HARLEM RENAISSANCE
February 20, 1998
An exhibit in San Francisco explores the artistic
and cultural legacies of the 1920s and 30s.
"(Harlem) is romantic in its own right. And it is hard and strong, its
noise, heat, cold, cries and colours are so. And the nostalgia is violent
too; the eternal radio seeping through everything day and night,
indoors and out, becomes somehow the personification of restlessness,
desire, brooding."
--Nancy Cunard, Harlem Review, 1933
The words "Harlem Renaissance" conjure up vivid images: Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway
at the Cotton Club, flappers in beads and scarves, Bessie Smith's winsome smile, Langston
Hughes looking elegant and solemn at his writing table, Josephine Baker in feathered dance
costumes, W.E.B. Du Bois looking confidently into the camera lens.
But the black renaissance and cultural revolution that took place in Harlem, New York between
the World Wars was much more than these images. It was a profound literary and political
movement as well.
This is the principle behind a new exhibit at The California Palace
of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco called Rhapsodies in
Black. The collection combines sculptures, photographs and
paintings with archival film, sound recordings and commentary by
leading scholars. In this exhibit, the Harlem Renaissance is more
than a phenomenon confined to artists of color in a few square
miles of Manhattan. It is an historical moment of global
significance, with links to Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and other
parts of the U.S.
In 1925, the African-American philosopher Alain Locke published
"The New Negro," an anthology that contained the works of some
of the writers of the period: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston. In Harlem,
"Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination," Locke
wrote in the introduction. Instead of using more direct political means, African-American artists
and writers employed culture to work for goals of civil rights and
equality. And for the most part, jazz, African-American paintings
and books were absorbed into mainstream culture.
But it wasn't always easy. Rhapsodies in Black traces how racism in
the U.S. forced some artists abroad. Josephine Baker was considered
too dark to be a star in Harlem and had to move to Paris before
receiving international acclaim. Opera singer and actor Paul Robeson also achieved stardom in
Europe.
What was it about the 1920s and 30s that opened up the pathways toward African-American
cultural expression? Are we still experiencing the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance today?
Our forum guests are: Jeffrey C. Stewart, professor of history at George Mason University,
William Drummond, a journalism professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who is
currently working on a story for NPR about the Harlem Renaissance and Richard Powell,
associate professor of art and art history at Duke University and co-curator of the exhibition.
The Online NewsHour asks:
Why did the artists of the Harlem Renaissance use primitive, sensual images and music to
celebrate black culture when African-Americans have often been stereotyped with images of the
primitive and the exotic? Was this ever addressed or challenged by the African-American
community?
Professor Richard Powell responds:
One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance is
that the African American artist was somehow above and beyond the primitivist mindset: that the
exoticizing of Africa, the exploring of sexual themes, and the interrogation of the black
demimonde was primarily something that white artists and intellectuals were engaged in. Yet if
one studies the historical record and the cultural artifacts from the period, we see many African
American artists delving into these problematic themes and subjects. Why? Because (among
many other reasons) many of these artists saw this approach as underscoring their modernist
credentials.
Since the mid-to-late nineteenth century, European moderns declared their artistic and
intellectual difference from the more conservative schools of art by painting carousers in cafes,
decadent circus performers, prostitutes and their clients in bordellos, and the indigent. They also
turned to non-western cultures -- especially Africa and Oceania -- for inspiration and
information. And they earnestly looked at peasants from rural France and from small villages in
northern and eastern Europe: all of this in order to invest their art with power and provocation.
Many African American artists (much to the chagrin of the more conservative critics, like
W.E.B. Du Bois) did the same thing. Langston Hughes wrote poetry that celebrated the blues
singers and jazz dancers. Paul Robeson played the roles of the stevedore and "jackleg" preacher
on the Broadway stage and in films. Duke Ellington composed a range of musical compositions,
some quite elegant and sophisticated, while others more fitting for the "hoochie choochie"
dancers in the nightclubs. And Josephine Baker turned Paris, Berlin, London, and Copenhagen
upside down with her suggestive banana dance and sense of abandonment. All of these artists
knew what they were doing and, yet, were willing to push their work to the primitivist extremes,
in order to make radical artistic statements, to critique what was then seen as a stultifying white
puritan ethic, and (to quote the African American muralist Aaron Douglas) to "create something
transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic."
