Fachbereich Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Sommersemester 2010
History of American Literature
Prof. Dr. Ralph J. Poole
Harlem Renaissance & After
Essay:
•
Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery (1901)
•
W.E.B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
•
Alan Locke. The New Negro.
Short Story and Novel:
•
Nella Larsen, Passing (1928
Poetry:
•
Claude McKay, "If We Must Die" (1919), "Harlem Dancer"
•
Langston Hughes, "The Langston Hughes (1902-1967) "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921), "The Weary Blues" (1925), "I,
Too, Sing America" (1925)
Harlem Renaissance
• First major movement of
African American
literature and arts
• 1920s until Depression,
but stimulus lasting
through 1940s and longer
• group of artists and
intellectuals from Harlem
• Harlem: since Great
Migration of African
Americans from rural
South center for
urbanized blacks
“New York! That’s not a place, it’s a
dream” (Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man)
Great Migration
• Move made by African
Americans from rural
South to urban North
beginning 20th cent.
• In 1910: 90 % of blacks in
South, by 1930 2 mio in
esp. New York, Chicago,
Detroit, Philadelphia
• better economic
opportunities in North
• lasting racial injustice in
South
• transformation from rural
to urban
• migration from South as
move to freedom while
slavery, afterwards move
to self-fulfillment
• compare South  North
migration with East 
West migration of 19th
cent.: transformation of
social landscape of US
The New Negro
•
•
New Negro Movement: named after
anthology The New Negro (1925), ed.
Alain Locke
"the old negro ... a creature of moral
debate and historical controversy ... a
stock figure perpetuated as an
historical fiction partly in innocent
sentimentalism, partly in deliberate
reactionism ... [T]he Negro has been
more of a formula than a human
being – a something to be argued
about, condemned or defended, to
be 'kept down', or 'in his place', or
'helped up', to be worried with or
worried over, to be harassed or
patronized, a social bogey or a social
burden.“ (The New Negro)
The New Negro
•
•
“The younger generation is vibrant
with a new psychology; the new
spirit is awake in the masses, and
under the very eyes of the
professional observers is
transforming what has been a
perennial problem into the
progressive phases of contemporary
Negro life.“
„We are achieving something like a
spiritual emancipation. Until
recently, lacking self-understanding,
we have been almost as much a
problem to ourselves as we still are
to others ... but the thinking few
know that in the reaction the vital
inner grip of prejudice has been
broken."
•
•
•
“renewed self-respect and selfdependence"
expressed "in the life-attitudes and
self-expression of the Young Negro,
his art, his education, and his new
outlook, with the additional
advantage, of course, of the poise
and greater certainty of knowing
what it is all about."
New Negro = New American Art: "If
after absorbing the new content of
American life and experience, and
after assimilating new patterns of art
… then the Negro may well become
what some have predicted, the artist
of American life.„
White Modernism:
Interest in Primitivism
•
•
•
primitivism: immediate passion,
direct emotion, true expression,
archaic psyche
Eugene O’Neill: The Emperor Jones
(1920)
Carl Van Vechten: Nigger Heaven
(1926)
• call for social and artistic
interracial co-operation
• Alain Locke: “The fiction
is that the life of the races
is separate, and
increasingly so. The fact is
that they have touched
too closely at the
unfavorable and too
lightly at the favorable
levels.” (The New Negro)
Black Modernism
•
•
•
move towards “high art”  Countee
Cullen: “I want to be a poet, not a Negro
poet.”
but also use of folk idiom (Blues), comic
writing, vernacular  Langston Hughes:
„One of the most promising of the young
Negro poets said to me: „I want to be a
poet - not a Negro poet“. . . And I was
sorry the young man said that for no great
poet has ever been afraid of being
himself. And I doubted then that, with his
desire to run away spiritually from his
race, this boy would ever be a great poet.
