Major representatives of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.[1][2][3][4]

The Harlem Renaissance is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid-1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression).

Background to Harlem

Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. After the end of slavery, the emancipated African Americans began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination. Soon after the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave rise to speeches by African American Congressmen addressing this Bill. By 1875 sixteen blacks had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous speeches with their newfound civil empowerment. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was renounced by black Congressmen and resulted in the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1875, part of Reconstruction legislation by republicans. By the late 1870s, democratic whites managed to regain power in the South. From 1890 to 1908 they proceeded to pass legislation that disenfranchised most Negros and many poor whites, trapping them without representation. They established white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South and one-party block voting behind southern Democrats. The Democratic whites denied African Americans their exercise of civil and political rights by terrorizing black communities with lynch mobs and other forms of vigilante violence[5] as well as by instituting a convict labor system that forced many thousands of African Americans back into unpaid labor in mines, on plantations, and on public works projects such as roads and levees. Convict laborers were typically subject to brutal forms of corporal punishment, overwork, and disease from unsanitary conditions. Death rates were extraordinarily high.[6] While a small number of blacks were able to acquire land shortly after the Civil War, most were exploited as sharecroppers.[7] As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans began to migrate North in great numbers.

Most of the African-American literary movement arose from a generation that had lived through the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Sometimes their parents or grandparents had been slaves. Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by paternal investment in social capital, including better-than-average education. Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the Great Migration out of the South into the Negro neighborhoods of the North and Midwest. African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem, New York City.

Development of African-American community in Harlem

Contemporary silent black and white documentary short.

During the early portion of the 20th century, Harlem was the destination for migrants from around the country, attracting both people seeking work from the South, and an educated class who made the area a center of culture, as well as a growing "Negro" middle class. The district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle and upper middle classes; its affluent beginnings led to the development of stately houses, grand avenues, and world-class amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the Harlem Opera House. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late nineteenth century, the once exclusive district was abandoned by the native white middle-class, who moved further north.

Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors and a church group. Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War. Due to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labor. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York.

Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African-American communities, even in the North. After the end of World War I, many African American soldiers—who fought in segregated units such as the Harlem Hellfighters—came home to a nation whose citizens often did not respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred throughout the US during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.

An explosion of culture in Harlem

The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. 1917 saw the premiere of Three Plays for a Negro Theatre. These plays, written by white playwright Ridgely Torrence, featured African-American actors conveying complex human emotions and yearnings. They rejected the stereotypes of the blackface and minstrel show traditions. James Weldon Johnson in 1917 called the premieres of these plays "the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater."[8] Another landmark came in 1919, when the poet Claude McKay published his militant sonnet, "If We Must Die". Although the poem never alluded to race, to African-American readers heard its note of defiance in the face of racism and the nationwide race riots and lynchings then taking place. By the end of the First World War, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay were describing the reality of contemporary African-American life in America.

In 1917 Hubert Harrison, "The Father of Harlem Radicalism," founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper, respectively, of the "New Negro Movement". Harrison's organization and newspaper were political, but also emphasized the arts (his newspaper had "Poetry for the People" and book review sections). In 1927, in the Pittsburgh Courier, Harrison challenged the notion of the renaissance. He argued that the "Negro Literary Renaissance" notion overlooked "the stream of literary and artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present", and said the so-called "renaissance" was largely a white invention.

The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African-American community since the abolition of slavery, as well as the expansion of communities in the North. These accelerated as a consequence of World War I and the great social and cultural changes in early 20th century United States. Industrialization was attracting people to cities from rural areas and gave rise to a new mass culture. Contributing factors leading to the Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, which concentrated ambitious people in places where they could encourage each other, and the First World War, which had created new industrial work opportunities for tens of thousands of people. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression.

Music

A new way of playing the piano called the Harlem Stride Style was created during the Harlem Renaissance, and helped blur the lines between the poor Negros and socially elite Negros. The traditional jazz band was composed primarily of brass instruments and was considered a symbol of the south, but the piano was considered an instrument of the wealthy. With this instrumental modification to the existing genre, the wealthy blacks now had more access to jazz music. Its popularity soon spread throughout the country and was consequently at an all time high. Innovation and liveliness were important characteristics of performers in the beginnings of jazz. Jazz musicians at the time like Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Willie "The Lion" Smith were very talented and competitive, and were considered to have laid the foundation for future musicians of their genre.[9][10]