Despite being addressed and challenged by Du Bois and others, these and other Harlem
Renaissance artists forged ahead with their new ways of seeing black culture, proclaiming (as
Langston Hughes did in 1926): "If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't
matter.... If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and stand on top of
the mountain, free within ourselves."
Professor Jeffrey Stewart responds:
There are at least two answers to this question. First, as I suggest in my essay, "Paul Robeson
and the Problem of Modernism" in the catalogue to the Rhapsody in Black exhibition, the
"primitivist" theme in Harlem Renaissance writings and theatre was predominantly the work of
liberal European American writers such as the New York socialite Mary Wiborg, who wrote the
play, "Taboo," or the great American playwright Eugene O'Neill, who wrote the play, "The
Emperor Jones."
An interest in primitivism among such writers derived from a variety of sources. Some became
interested in primitivism because of the discovery and recognition of African art by European
artists such as Picasso, Modigliani, and others. Others were attracted to the idea of primitivism
because of the writings of Sigmund Freud, who argued that much of civilization was an
unhealthy repression of legitimate primal urges, a repression that led to neurosis. Some others
were influenced by the anthropological theories of Franz Boas, the Columbia University
professor, who argued that there was no significant difference between the civilized and the socalled "primitive" mind of peoples who had had little contact with Western culture.
These various ideas coalesced into a widely held belief in sophisticated circles that one of the
unintended consequences of racism and segregation in America was to exclude African
Americans from the negative aspects of civilization and to preserve in them a more "primitive"
mentality. While today this belief is rightly criticized, in the 1920s, it was seen as a positive:
primitive meant something good, something better than civilized, at least among a select group
of intellectuals and artists who congregated in urban centers like Greenwich Village and Harlem.
African American actors like Paul Robeson were attracted to such plays like "Emperor Jones"
because they constituted some of the first opportunities to perform in dramatic rather than
comedic roles. Also, Robeson and some others saw some of these roles as opportunities to
explore their Africanness. It was only later, in the 1930s, that Robeson began to question the
accuracy and legitimacy of some of his roles in such British films as "Sanders of the River,"
"King Solomon's Mines," etc., and to search for more authentic plays about the African
experience.
In terms of Black writers and artists who themselves wrote or constructed art on the African or
"primitive" theme in the 1920s, it must be admitted that some of them did so in part to cash in on
the fad or the "vogue of the Negro." There arose a market for plays and poems and visual art that
explored such themes, and Black artists who had great difficulty making a living as artists cashed
in on this fad to make a few bucks. There were others, also, who, coming from middle class
backgrounds, were ignorant about the lives of working class African Americans, many of whom
had recently migrated out of the rural South into the urban North. In many respects, these middle
class writers and artists could themselves view members of their own race who were from the
South and less sophisticated than their urban, northern, more middle class brethren, as
"primitive."
What is most important is to see the Harlem Renaissance as a transitional period, in which
African American writers and artists explored notions of "the primitive" and learned how such
images could be used for and against the race. It is also important to realize that in the 1920s the
term "primitive" had a slightly different meaning among the literary elite than it does today.
Actually, some African American audiences did react against the cult of the primitive in such art.
I relate in my essay that when "The Emperor Jones" was performed in Harlem, it failed, because
the audience of predominantly Black patrons hooted, howled, and laughed at the performances,
particularly the scene in which Brutus Jones becomes "scared" in the jungle." For working class
African Americans living in Harlem, the 'jungle" was the urban world of survival they were daily
struggling to survive in, not some romanticized and distant Africa.
Professor William Drummond responds:
Today I interviewed Jacob Lawrence, the country's most celebrated African-American painter
and a man who lived through the Harlem Renaissance, for a piece I'm doing for National Public
Radio. Based on his answers and my own research into the issues, I'll try to respond to the
queries.
Painters like Mr. Lawrence were listening to their own inner voice when they created their
art. Lawrence said he felt the influences of such people as the Mexican muralist Diego
Rivera. It doesn't seem to me that he thought of his style at the time as either primitive or
especially sensual. He, of course, has a particularly unique style. His major contributions were
"story-telling" panels, depicting such things as the life of abolitionist Harriet
Tubman. Nevertheless, I think that the graphic artists of this movement would say the same
thing. They were depicting the life and times in which they lived or the history that became real
to them.