: the essay. Writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence infused the essay with this ethos and positioned it as an equally important genre for chronicling the period. Indeed, it was through the essay that readers in the United States and in other parts of the world encountered rhetorical styles reflecting the racial pride and determination of the “New Negro.” Essays from the period detailing the array of forces and ideas shaping African American life – including migration, racial violence, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism – constitute dynamic narratives combining history, opinion, and critical redress.

This chapter begins by claiming that in comparison to its British and French contemporaries, American modernism does not contain a lot of obviously queer texts. That is, American modernism does not represent homosexuality explicitly very often. There are exceptions, of course – Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D., Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” and Charles Henri Ford and Park Tyler’s The Young and the Evil offer three such examples, but same-sex relations are not central subjects in the way that they are in contemporaneous texts such as Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, André Gide’s Miracle of the Rose, or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. This chapter aims to explain this peculiarity and thus to provide a theory of queer American modernism itself by examining two key sites of its production: namely, the Provincetown Theater and the Harlem Renaissance.

Historically condemned for their commercial exploitation of poesy, and threat to authorial autonomy, the literary anthology was nevertheless one of the signal forms of literary modernism, in the US and beyond. It was at once a salient means for circulating and preserving verse and a genre in its own right. Although the little magazine has been the more attractive genre of study – both for the form’s closer proximity to collaborative literary production and for their amenability to digital scholarly methods – the anthology often had a symbiotic relationship to little magazines in the modernist period, and has endured as a form for aesthetic and political self-identification, speculative interpellation, preservation, and reclamation, as well as being a mode of reaching audiences beyond the “field of restricted production.” This chapter traces the US career of the anthology from Des Imagistes to An “Objectivists” Anthology, emphasizing the genre’s key importance for Black American writing.

Introductory chapter for book that centers the work, labor, and effort of artists to script and share African American experiences on stage from the nineteenth century to the present day. It provides an overview of the major movements and moments in Black theatre, beginning with sorrow songs in the era of legal captivity to twenty-first-century stagings.

Following Carol S. Manning’s argument that “the real beginning” of the Southern Renaissance anticipates by a generation or more the standard dating of the phenomenon to the post-World War I decade, this chapter links the achievements of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women writers who were instrumental in guiding the region’s literature and art into intellectual modernity, to a distinguished interwar cohort of women authors who inherited and extended their predecessors’ critique of the American South. It situates figures like Kate Chopin, Pauline Hopkins, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, Mary Noialles Murfree, Anna Julia Cooper, Helen Keller, and Ellen Glasgow as inaugurators of a “long Renascence” that reaches from the 1880s to the 1950s to include now-canonical authors like Katherine Anne Porter, Nella Larsen, Caroline Gordon, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Lillian Smith, alongside lesser-studied writers like Julia Peterkin, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Evelyn Scott, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Newman, Grace Lumpkin, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

This introductory chapter provides historical context for situating key developments in African American literature and culture at the turn into the twentieth century. In particular, this chapter examines the major shifts that happened in the immediate decade following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision to legalize racial segregation, showing how African American writers, artists, athletes, and intellectuals advocated for civil and political rights, even as they turned inward to strengthen and fortify the infrastructures of their own communities. Illuminating reasons why this decade still remains largely underappreciated in African American literary history, this chapter argues for attention to geography, genre, and publication circumstance, as inflected through questions of gender, sexuality, class, and the politics of race and representation, to bring to light new ways of reading these critical years at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1905, at the height of both Jim Crow segregation and the Progressive era, Sutton E. Griggs and Charles W. Chesnutt published two complex and experimental novels that explored the “new slavery” that dominated in the New South. In The Hindered Hand and The Colonel’s Dream Griggs and Chesnutt, respectively, evoked literary tropes and narrative strategies connected with the representation of slavery. At the same time, through revisionary intertextuality, irony, and experimentation with the temporal construction of narrative form, they defamiliarized such tropes and strategies, in order to instantiate awareness-raising meta-narrative mechanisms that required the active critical involvement of readers in the process of interpretation, as would become characteristic of modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Griggs’s and Chesnutt’s ability to take at a deeper level the portrayal of their segregationist times influenced contemporaneous mainstream representational politics with a force that is yet to be fully estimated, as can be gauged by the defensiveness that underlies Thomas Dixon’s attempt at the appropriation and racist misreading of African American literature and culture in his own fiction.

Paul Robeson, Negro sits uneasily alongside recent reconsiderations of the Harlem Renaissance as a localized if significant instance of wider afromodernist currents in play in the early decades of the twentieth century, and has received little attention in scholarship.

African American writers, artists, historians, and activists of the interwar period expended substantial energy to refute a widely held idea that US slavery was relatively benign. Among black American writers, it was poets – for commercial reasons and reasons to do with genre – who took up the topic of enslavement most often. Some wrote poems about the pride they took in the survival of their forebears. Others argued, in poetry, that trauma inflicted by enslavement required them to break free of its enduring spell. A third group, including Langston Hughes, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset, used poetry to call into question the norms of contemporary history writing and of rules of evidence. African American poets in this group used poetry to create a new archive of enslaved people’s experiences and narratives.

This chapter examines Hurston’s early dramatic works during the period popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that a more comprehensive reading of the Harlem Renaissance must include Hurston’s early career in playwriting and that Hurston’s early plays – Meet the Mamma, Spears, The First One, and Color Struck – reflect key concerns of the Harlem Renaissance period. Within this context and combined with the fairly recent discovery of her plays, a fuller view of Hurston’s efforts becomes possible. Given the role of ritual and vernacular folk idioms that would come to dominate her creative writing and her social science career, Hurston’s early plays can be interpreted as testing ground for the theories of culture she would later develop in her novels and essays.