During the time period, the musical style of blacks was becoming more and more attractive to whites. White novelists, dramatists and composers started to exploit the musical tendencies and themes of African-Americans in their works. Composers used poems written by African American poets in their songs, and would implement the rhythms, harmonies and melodies of African-American music—such as blues, spirituals, and jazz—into their concert pieces. Negros began to merge with Whites into the classical world of musical composition. The first Negro male to gain wide recognition as a concert artist in both his region and internationally was Roland Hayes. He trained with Arthur Calhoun in Chattanooga, and at Fisk University in Nashville. Later, he studied with Arthur Hubbard in Boston and with George Henshel and Amanda Ira Aldridge in London, England. He began singing in public as a student, and toured with the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1911.[11]

特征及主题

对哈莱姆文艺复兴进行描述是一种明显的民族自豪感,Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration The creation of art and literature would serve to "uplift" the race.

哈莱姆文艺复兴中艺术是无法放在一起进行综合的描述的。它包含了非常丰富的文化元素与风格,包括 泛非洲 的观点, "高语境文化"和"低语境文化"或者称作","世俗文化" ,有古典音乐也有布鲁斯和爵士乐,有传统的文风,也有诸如现代主义爵士诗歌这样的现代的实验性文风。这种文化的二元性引起了许多的非裔美国艺术家与黑人知识界保守派的冲突,知识界中的保守派对这种描述黑人生活的方式持有异议。

在哈莱姆文艺复兴时期的一些常见主题有:黑人奴隶的历史与新兴的黑人种族传统的影响,种族主义制度化的影响,表演和写作中当白人精英作为观众和读者时不可避免的困境,以及如何将现代黑人的生活传播给北部的城市。

哈莱姆文艺复兴主要是由非裔美国人参与与推动的。它建立在黑人投资者、黑人所拥有的商业组织以及出版社的支持体系上。尽管如此,它也依赖于一些白人的资助,比如 Carl Van VechtenCharlotte Osgood Mason, 这两个人提供了形式多样的协助,将黑人的出版业推广到了黑人社区之外。这种支持一般都以赞助 或者 初版的形式提供。

There were other whites interested in so-called "primitive" cultures, as many whites viewed black American culture at that time, and wanted to see such "primitive" in the work coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. As with most fads, some people may have been exploited in the rush for publicity.

Interest in African-American lives also generated experimental but lasting collaborative work, such as the all-black productions of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, and Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts. In both productions the choral conductor Eva Jessye was part of the creative team. Her choir was featured in Four Saints.[12] The music world also found white band leaders defying racist attitudes to include the best and the brightest African-American stars of music and song in their productions.

The African Americans used art to prove their humanity and demand for equality. The Harlem Renaissance led to more opportunities for blacks to be published by mainstream houses. Many authors began to publish novels, magazines and newspapers during this time. The new fiction attracted a great amount of attention from the nation at large. Some authors who became nationally known were Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Eric D. Walrond and Langston Hughes.

The Harlem Renaissance helped lay the foundation for the post-World War II phase of the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, many black artists who rose to creative maturity afterward were inspired by this literary movement.

The Renaissance was more than a literary or artistic movement, it possessed a certain sociological development—particularly through a new racial consciousness—through racial integration, as seen in the Back to Africa movement led by Marcus Garvey. W. E. B. Du Bois' notion of "twoness", introduced in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), explored a divided awareness of one's identity that was a unique critique of the social ramifications of racial consciousness.

哈莱姆文艺复兴的影响

黑人获得崭新的社会地位

 
兰斯顿·休斯(Langston Hughes), 小说家及诗人, 由卡尔·范韦克滕摄于1936年

"有时我觉得自己被歧视, 但这一点并不使我生气. 这仅仅让我有些惊讶. 难道有谁能说他与我为伴的时候不感到惬意吗? 这并不是我个人的原因." - 卓拉·尼尔·赫斯特[13]

哈莱姆文艺复兴是成功的,因为它将黑人的历史写进了 美国 文化史。 它不仅仅是一次 文化 的大爆炸, 还再 社会学的 层面上有重要意义, 哈莱姆文艺复兴的传奇不仅让美国,还让整个世界重新审视了非裔美国人。从美国南方来到北方的移民使非裔美国人的形象从未充分受教育的乡下人变成了老练的大都会居民。这种新的身份导致了一种新的社会意识, 非裔美国人正式登上了世界舞的大舞台,在国际上发挥他们的才干,拓展他们的交际圈。

在这一时期的所有进展,无论是象征性的还是实际的,都成为了非裔美国人群体拥有自决精神的参考点。从这一点开始,非裔美国人群体对黑人民族主义的意识越来越强了, as well as a foundation for the community to build upon for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s.

