Beyond the Harlem Renaissance: The Case for Black Modernist Writers

(This article originally appeared in Modern Language Studies in a special edition on theory and writers of color, edited by Bonnie TuSmith)

As an Americanist, my area of interest encompasses American Modernism, specifically literature and art produced roughly between 1920 and 1932 that record a distinct departure from aesthetics governing notions of art and beauty in the 19th-century. As an African Americanist, my area of specialization is literature and art of the Harlem Renaissance, works produced by African Americans between 1920 and 1932 that record a distinct departure from aesthetics governing notions of art and beauty in the African American community reified in the late 19th-century during the era of Post-Reconstruction. On first impression, the categorical distinction seems harmless enough and for students of American literature, the separation is assumed. Yet when the distinction is examined more closely, questions arise concerning what one Harlem Renaissance scholar poses as the intimate yet multifarious relationship between the Harlem Renaissance and American Modernism in terms of traditional literary theories and their relation to ethical literary interpretation. The distinction between the two movements, real or not, arises because American literary history views the Harlem Renaissance as an aesthetic movement contemporaneous with, but separate from, Euro-American Modernism. And while American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance both share such primary Modernist concerns as alienation, primitivism, and experimental form, the canon of American literature continues to posit the movements either as distinct or to read works of the era written by the few canonized African American writers in ways that dismiss the idea of modernity in the African American community.

I teach American Modernism in an urban academic institution, where, for the most part, classrooms are culturally and racially diverse. Needless to say, I include black authors--not as Harlem Renaissance writers on the periphery of a larger, Euro-American movement, but as black Americans participating in a global Modernist phenomenon whose intention was to redefine art, culture and aesthetics for the 20th-Century. My purpose in so doing is to have my students understand that American Modernism is not an aesthetic movement only affecting or affected by Anglo-Americans but, rather, one that crosses cultural boundaries. As such, I present American Modernism as a national cross-cultural movement, affecting and affected by African American aesthetics, including literature and art of the Harlem Renaissance. The strategy accomplishes two goals. First, my approach expands definitions of Modernism to include contributions of African and African American aesthetics. Second, the practice of grounding literary interpretation in such an expanded context places the notion of American Modernism in the realm of social theory; which, in turn, provides a means of interrogating the ideology shaping the Modernist movement in America. Among other things, my students come to understand the implications of subject position, especially the problems of interpretation when reader and text come from different cultural traditions. The second objective is significant to the goal of this paper, which is to consider what it means to validate theory in the classroom and to communicate assumptions which challenge and enhance the practice of teaching a broadened, more ethical concept of American Modernism.

Cultural theorist, Charles Taylor, suggests that clarifying the practice of theorizing contributes to a broader understanding regarding the scope and validity of theories. In our case, it is apparent that existing literary theories beg the question of the American in American Modernism and relegate the Harlem Renaissance to a position of parallel, but not equal. Using Taylor, we can see that existing theories follow the fixed cause-and-effect logic of the natural science model, an erroneous but prevalent view in academia since the 19th-century that natural sciences provide empirical models for methods and procedures for theories of social science. According to the logic of traditional literary history, the Modernist movement was influenced by a Euro-American Zeitgeist shaping an aesthetic characterized by specific qualities identifiable as "modern." However, a growing and more adequate theorizing of American Modernism operates from an implicit understanding that, on many levels, assumptions in existing theories are crucially inadequate or even wrong. In this sense, my idea of "theorizing American Modernism" provides what Taylor sees as a stronger motive for making and adopting theories, in that theorizing American Modernism, makes a claim to tell us what is really going on, revealing a course of events, hitherto unidentified.

