Rebirth of Harlem
The Renaissance of Harlem is a movement of revival of the Culture Afro-American, in the Entre-deux-guerres. Its cradle and its hearth are in the district of Harlem, with New York. This effervescence extends to several fields from creation, the arts, as photography, the music or painting, but it is especially the literary production which is affirmed like the most remarkable element of this blooming.
Supported by patrons and a generation of talented writers, the Rebirth of Harlem mark a major turning in the American black Literature which knows a certain recognition and a greater diffusion apart from the American black elite. The literature and the black culture S reach such tops during this period that some désigent Harlem like the “world capital of the black culture”.
Presentation and context
Origins
It is difficult to give an exact date for the beginning of the Rebirth of Harlem. It is allowed that it appears in the Entre-deux-guerres, i.e. it corresponds to the years 1920 and 1930. Some consider that the crisis of 1929 breaks the dash of the Rebirth of Harlem; others prolong it to the entry in war of the United States (1941).Since the Abolition of slavery in 1865, the American Blacks are confronted with the segregation. If they obtained the right to vote, the Afro-Americans in fact are excluded from the citizenship in the South of the country: several states impose tests of elimination of illiteracy or criteria of fortune to draw aside them from the vote. Vis-a-vis lynchings which intensify in the years 1890, vis-a-vis discriminations and with the mechanization of agriculture, several thousands of Afro-Americans leave the rural South to settle in the industrial towns of Midwest and the North-East.
In the years 1920, the US economy is prosperous, but the inequalities are important, and the Blacks appear among poorest. Only a small number of them succeeded in integrating the middle-classes and easy american company.
The movement of the Rebirth of Harlem seeks with émanciper the American Blacks; but it does not intervene in a total cultural vacuum: an American black literature exists since American independence with writers such as Frederick Douglass (towards 1818– 1895), W.E.B. Wood (1868– 1963) or Booker T. Washington (1856– 1915). The accounts of slaves, the tests free trade or historical, the press articles and the poems constitute this literature of the XIXe century. But with the Rebirth of Harlem, works multiply in all the fields, more largely diversify and are diffused. Harlem becomes the famous center of this new dynamism, so that one uses the expression “Rebirth of Harlem”, in reference to the rebirth Irish Littérature of the XIXe century.
Harlem at the beginning of the XXe century
New York attracts many American Blacks with the turning of the century. They are confronted with daily racism and are rejected center by the White. They gather in the district of Harlem, in the north of Manhattan. In the first decades of the XXe century, new artists and intellectual Afro-Americans tributary towards Large Apple and the majority are established or work in Harlem: the activist Marcus Garvey in 1918, the musician Duke Ellington in 1923 or Louis Armstrong in 1924-1925. Harlem becomes a major hearth of artistic creation with the installation of painters, sculptors (Richmond Barthé in 1929) and photographers (James Van Der Zee in 1932).
Conditions of the Rebirth
Several factors make it possible to explain this Rebirth, with initially the existence of a black middle-class which concentrates on Sugar Hill in the years 1920. Harlem becomes the place of appointment of the elites Afro-Americans of New York, which reaches at that time the row of world city of the culture.Then, the universities in the east of Harlem form an elite Afro-American. For example, the journalist, writer and poet Langston Hughes obtain his diploma of the Columbia university to the beginning of the year 1920. The City College off New York is opened with most underprivileged and the ethnic minorities as of the middle of the XIXe century. The poet and novelist Jean Toomer made there his studies. Generally, the majority of the writers and artists of the Rebirth of Harlem made higher learning in Harvard or in other universities.
Lastly, the intellectual boiling is supported by associations, organizations and newspapers. It is supported by black patrons and guards (Alain Locke) or white: the photographer and writer Carl van Vechten (1880– 1964) are one of them. One owes him of many stereotypes of the great figures of the Rebirth of Harlem. The press is another vector of promotion of the culture Afro-American. Thus, the magazine The Crisis, founded in 1910 within NAACP in the offices of the New York Evening Post (auj New York Post), publishes lampoons and articles of the black authors. The monthly magazine also makes know literary works of Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer in the years 1920. The New York Amsterdam News which opens in Harlem in 1909, takes part in the diffusion of the writings of militants W.E.B. Dubois, Roy Wilkins and Adam Clayton Powell Jr..
