The “Harlem Renaissance” is now a dominant term for what is commonly thought to describe a cultural movement that emerged and faded in the period between the First and Second World Wars. Preceded by a variety of terms which came to the fore in the 1890s-1930s period, the “Harlem Renaissance”, from its little-known emergence in the late 1930s, became the hegemonic moniker in the early 1970s, displacing similar, yet distinct, alternatives which include: the New Negro, the New Crowd Negro, the New Negro Movement, the Negro Renaissance, the New Negro Renaissance, the Black Renaissance and the Harlem School. This essay traces a genealogy of such terms, metanarratives and historiographical currents, and aims to show how the hegemony of the term Harlem Renaissance is linked to its institutionalization as a subject and the rise of Black Studies in the United States. It also demonstrates how the weighting of Harlem as a category of the term and subject area, alongside the scholarship of foundational Black Studies scholars, both localized and nationalized a cultural development previously seen as having broad transnational and cross-cultural currents. The effect of this nationalization led to a selective historiography, diminishing a range of transnational and intercultural activity evident in discourses about the New Negro and the Negro Renaissance. The framework is trans-American and the scope transnational, while the chronology consists of an inner 1890s-1940s period, and a broad outer period which begins in 1701 and covers post-WWII writing about an earlier black-led “movement”. In following these flows, the essay aims to problematize the notion of distinct political or cultural channels of the “movement” or “movements”. It follows in the footsteps of work which makes the case that radical components of the “New Negro” have been downplayed, and argues that the political, and consequentially radical, aspects of this cultural development were indissoluble from its cultural-aesthetic elements. Recent scholarship attentive to some of the problems of earlier Harlem Renaissance studies has illustrated the key role played by Caribbeans in early twentieth-century art and politics. This essay, drawing on these insights, outlines how it is through a greater emphasis on Caribbean cross-currents that the transnational aspects of a black-centred cultural phenomenon have been better understood.
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