Taylor claims that what is "really going on" may be seen only when a theory is situated in a causal matrix not previously known or understood. The assertion is particularly relevant to our theorizing project, which argues a more adequate theory of American Modernism to be one which utilizes a non-binary logic of both/and. Therefore, while literary history, informed by strict binary logic, still separates the two movements in racial terms, non-binary logic has a capacity to recognize the Zeitgeist shaping the Harlem Renaissance as both the same and different from that informing the traditional, or Euro-American Modernism. Moreover, claims of race as a distinction both with and without difference are argued in The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke in 1926, one of the architects of the Harlem Renaissance as an aesthetic movement. The New Negro was a collection of poems, stories, artwork and essays, including "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes. Locke, himself a Phi Beta Kappa Harvard graduate and the first black Rhodes scholar, was well acquainted with classical European culture, having lived and studied in England, Germany, and France. Locke's influence was instrumental in helping Renaissance writers to obtain fellowships for study abroad. Moreover, it is clear that Locke intended the role of the New Negro Renaissance in an international context, as evidenced in the Preface:

Europe seething in a dozen centers with emergent nationalities, Palestine full of a renascent Judaism--these are no more alive with the progressive forces of our era than the quickened centers of the lives of black folk. America seeking a new spiritual expansion and artistic maturity, trying to found an American literature, a national art, and national music implies a Negro-American culture seeking the same satisfactions and objectives. Separate as it may be in color and substance, the culture of the Negro is of a pattern integral with the times and with its cultural setting.

For Locke, the New Negro Renaissance was grounded in the trans-racial experience of Americanism, a view reiterated by Robert Hayden in his Preface to the anthology's reissue in 1968. Here, Hayden states:
"The Negro Renaissance was clearly an expression of the Zeitgeist, and its writers and artists were open to the same influences that their white counterparts were. What differentiated the New Negroes from other American intellectuals was their race consciousness, their group awareness, their sense of sharing a common purpose."

Like more African American scholarship in the 1970s, Nathan Huggins' groundbreaking comprehensive study of the Renaissance judges the era of the New Negro Renaissance to be an "American failure" because of naive assumptions about the centrality of culture that were unrelated to economic and social realities. Nevertheless, Huggins echoes Hayden's assessment of the Zeitgeist ruling the period and recognizes Locke's spiritual vision in so far as seeing the black Modernist search for the spiritual self as similar to that of deracinated white intellectuals that comprised the so-called lost generation.
At the same time, Huggins' comparison of the former introduces an important element in our theorizing project--the presentation of black Modernist writers not only in terms of cultural convergence but also in terms of cultural divergence. For example, my students, like Locke, attribute impulses motivating black American Modernist writers to be the same as those motivating white American Modernists and, in works such as Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), easily identify explicitly Modernist characteristics as those discussed by Modernist critics such as Irving Howe. It is at that point of comfortable consensus that I have them ponder the nature of the "psychic and social forces" gathering strength since the nineteenth century and it is here that the discussion reaches what I label as a point of binary impasse. For example, while World War One left younger white intellectuals with the sense of disillusion that characterizes the works of Ernest Hemingway, the participation of 340,000 African American soldiers in the war to make the world safe for democracy inspired poems such as "If We Must Die" by African American Modernist, Claude McKay. While white modernists works sought folk tradition as a panacea for over-industrialized society, fiction by Langston Hughes and Rudolph Fisher sought to record the transition and survival of folk culture in urban environments during the Great Migration.

