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Taking the incredible flowering of African-American literature in the 1920s as its starting point, Looking for Harlem offers a cogent and persuasive new reading of a diverse range of twentieth-century black American writing. From the streets, subways, hotels and cabarets of New York's Harlem and Chicago's Southside, Maria Balshaw moves beyond the canon to encompass often neglected writing by Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman and Claude McKay, as well as the more familiar work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Nella Larsen and Toni Morrison. In a provocative revision of African-American literary history, Balshaw examines the creation of an ‘urban aesthetic’ and explores the links between the engagement with the city and fictional reconstructions of racial identity and race writing. Focusing on the material culture of the city, the visual sense of the urban environment, the class dynamics of urban culture and the crucial importance of consumerism, this study presents a critically astute, challenging and very welcome new approach to a much-studied area of contemporary American fiction. [Maria_Balshaw]_Looking_For_Harlem_Urban_Aestheti_BookZZ.org_

The Harlem Renaissance is rightly considered to be a moment of creative exuberance and unprecedented explosion. Today, there is a renewed interest in this movement, calling for a re-evaluation and a closer scrutiny of the era and of documents that have only recently become available. Temples for Tomorrow reconsiders the period—between two world wars—which confirmed the intuitions of W. E. B. DuBois on the "color line" and gave birth to the "American dilemma," later evoked by Gunnar Myrdal. Issuing from a generation bearing new hopes and aspirations, a new vision takes form and develops around the concept of the New Negro, with a goal: to recreate an African American identity and claim its legitimate place in the heart of the nation. In reality, this movement organized into a remarkable institutional network, which was to remain the vision of an elite, but which gave birth to tensions and differences. This collection attempts to assess Harlem's role as a "Black Mecca", as "site of intimate performance" of African American life, and as focal point in the creation of a diasporic identity in dialogue with the Caribbean and French-speaking areas. Essays treat the complex interweaving of Primitivism and Modernism, of folk culture and elitist aspirations in different artistic media, with a view to defining the interaction between music, visual arts, and literature. Also included are known Renaissance intellectuals and writers. Even though they had different conceptions of the role of the African American artist in a racially segregated society, most participants in the New Negro movement shared a desire to express a new assertiveness in terms of literary creation and indentity-building. [Genevieve_Fabre__Michel_Feith]_Temples_for_Tomorr_bookos-z1.org_

Whether in schoolrooms or kitchens, state houses or church pulpits, women have always been historians. Although few participated in the academic study of history until the mid-twentieth century, women labored as teachers of history and historical interpreters. Within African-American communities, women began to write histories in the years after the American Revolution. Distributed through churches, seminaries, public schools, and auxiliary societies, their stories of the past translated ancient Africa, religion, slavery, and ongoing American social reform as historical subjects to popular audiences North and South. This book surveys the creative ways in which African-American women harnessed the power of print to share their historical revisions with a broader public. Their speeches, textbooks, poems, and polemics did more than just recount the past. They also protested their present status in the United States through their reclamation of that past. Bringing together work by more familiar writers in black America-such as Maria Stewart, Francis E. W. Harper, and Anna Julia Cooper-as well as lesser-known mothers and teachers who educated their families and their communities, this documentary collection gathers a variety of primary texts from the antebellum era to the Harlem Renaissance, some of which have never been anthologized. Together with a substantial introduction to black women's historical writings, this volume presents a unique perspective on the past and imagined future of the race in the United States. [Laurie_F._Maffly-Kipp__Kathryn_Lofton]_Women's_Wo_bookos-z1.org_

During the New Negro Renaissance, African American children's literature became a crucial medium through which a disparate community forged bonds of cultural, economic, and aesthetic solidarity. Employing interdisciplinary critical strategies, including social, educational, and publishing history, canon-formation theory, and extensive archival research, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance analyzes childhood as a site of emerging black cultural nationalism. It explores the period's vigorous exchange about the nature and identity of black childhood and uncovers the networks of African Americans who worked together to transmit black history and culture to a new generation. [Katharine_Capshaw_Smith]_Children's_Literature_of_bookos-z1.org_

Flamboyant, excessive, and full of changes, the 1920s fell between the two great wars of the 20th century. Characterized in America by the trends of Prohibition, bootleggers, the Harlem Renaissance, Art Deco design, and the Jazz Age, this period witnessed a shift in gender relations and moral values as well as the first generation gap. While rural life became marked by religious fundamentalism, urban life tended to an eager acceptance of modernity, a difference highlighted by the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The 1920s were a time of great transition that is often regarded as a period of carefree indulgence by the post - World War II generation. [Rodney_P._Carlisle]_The_Roaring_Twenties_1920_to_bookos-z1.org_

In this intellectual history, Minkah Makalani reveals how early-twentieth-century black radicals organized an international movement centered on ending racial oppression, colonialism, class exploitation, and global white supremacy. Focused primarily on two organizations, the Harlem-based African Blood Brotherhood, whose members became the first black Communists in the United States, and the International African Service Bureau, the major black anticolonial group in 1930s London, In the Cause of Freedom examines the ideas, initiatives, and networks of interwar black radicals, as well as how they communicated across continents. Through a detailed analysis of black radical periodicals and extensive research in U.S., English, Dutch, and Soviet archives, Makalani explores how black radicals thought about race; understood the ties between African diasporic, Asian, and international workers' struggles; theorized the connections between colonialism and racial oppression; and confronted the limitations of international leftist organizations. Considering black radicals of Harlem and London together for the first time, In the Cause of Freedom reorients the story of blacks and Communism from questions of autonomy and the Kremlin's reach to show the emergence of radical black internationalism separate from, and independent of, the white Left. 0807835048

The Making of the New Negro examines black masculinity in the period of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s in America and was marked by an outpouring of African American art, music, theater and literature. The Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement, began attracting extensive academic attention in the 1990s as scholars discovered how complex, significant, and fascinating it was. Drawing on African American texts, archives, unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, this book highlights both the canonical figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture such as W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, and other writers such as Wallace Thurman, who have not received as much scholarly attention despite their significant contributions to the movement. [Anna_Pochmara]_The_Making_of_the_New_Negro_Black_bookos-z1.org_