HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Catalog description

(Lecture). This course will focus on the arts of the Harlem Renaissance as experiments in cultural modernity and as forms of incipient political empowerment. What was the Harlem Renaissance? Where and when did it take place? Who were its major players? What difference did it make to everyday Harlemites? What were its outposts beyond Harlem itself? Was there a rural HR? An international HR? As we wonder about these problems of definition, we will upset the usual literary/historical framework with considerations of music and painting of the period. How to fit Bessie Smith into a frame with W.E.B. Du Bois? Ellington with Zora Neale Hurston? Aaron Douglas with Langston Hughes? Where is Harlem today? Does it survive as more than a memory, a trace? Is it doomed to be black no more? How does Harlem function in our national/(international?) imagination? Has the Harlem Renaissance's moment come and gone? What continuities might we detect? What institutions from the early twentieth century have endured?