HarlemRenaissance

• Definition In the early 1900s, particularly in the 1920s, African-American literature, art, music, dance, and social commentary began to flourish in Harlem, a section of New York City. This African-American cultural movement became known as "The New Negro Movement" and later as the Harlem Renaissance.

• Historical Context The end of World War I brought a sudden economic growth, which spread industrialism and a mass migration to cities. "Between the two World Wars, over one million African Americans moved to the North" They relocated in areas such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. This brought an unprecedented out burst of creative activity among the black Americans in all fields of art. During WWI, hundreds a blacks migrated to the North to take advantage of the job opportunities. The South only offered Jim Crow laws, segregation, and unemployment. African Americans left the South in search of new beginnings and new ways of life.

• Important Authors & works Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel “//Their Eyes Were Watching God”//. It represented a women’s self development through her three married ages. Nella Larsen's importance as a writer is based upon her two novels; she was unable to complete a third one. She spent her last thirty years as a supervising nurse at a Brooklyn hospital. Both //Quicksand// (1928) and //Passing// (1929) are admired for their use of irony and symbolism dealing in themes of identity, 'passing,' marginality, race consciousness, sexuality, and class distinction.

• Common Themes Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro who through intellect, the production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes of that era to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of art and literature would serve to "uplift" the race.

• Common Techniques and/or Style No common literary style or political ideology defined the Harlem Renaissance. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common endeavor and their commitment to giving artistic expression to the African American experience. Some common themes existed, such as an interest in the roots of the 20th-century African American experience in Africa and the American South, and a strong sense of racial pride and desire for social and political equality. But the most characteristic aspect of the Harlem Renaissance was the diversity of its expression. From the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s, some 16 black writers published more than 50 volumes of poetry and fiction, while dozens of other African American artists made their mark in painting, music, and theater.

• Reason for Decline or Change A number of factors contributed to the decline of the Harlem Renaissance by the mid-1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s increased the economic pressure on all sectors of life. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, which had actively promoted the Renaissance in the 1920s, shifted their interests to economic and social issues in the 1930s.The Harlem Renaissance ended when most of those associated with it left Harlem or stopped writing. Among the new young artists who appeared in the 1930s and 1940s, social realism replaced modernism and primitivism as the dominant mode of literary and artistic expression.