The Harlem Renaissance - Essay Example

"...Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painting black...let's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let's do the impossible. Let's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic." Thus spoke Aaron Douglas, a painter and one of the foremost exponents of what has come to be known today as the movement of Harlem Renaissance in African-American culture. The Harlem Renaissance took place in the 1920's mostly in the Harlem district of New York city, an area of three square miles where the African-Americans converged after the World War I. The Africa-Americans from the South were attracted towards the better economic opportunities and the more tolerant attitudes in the North, and especially in New York, and settled down in Harlem to form some of the most concentrated of African-American communities in existence today. Those African-Americans already settled in New York soon gravitated to this area, attracted by the buzz of new music, new art, and new possibilities. Douglas defines exactly what the writers, poets, musicians as well as visual and performing artists of the period were able to create, because all the angst, anguish and lyricism of the African-Americans poured out in their artistic and intellectual expressions. They told the story of African-Americans from the African-American perspective. The common themes of literary, musical and artistic works of the period were alienation, segregation, the common usage and appreciation of folk material, the reinforcement of the blues tradition, and a general air of optimism. In 1925 Alain Locke, a renowned critic and teacher edited the book The New Negro: An Interpretation and in it he described Harlem Renaissance as a "spiritual coming of age", wherein the African-American population was able to consolidate its "first chances for group expression and self determination" and turn its "social disillusionment into race pride." This book became one of the major documents of the Harlem Renaissance, along with other magazines that encouraged a new abundance of intellectual and artistic flowering. Magazines like Crisis, published by W. E. B. Du Bois and urged racial pride among African Americans, and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League encouraged the blossoming of sophisticated and highly original African-American literature, and also a certain degree of pride in being an African-American. A lot of this was possible also because of the popularity of things African-American amongst a big section of the whites, who were fascinated by the influx of African-American talent. One of the most important and well-researched aspects of the Harlem Renaissance is the literature born in the period amongst the African-Americans of Harlem. Writers like Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, and Jean Toomer produced a body of work that was both intensive as well as extensive in scope. Writers like Langspon Hughes made an immediate and lasting impact. Hughes left behind him a huge body of work, that included twelve volumes of poetry, as well as various works of fiction, drama and history. His work was full of a love of humanity, especially for African-Americans, a warm humor and understanding, and included a strong voice against the segregation of colored people all packaged in a sophisticated style of writing. Some of his works that made him famous are The Big Sea , The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, The Panther and the Lash, The Ways of White Folks. Other voices like Claude McKay, whom Hughes admired, were equally passionate in the subjects of romantic love, and a love of the Africa-American people in general, which is evident in some of his famous sonnets like The Harlem Dancer and Invocation . In 1925 Countee Cullen came up with a volume of poems titled Color, which was seen as a path-breaking achievement at the height of Harlem Renaissance, a collection which was sensuous yet hard-hitting and realistic. The common thread between all these poets was the angst, variously expressed, against the establishment that discriminated against people of color. In the field of fiction, the first name that dominated the arena of Harlem Renaissance is Zora Neale Hurston. Women writers from Harlem were known for their outspoken views, and Zora was no exception. She struggled against the greatest of odds to write novels like Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks on a Road, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive . Another fiction writer of note during the Harlem Renaissance was also a woman: Nella Larsen. She wrote only two novels, the Quicksand and Passing, which are today renowned for their mature use of imagery, symbolism and irony. A contemporary of Nella Larsen was Jean Toomer, who has today become famous for his work Cane, which is a collection of poems, sketches and short stories based on African-American life in of those times. Arna Bontemps was another writer and poet of note who led the Harlem Renaissance, writing novels like Black Thunder, We Have Tomorrow, You Can't Pet a Possum, Sad-Faced Boy and others. He is famous for his children's books and poems. All these writers and poets worked against incredible odds and discrimination, yet persevered in a tone of optimism, because of a variety of reasons. Some saw in the simplicity of daily lives of the African-Americans a cause for celebration, none had anticipated the economic depression that was to come in, and Harlem was in any case a pulsating center of African-American culture that encouraged, a light, carefree tone in literary expression. Another big factor in the Harlem Renaissance was the new influx of music, of jazz and blues, an experimentation with various combinations of European harmony with African rhythmic structures, which made for compulsive dancing numbers, but had deep lyrical content at the same time. Jazz was the most important musical form to emerge from Harlem, and as a genre it demanded a lot of innovation and improvisation. Music had become a way of liberating the African-American soul, and Jazz its most fluent and transcendent expression. As Saadi. A. Simawe notes in Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison: "Scholars of the Harlem Renaissance from Nathan Huggins to David Levering Lewis have noted the disdain the old school and many in the new had for jazz and blues, but all note that among the New Negroes Langston Hughes took these forms seriously and used them as a basis for an African American aesthetic, and those few who mention McKay note that he did as well. Sherley Anne Williams (1972) discussed the way McKay used Black music as "a symbol of liberation from a stifling respectability and materialistic conventionality which have an odor of decay about them," Musicians like Duke Ellington benefited from the influence of great masters like Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton from down South, and became a powerful player in the musical scene during the Harlem Renaissance. He was a talented band leader and musician, and thanks to his work and others like Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, James Flecther Henderson in clubs like the renowned Savoy Ballroom, Connie's Inn, Cotton club and Ed Small's Paradise and Apollo theater, Harlem Renaissance was as much about music as any of the other arts. These musicians held sway over New York during the 1920's and later, accompanying or competing with each other, and creating a rich repertoire of music. There were musicals like "Shuffle Along" written by Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, F.E. Miller, and Aubry Lyle, which became famous al over the world. Stars such as Josephine Baker who was famous for her sensuous abandonment in dance and other dancers like Adelaide Hall, Ada Ward, Ethel Waters, and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson took the Harlem Renaissance to new heights. The artists during the period of Harlem Renaissance fell back on folk tradition and introduced it into the arena of fine art. They created their own iconography because they had no existing structure and meanings to depend on, and went on to make strong statements about the African-American condition. Los Mailou Jones, William H. Johnson, and Palmer Hayden were a few of the artists that made their home in New York at various points of time, and shared in the Harlem Renaissance theme of depicting a "primitive" innocence, the travails and prejudices of colored existence, and borrowed African motifs in search of their roots and identity. Some were self-trained, some went to renowned academies in the United States, but all had a common penchant for all things African-American. The jazz music and dance scene featured frequently in paintings during the Harlem renaissance theme as did interpretations of African-American life against the background of segregation from the whites. Nancy Cunard said of Harlem in Harlem Review in the year 1933 that 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." This indeed was the hotbed of a Renaissance of the arts where the writers, musicians and artists chose artistic media to find their voice, rather than taking a more directly political option. The Harlem Renaissance has left a legacy of a huge body of literature, art and music, which has today become an integral part of the American culture. Works Cited Anthony D. Hill, Pages from the Harlem Renaissance: A Chronicle of Performance. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. p. 9. Saadi A. Simawe, Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison.New York:Garland, 2000. p, 43. Harold Bloom (ed.), Black American Prose Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. Nathan Irvin Huggins (ed.), Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, New York: Oxford, 1976. Richard J. Powell (ed.), Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 Read More