But this is the mountain standing in the
way of any true Negro art in America - this
urge within the race toward whiteness,
the desire to pour racial individuality into
the mould of American standardization,
and to be as little Negro and as much
American as possible.“ ("The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain„)
• Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
• Langston Hughes, Weary
Blues (1926)
• Claude McKay, Home to
Harlem (1928)
• Nella Larsen, Quicksand
(1928), Passing (1929)
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their
Eyes Were Watching God
(1937)
Tradition vs. Innovation
If We Must Die
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one eathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Claude McKay
The Weary Blues (excerpt)
„I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan –
Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frowin‚
And put ma troubles on the shelf.“
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more –
„I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied –
I ain't happy no mo‚
And I whish that I had died.“
Langston Hughes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyqwvC5s4n8
Harlem
“The Negro capital of the world“ (James Weldon Johnson)
Josephine Baker
The Harlem Dancer
APPLAUDING youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black, shiny curls
Profusely fell; and, tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze;
But, looking at her falsely-smiling face
I knew her self was not in that strange place.
Claude McKay
The Cotton Club
Cab Calloway and The Cotton Club Orchestra, 1934
Roaring Twenties and Great
Depression
• social, technological changes,
economical boom (stock market
speculations)
• President Herbert Hoover: “We in
America today are nearer to the
final triumph over poverty than
ever before in the history of any
land. The poorhouse is vanishing
from among us.”
 “Black Thursday” Oct. 24, 1929
 1930s: Great Depression
• 1931: 8 mio unemployed, 1932:
12 mio (maybe up to a quarter of
population)
• collective trauma after boom
(Wall Street, October 24, 1929)
Thursday, October 24, 1929, Page 1, Col. 1
PRICES OF STOCKS CRASH IN HEAVY LIQUIDATION, TOTAL
DROP OF PAPER LOSS $4,000,000,000
---------2,600,000 Shares Sold In The Final Hour In Record Decline
Great Depression: 1930s
• radical gap between rich
and poor
• “bread lines”
• class conflict  race
conflict
• esp. blacks: unemployment,
homelessness, malnutrition,
diseases
• 1932: half of black
population in South
unemployed (new wave of
migration to North)
• threat for democracy
Richard Wright (1908-1960)
• first African-American
writer to win broad
response from reading
public
• born in South,
experience of
oppression  turn to
Communism until 1944
• Native Son (1940):
made him a leading
American novelist
Wright, “Blueprint for Negro
Writing (1937)
• Essay
• call for politically
engaged and radically
social realism (↔
aesthetics and
optimism of Harlem R.)
• declaration of cultural
independence for black
writers
“Are [the Negro writers] being called
upon to "preach"? ... To "prostitute"
their writing? ... Must they write
"propaganda"? No; it is a question of
awareness, of consciousness; it is ,
above all, a question of perspective
... It is that fixed point in intellectual
space where a writer stands to view
the struggles, hopes, and sufferings
of his people ... Perspective for
Negro writers will come when they
have looked and brooded so hard
and long upon the harsh lot of their
race and compared it with the
struggles of minority people
everywhere that the cold facts have
begun to tell them something.”
Wright: Native Son
• Irving Howe: “the day Native Son appeared,
American culture was changed forever”
• Bigger Thomas: from Chicago slums to electric
chair (false claim: murder and rape of white girl)
• black rage
• radical politics
• determinism in underclass black life
• white hypocrisy
• critical, political realism/naturalism
Ralph (Waldo) Ellison (1913-1994)
• resistance to be categorized as
black writer
• universalist claim
• debate betw. Wright and Ellison
valid for cont. identity politics
• although writing about blackwhite relationships, critical and
satirical treatment of black social,
ethnic, regional, moral traditions
• realism (incl. symbolism,
expressionism, surrealism)
• mixture of black cultural tradition
and white modernism
• The Invisible Man (1952): won
National Book Award, regarded
as classic of modern American Lit.