The irony seems even sharper when one considers that the new Negro movement began following the internationally celebrated return of the all-black 369th Infantry in February of 1919, the first American troops of any color to march under the Victory Arch in Washington Square. Indeed, as David Levering Lewis notes, the return of the former 15th New York National Guard--as did the return of thousands of other African American soldiers-- infused black Americans with what he describes as a lifestyle and a dignity not only new to the nation, but soon to pervade the black community on a national level. As a result, while both black and white Modernists were alienated from a past to which they could not return, to posit that past or the emancipation, spiritual or other, as the same would be to deny distinct historical differences.
Locke's declaration that the motive for modern black writers was "in being racial...purely for the sake of art" is another example of which, as a movement, American Modernism lends itself to both dynamic reading, as well as critical misinterpretation. This becomes the case when black women writers are factored into the practice and students must consider gender difference within cultures, as well as differences in culture and history. As was the case with European Modernists, women played significant roles in promoting the Harlem Renaissance. As literary editor of Crisis magazine, Jesse Fauset was the first to publish Langston Hughes. Regina Anderson, librarian at the Harlem Public Library, kept black writers current on the latest works by European and white American Modernist writers, going so far as to compile a digest for reviews. Moreover, while Harlem was the Negro Capital of the World, it was not the only major metropolitan area with an urbane and artistic black community. Beyond Harlem, poet Georgia Douglas Johnson sponsored literary coteries at her home in Washington, D.C., as did poet Anne Spencer at her home in Lynchburg, Virginia. Nevertheless, for the most part, women's roles as cultural sponsors of the Renaissance were relegated to the private sphere of home, church, and school, a great deal of what Gloria Hull refers to as "professionally vital male socializing" occurred in bars, after hours, and over drinks. The difference, as Hull notes, raises questions of Harlem Renaissance fraternization and its relation to female role expectations.
Emphasizing cultural convergence, I make my students aware that the exclusion of women from decision making circles in the Harlem Renaissance parallels the situation in Euro-American Modernism as viewed by feminist critics, such as Lillian Hanscombe and Virginia Smyers, who find women writers of the Modernist period to be anomalous. Students become aware of the cultural implications in Hanscombe and Smyers' study of fourteen (white) Modernist women writers, which concludes that women Modernist writers were viewed as interlopers, as much at home in men's traditions as is a Third Worlder in the privileged landscapes of European society. Such claims generally lead to a discussion of subject position, particularly as we go on to examine implications of primitivism, a central tenet of white Modernism, which ascribes to black women the erotic exoticism of Josephine Baker. Students become aware that while gender issues can transcend race, such issues can also be misread if understood from the perspective of gender alone. This enables them to reconcile what Katherine Fishburn identifies as moments of misunderstanding, eventually coming to recognize (if not accept) that when one is faced with the problem of reading a text alien to one's own cultural experience, the ability to understand will inevitably be impeded by fundamental differences separating the two cultures.

Rather than focus on "universal truths" or "seamless experiences," the practice of theorizing subject position works best in those passages students find puzzling or irritating, as these are the moments when learning occurs at a deeper, or felt, level. My insistence that theorizing American Modernism should emphasize, rather than elide, difference is vulnerable to the charges that theories of multiculturalism threaten to split American universities into "balkanized tribal enclaves," I would argue that in the case of American Modernism, traditional, canonical approaches create a false separation by defining the contributions of black authors in terms of their absence, as well as a false unity by limiting factors for inclusion to exclusive interpretation. In reality, the risk of confusion caused by emphasizing difference is both necessary and real to broaden an understanding of the ideology shaping American Modernism in order to access cross-cultural discursive practices. Indeed, the tendency of Western culture to impose meaning on any of its cultural "others" in the name of a common understanding not only threatens the learning potential inherent in confusion, but instructs a concept of understanding that, in fact, does not-and can not--exist. Over the span of the 20th-century, it became increasingly apparent that Western principles of intellectual neutrality, universal values, universal reason, and other so-called "culture-free" theories failed to recognize the fallacy of using Western culture as the norm against which other people and cultures are measured and studied. Nor can it be argued that such theories have failed to construct an (almost) impalpable strategy to exclude ethnic minority voices, or that, as a rhetorical strategy, the practice is of fundamental concern to theories of cross-cultural discourse. In fact, such tactics of elision are the subject of one of the first critical anthologies to address the comprehensive effects of tactics of cultural elision in higher education. Published in 1990 by Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, The Nature and Content of Minority Discourse is, at present, out of print; however, the text remains one of the most accomplished of this nature.

Returning to the subject at hand, my approach to literary interpretation in terms of theorizing American Modernism attempts to counter two critical misconceptions resulting from culture-free theories: (1) that interpretation requires empathy (an element useful but not necessary to what understanding consists of), and (2) that understanding the "cultural other" involves the ability to adopt his or her point of view, or, as Charles Taylor would say, to speak in terms of language, describing and accounting for what the "cultural other" does in his own terms, in his society and in his own time. Again, the Modernist notion of primitivism in the context of gender provides a fitting illustration. In the traditional Modernist ideology, primitivism is characterized by a penchant for the innocent and sexually uninhibited, qualities attributed black feminist critic, Ann duCille, sees as a Eurocentric tendency to fetishize the differences of the non-white, "racially othered" female. I have my students recall the erotic exoticism of entertainer Josephine Baker used to characterize black women, in general. Often students themselves "confuse" the point beyond gender in order to reconsider representations of black males as central metaphors of primitivism in canonical texts by white Modernist male writers, such as Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.

