Summer 1999
Volume 25, Number 4

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., says that "it is difficult not to recognize the signs that African Americans are in the midst of a cultural renaissance," and he numbers this renaissance the "fourth such movement in the arts in this century" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Harlem On Our Minds," Critical Inquiry 24 [Autumn 1997]: 2). He dates the first renaissance from about 1890 to 1910; the second and "most famous" renaissance, the New Negro movement, from about 1920 to 1929; the third, the Black Arts movement, from "1965 to the early seventies" (pp. 3, 4); he dates the current renaissance from about 1987 to the present, with Morrison's 1993 Nobel Prize its sure marker. To suggest that four renaissances have occurred in ninety-three years is perhaps to drain the term of explanatory power. African American culture has sustained vibrancy and power throughout the century; it is, instead, our criticism--our version of cultural history--that ascribes rise-and-fall patterns to culture in general, in this instance to twentieth-century African American culture, especially literature. As Gates himself says, "All renaissances are acts of cultural construction, attempting to satisfy larger social and political needs" (p. 9). Indeed, literary and cultural movements are always, at least in part, critical constructions as well; and many critics construct the 1920s and the 1990s as clear peak periods of African American cultural production.

What of the decades left out of Gates's chronology? The 1940s and 1950s witnessed the ascendancy of a number of important African American writers, many of whom merit far more scholarly attention than they have received to date (with Richard Wright an obvious exception). Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Gordon Parks, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Melvin Tolson produced some of their greatest writing during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s--all non-"renaissance" periods. Zora Neale Hurston's novels and her autobiography, reflexively and insistently assigned to the Harlem Renaissance, were published between 1934 and 1948. I do not wish to argue that there was no cultural flowering during the 1920s. But I do want to suggest that there is a contemporary academic selection process at work whereby the Harlem Renaissance often emerges as the most compelling moment in the history of African American culture, one that (not coincidentally) lends itself particularly well to generalization as well as periodization. Moreover, the Harlem Renaissance seems, for many critics, to represent a ready cultural and historical parallel to today's abundant African American cultural production.1

Gates argues persuasively for a kind of cultural, and perhaps sociopolitical, correspondence between the 1920s and 1990s, but he does not explore his own impulse to draw parallels between the two decades. Skipping a generation, he is speaking of, and to, the "grandchildren of Du Bois's 'Talented Tenth'" (p. 5). Contemporary scholars' frequent selection of the Harlem Renaissance as a field of inquiry in the 1990s may have reasons beyond the obvious--that is, the movement's rich and thrilling cultural record. At the same time, in what may well be a related phenomenon, there is widespread scholarly acceptance of certain, far from inevitable, constructions of the Harlem Renaissance. All too often, a handful of the editors and arbiters of the "most famous" renaissance are permitted to direct current interpretations, chronologies, and genealogies of the movement. This critical bias results, in part, from contemporary critics' frequent, and surprisingly uncritical, acceptance of the self-conscious (albeit ambivalent) assessment of the Harlem Renaissance offered by some of its own stars--especially W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes.

On the one hand, many of the arbiters of the New Negro Renaissance saw themselves as stars of an important cultural movement. As Locke put it in his 1925 manifesto, "The New Negro":

Harlem has the same rôle to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.

Harlem, I grant you, isn't typical--but it is significant, it is prophetic. No sane observer, however sympathetic to the new trend, would contend that the great masses are articulate as yet, but they stir, they move, they are more than physically restless. The challenge of the new intellectuals among them is clear enough.2

Gates notes that the New Negro writers held Harlem up as a wondrous cultural center, even as it "was turning into the great American slum" (p. 11). He observes a similar dynamic accompanying "today's renaissance"; once again, "stark statistics" regarding African American urban life are coinciding with a flourishing of African American arts and letters. Gates warns that the current renaissance therefore "runs the risk of suffering the sorts of critique that we level against the Harlem Renaissance" now, in the 1990s. He worries that a middle-class bias obtains in both the 1920s and the 1990s, that both movements will have failed to match their cultural output with the "social reality" of their day (p. 12). In other words, like Hughes in 1940, Gates today wants African American artists and writers to take note of "ordinary Negroes": "The ordinary Negroes," said Hughes in The Big Sea, "hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn't raised their wages any."4

Like Hughes, Gates believes that Harlem Renaissance writers failed to "explore what the hyphenation of class" cost. He argues that now, what "remains to be explored," in the fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, "are the lives and times of the grandchildren of the Bigger Thomases and Bessie Mearses of Native Son" (p. 12). Gates is taking today's writers to task for their failure to extend the literary project, not of Harlem Renaissance writers, but of Richard Wright (who stands metonymically for a nonrenaissance period). But a number of contemporary writers can be considered literary "relatives" (to use Ralph Ellison's term) of naturalist writers such as Wright and Ann Petry (as well as some Harlem Renaissance writers). Sapphire's Push and Barbara Neely's detective novels come to mind as clear exceptions to Gates's assessment; just because these books can be termed "female tale[s] of the transcendence and emergence of the self" does not then mean that they cannot also deliver some version (however controversial or contingent) of what Gates terms the "nightmare reality of black inner-city life" (pp. 11, 12). It is worth challenging customary evaluations--both of today's literature and of Harlem Renaissance writing--as overly optimistic or as socially blinkered.

As a result of their influence on entire generations of students of African American literature and culture, the evaluations of the Harlem Renaissance offered by popular histories and anthologies call for our particular attention. For example, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature contends that:

With very few exceptions, none of the younger writers of the movement saw himself or herself as part of the radical modernist strain of literature set in motion in America mainly through the efforts of poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and Wallace Stevens or by . . . James Joyce. . . . In part . . . these writers were after a different business altogether. Most could not be completely taken, for example, by T. S. Eliot's epochal figuring of the entire modern world as a "Waste Land." For many of them, the 1920s was a decade of unrivalled optimism, and all through the generations of slavery and neo-slavery, black American culture had of necessity emphasized the power of endurance and survival, of love and laughter, as the only efficacious response to the painful circumstances surrounding their lives.5

1. Gates does not argue, however, that the two movements are identical. He offers a clear and persuasive analysis of the particular social and institutional conditions that have produced and that characterize African American cultural production in the 1980s and 1990s: a "new presence and authority of blacks in cultural institutions," a "diversified, integrated audience," and so on (p. 7).

2. Alain Locke, "The New Negro," in The New Negro, ed. Locke (1925; New York, 1992), p.Ê7; hereafter abbreviated "NN."

3. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York, 1940), p. 228.

4. Ibid.

5. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Gates et al. (New York, 1997), p. 932.

Daylanne K. English has taught African American literature at Brown University and Caribbean literature at Brandeis University, where she is currently a lecturer. She is at work on two book-length projects: Eugenics, Modernism, and the Harlem Renaissance and The Rise of Africana Women's Novels.