The Invisible Man
• complex reflection on
individual, collective, and
artistic identity
• unnamed first-person narrator
born in deep South and adopts
compliant behavior of “good
Negro”
• his individualism as “invisible”
• educated in black college, sent
north to powerful whites who
want to place him in highsounding, but empty positions
 keeping him “invisible”
• discovery of imposture 
pitches into chaos of New York
City
• bewildering succession of
adventures
• falls into a coal cellar 
disillusioned by world’s
absurdity, determines to
remain underground and to
write down his experiences (=
novel)
Invisible Man (excerpt)
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like
those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one
of your Hollywood ectoplasms. I am a man of
substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids –
and I might even be said to possess a mind. Like
the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus
sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded
by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they
approach me they see only my surroundings,
themselves, or figments of their imagination –
indeed, everything and anything except me.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cctjuE95VA
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
•
•
•
•
•
not experimentalist, but naturalistic
realist
spokesman for social injustice, antiseparatism, Christian love
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953):
struggle of intelligent and sensitive
boy to transcend Harlem
environment and religious
fundamentalism of his family
The Fire Next Time (1963):
journalism, powerful impact on civil
rights legislation; injustices,
indignities, humiliations of African
Americans; resistance against
withdrawal into black separatism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS3lpkaLv
wQ (scenes from “Sonny’s Blues”)
Baldwin
• controversial novels
Giovanni’s Room (1956, young
black American in Europe
must choose between his
“true love” for a man and love
for a woman) and Another
Country (1962, moral
confusion and race hatred of
American cities) because of
homo- and bisexuality and
racial mixing: see Eldridge
Cleaver (Black Panthers) in
Soul on Ice (1968) accusing
Baldwin of racial death wish
and self-hatred
• “Sometimes I lie here and
I listen, listen for a bomb,
man, to fall on this city
and make all that noise
stop. I listen to hear them
moan. I want them to
bleed and choke, I want
to hear them crying.”
(Rufus, an unhappy jazz
musician, realizes his
anger and kills himself in
Another Country)
Contemporary African American Literature
• 1980s/90s: emancipation of black literature
• not writing for or against white audience, but for own ethnic group
• Toni Morrison: call for revision, “not just what black people do but the
way we look at it”
• finding own aesthetic and narrative techniques
• Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964, Alex Haley as ghostwriter)
• Alex Haley, Roots (1976)
• Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (1972, postmodern-parodist collage on
Harlem Renaissance)
• Samuel R. Delany, Atlantis (1995, retro-utopian novel on Harlem)
• Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992, on Harlem)
“If my work is to confront a realty unlike that realty of the West, it must
centralize and animate information discredited by the West.” (Morrison,
“Memory, Creation , and Writing”)
• discredited information: gossip, magic, sentimental …
Alice Walker (1944-)
•
•
•
•
black (female) experience of South
impressionist, symbolist realism
wisdom of black matriarch, brutality
of low-class black male; white
oppression, exploitation; folk
heritage, feminism (sexism, rape,
abortion, economic injustice)
The Color Purple (1982): American
Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, epistolary
novel (see tradition of English
sentimental novel). Story of Celie
who suffers poverty, racism, sexual
abuse, but through strength of
character rises to accommodation to
her life and restoration to her loved
Toni Morrison (1931-)
Jazz (1992)
• from agrarian South to
Harlem of 1926
• recapturing spirit of Jazz
Age, but also white
exoticism and sexual
projections
• instead of equation Jazz =
Sex focus on oral tradition
of Jazz
• multiple voices: bridge
between orality and written
narration
Beloved (1987)
• tradition of slave narrative
• story of slave mother who kills
her daughter to safe her, but
daughter returns as haunting
ghost
• recurrence of traumatic past
of slavery
• past not factual reconstruction
(Haley) or parodist
deconstruction (Reed), but as
“rememory”: remembering,
working through, overcoming
of collective history
Morrison
• 1993 Novel Prize
• Essay Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary
Imagination (1991)
– omnipresence of blacks in white American literature as
potentially destabilizing feature
– readings of Poe, Hemingway, Willa Cather and Faulkner
– claim that national consciousness of white Americans rely
on denial of African Americans
– but these suppressed figures return as ghosts of history
– call for relocating interest from victims (Blacks) to
aggressors (Whites)
– re-reading of canonized white texts