Activist Arts and The Harlem Renaissance

Catalog description

In this class we will examine the activist impulse of visual, musical, and literary artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Walrond, Miguel Covarrubias, Jessie Fauset, Ethel Waters, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Paul Robeson, and Nella Larsen. We will also look at the intellectual-activists of the moment, including Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Charles S. Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Ernestine Rose, among others. Class will include occasional visits to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.