Characteristics and actors of the Rebirth of Harlem
Literature
The vitality of the Rebirth of Harlem appears in the multiplication of works and their diversity, like by their broad success. It passes by a reflection on the condition of the Afro-Americans in the american company. Way is led to the beginning of the XXe century by Booker T. Washington (1856– 1915) which wishes to cooperate with the White to gradually improve the fate of the Afro-Americans. This vision is opposed to that of W.EB. Dubois (1868– 1963), one of the founders of NAACP in 1909, an organization which militates in favor of the equality of the minorities, which prefers to support the emergence of a black elite.
One finds the topics of the injustice and intolerance in other Afro-American authors of the inter-war period: certain works of Langston Hughes (1902-1967) take a political turning, even ideological. The black novelist Wallace Henry Thurman (1902-1934) denounces with realism the living conditions of his contemporaries. Dorothy West (1907-1998) described as for it the life of an easy black family in The Living room is Easy .
The Rebirth of Harlem emphasizes the African heritage. The American black literature is inspired then by the African folklore while borrowing from the most various forms: hymns, animalist tales, superstitions, riddles. James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) adapts the structures of the black sermon (black Protestantism). Other authors are interested in the dialect Afro-American of the major south. Landson Hugues uses the language of the ghetto and the forms of the blues. The influence of the jazz and the blues is read in the ballades of Sterling Brown (1901-1989).
In Heritage , Countee Cullen celebrates the African continent. Emigrated Jamaïcain with Harlem Marcus Garvey (1887– 1940) preach as for him the return of the Blacks on the African ground.
The recognition of the culture Afro-American is stimulated by the work of black historians such as Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938). Called the Father of the American black history, this last gathers during its life a great number of objects, manuscripts and documents rare on the black-American history. Part of this collection is today preserved at Schomburg Center in Harlem. In 1936, the writer and poet Arna Bontemps describe the revolt of Gabriel Prosser in 1801 in his novel Black Thunder . Exciting resistance to slavery, it attests the part played by the black community in its own release.
The authors of the Rebirth of Harlem develop the American black identity: this program is outlined by Alain Locke, in The New Negro ( the New Black , 1925). Alain Locke is an Afro-American, graduate in philosophy of Harvard. In its writings and its personal course leaves intellectual, it fights the Stéréotype S on the Black slave or savage. In Harlem, it helps the artists, the writers and the black musicians of his time and fact of the district “Mecque of the black revival”. These ideas are not without pointing out those of the négritude, definite at the same time in West Africa.
But this black pride is also criticized or turned in derision, including by black writers like George Schuyler (1895-1977). In 1931, Schuyler publishes Plus Black (Black No More), which tells the history of a scientist who invents a machine able to transform a Black into White. He criticizes at the same time violence Ku Klux Klan and excesses of NAACP. The program of the Rebirth of Harlem is finally subjected to debate: the literature must it be held for the black elite or integrate the popular culture, between primitivism and modernism.
The Rebirth of Harlem knows in the years 1920 and 1930 a radiation and a success which goes well beyond the USA. The American black literature is recognized and rewarded by literary prizes: for example, the novel of Claude McKay (1889-1946) Home to Harlem (1928), gains Hamon Gold Award for Literature. A French translation due to Louis Guilloux appears in 1932. The novel, which described the life in the streets of Harlem, was going to have an major impact on the black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe.
Music
- the jazz
-
the places
-
the gospel
Arts
Initiators of the Rebirth of Harlem
- W.E.B. Wood
- Alain Locke
- Jessie Redmon Falsetto
Patrons
- Arthur Schomburg
- Carl van Vechten
- A' Lelia Walker
- max Eastman
- Charlotte Osgood Mason
Militants, Intellectuals, and writers
Artists, photographers, and sculptors
Artists of the entertainment world
Symbolic systems places of the Rebirth of Harlem
- Knitting machine Club
- Apollo Theater
- Savoy Ballroom
- Small' S Paradise
- Connie' S Inn
- Speakeasies
- Rent party
See too
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