Obscurity, blackness, and the making of the Harlem Renaissance, 1919-present.

摘要

Although we generally use "Harlem Renaissance" to refer to African American cultural production of the 1920s and 1930s, this concept, as we are familiar with it today, is far more recent. In my dissertation, I consider the ex-post facto "making" of the Harlem Renaissance. From its inception in the 1920s, the Renaissance (initially the "Negro" and then "Harlem" Renaissance) has been an unstable but politically useful category for defining blackness. First popularized by Alain Locke in The New Negro (1925), the term was imagined to encourage, coordinate, and package an unprecedented burst of Negro writing, painting, music, and drama in an effort towards political and social equality. Between the late-1930s and the present, subsequent generations have continually returned to the concept of the Renaissance, re-shaping the field to respond to contemporary issues and to promote certain versions of African American identity, often in an attempt to challenge America's enduring racism. However, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, the Harlem Renaissance became increasingly narrow, and a substantial body of African American writing and art from the period was obscured, written out largely in order to consolidate "authentic" blackness and demonstrate the clear existence of tradition. Certain non-conforming authors, texts, bodies, performances, genres, events, and geographies were trimmed from the prevailing Renaissance narrative. My dissertation, in theorizing obscurity and recovering specific sites of persisting neglect, considers the politics of cultural memory, and how, why, and at what cost such erasure has occurred. Ultimately, I argue that the concept of the Renaissance, its canon, and its relationship to African American literature and American racial paradigms has revealed as much about the needs of the attending generation as it has informed us about the art and culture of the 1920s and 1930s.