As a pedagogical strategy, "going beyond the confusion" requires a discursive understanding in a language not culturally specific, a language capable of making sense of the contradiction gap between both the agent's self-definition and that of the observer. Taylor deems such a language to be one of perspicuous contrast, a language that recognizes to describe people in different terms is to describe their cultures in different terms, terms which often cannot be measured by the same standards. In the case of theorizing American Modernism, the language of perspicuous contrast is one able to address cultural difference while acknowledging that the experience of one culture is not that of another. Simply put, the historical experience and judicial ramifications of race policy in America has produced a distinction with a very significant difference. Nothing in Anglo American culture corresponds to the African American cultural experience of slavery, and its effect on black Modernist writing, whether mentioned or not, runs through Modernist texts by African American Modernist writers. For example, critical readings of Jesse Fauset's Plum Bun or Nella Larsen's Quicksand cannot occur without an awareness of the 19th-century tropes of chastity and moral rectitude against which these writers react. Nor can one assume that black women writers used are the tropes for the reasons, history, or purpose. Black women wrote in defense of retrogressionism, the ideology of white radical conservatives dominating policy and politics during the Post-Reconstruction era. Among other things, retrogressionism, or regressionism, held black women to hold "sex in mind and body," and to be licentious, voluptuous, and passionate as a matter of racial genetics. Without such, unguided readers will continue to reduce the devolution of Helga Crane, the novella character, to the fate of the "tragic mulatto." As is the case with works by white Modernists, male and female, Passing, Larsen's second novel written in 1928, answers almost all of Howe's requirements for a Modern text, including the author's intent to disturb the audience and threaten its most cherished sentiments-not the least of which would include notions of female homosexuality in the black community or the idea that one can pass for black. At the same time, when the context is expanded to include social history, as well as narrative convention, what is revealed is the lyrical economy with which Larsen critiques the hypocrisy of "racial uplift," one of the two impulses shaping the black community--and black literature--since the Post-Reconstruction era.

Ultimately, our project of theorizing American Modernism must confront the issues of validation and significance, a possible goal when framed in terms of Taylor's construct in that the act of theorizing American Modernism can be can be tested in practice. Moreover, according to Taylor's arguments, if theory can indeed transform practice, proof of the theory's validity will be discernable in the changed quality of the practice it informs. As I argue, theorizing American Modernism in terms of cultural nationalism brings to light cultural aspects and/or ramifications of literary interpretation heretofore ignored by traditional theories, thereby making possible what is clearly a more effective practice of reading strategies for literary interpretation. Taylor's quality of change is embodied through a more inclusive, informed, and, thereby ethical, interpretation of text, a deeper meaning that avoids the "false we" assumed in culture-free theories through a dynamic that incorporates differences as part of a critical reading strategies. Such strategies make optimum use of moments of misunderstanding, in that misconceptions become clear only when assumptions inherent in traditional theories in the Humanities are placed against a broader cultural matrix. Finally, it is important to emphasize that theorizing American Modernism is not posited as a recommendation to eliminate the Harlem Renaissance as an area of academic study but as a means to broaden the scope of defining American Modernism. The resulting pedagogical consequence will have ethical consequences in terms of a more broadly defined American Modernist aesthetic, one capable of crossing American cultural boundaries.

Adrienne Johnson Gosselin is Associate Professor of English at Cleveland State University. She is the editor of Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the "Other" Side, the first critical anthology on multicultural detective fiction. A creative writer, Dr. Gosselin is currently working to mount an adaptation of Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies for stage and completing The Last New Negro, a novel about African American soldiers in the First World War.

For further information on utilizing moments of misunderstanding in the classroom, plan to attend "Using Conflict in the Curriculum: Pedagogies, Collaborations, & Resources," March 22, 2002. Sponsored by the Humanities Consortium at Cleveland State University and its Cultural Crossing Lecture Series, the day-long conference for high school teachers will feature a presentation by Gerald Graff, University of Illinois at Chicago. Visit www.csuohio.edu/crossings or call 216.523.7173 for more information on the lecture series and the conference.