哈莱姆地区的快速发展为来自不同背景的非裔美国人开了一条欣赏黑人生活与文化多样性的快车道。 也就是说,哈莱姆文艺复兴推动了人们欣赏民族的根源及文化。例如,民族的物质元素和精神内涵为移民而来的艺术家和知识分子们提供了相当丰富的原始资料,将黑人从过去艰苦的环境下解放了出来。一种民族自我认同与团结的意识在对同一种民族文化的认同中涌现出来了。

对运动的批判

很多批判家指出,哈莱姆文艺复兴企图创立一个新的,与白人文化、欧洲文化从根本上完全分离的文化,这一点是其在 历史 上和 文化 上无法逃脱的。Often Harlem intellectuals, while proclaiming a new racial consciousness, resorted to mimicry of their white counterparts by adopting their clothing, sophisticated manners and etiquette. This 'mimicry' may also be called assimilation, as that is typically what minority members of any social construct must do in order to fit social norms created by that construct's majority. This could be seen as a reason for which the artistic and cultural products of the Harlem Renaissance did not overcome the presence of White-American values, and did not reject these values. In this regard, the creation of the "New Negro" as the Harlem intellectuals sought, was considered a success.

The Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience. The literature appealed to the African-American middle class and to whites. Magazines such as The Crisis, a monthly journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, an official publication of the National Urban League, employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staffs; published poetry and short stories by black writers; and promoted African-American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. As important as these literary outlets were, however, the Renaissance relied heavily on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines. A major accomplishment of the Renaissance was to push open the door to mainstream white periodicals and publishing houses, although the relationship between the Renaissance writers and white publishers and audiences created some controversy. W. E. B. Du Bois did not oppose the relationship between black writers and white publishers, but he was critical of works such as Claude McKay's bestselling novel Home to Harlem (1928) for appealing to the "prurient demand[s]" of white readers and publishers for portrayals of black "licentiousness."[14] Langston Hughes spoke for most of the writers and artists when he wrote in his essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926) that black artists intended to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought.[15]

African-American musicians and other performers also played to mixed audiences. Harlem's cabarets and clubs attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. Harlem's famous Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington performed, carried this to an extreme, by providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences. Ultimately, the more successful black musicians and entertainers who appealed to a mainstream audience moved their performances downtown.

Certain aspects of the Harlem Renaissance were accepted without debate, and without scrutiny. One of these was the future of the "New Negro." Artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance echoed the American progressivism in its faith in democratic reform, in its belief in art and literature as agents of change, and in its almost uncritical belief in itself and its future. This progressivist worldview rendered Black intellectuals—just like their White counterparts—unprepared for the rude shock of the Great Depression, and the Harlem Renaissance ended abruptly because of naive assumptions about the centrality of culture, unrelated to economic and social realities.

Notable figures and their works

Novels

Short story collections

Drama

Poetry

Leading intellectuals

Visual artists

Musicians and composers

See also

References

  1. ^ New York Times
  2. ^ New York Times
  3. ^ Jcu.edu
  4. ^ Los Angeles Times
  5. ^ Woods, Clyde. Development Arrested. New York and London: Verso. 1998. 
  6. ^ Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Anchor. 2009. 
  7. ^ Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. Harper Collins. 1988. 
  8. ^ The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Norton, New York, 1997, p. 931
  9. ^ Boland, Jesse. "Harlem Renaissance Music." 1920s Fashion and Music. Web. 23 Nov. 2009.
  10. ^ 1920s-fashion-and-music.com
  11. ^ Southern, Eileen. Music of Negro Americans a history. New York: Norton, 1997. Print, pp. 404, 405, and 409.
  12. ^ "Eva Jessye", University of Michigan, accessed 4 Dec 2008
  13. ^ Irving, Shae, Nolo's encyclopedia of everyday law: answers to your most frequently asked legal questions 7, Nolo: 68, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4133-0560-9 
  14. ^ Aptheker, H. ed. (1997), The Correspondence of WEB Dubois: Selections, 1877–1934, Vol. 1, pp. 374–5
  15. ^ Books.google.com

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