Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African-American social thought and culture based in the African-American community forming in Harlem in New York City (USA). This period, extending from roughly 1920 to 1940, was expressed through every cultural medium—visual art, dance, music, theatre, literature, poetry, history and politics. Instead of using direct political means, African-American artists, writers, and musicians employed culture to work for goals of civil rights and equality. Its lasting legacy is that for the first time (and across racial lines), African-American paintings, writings, and jazz became absorbed into mainstream culture. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after an anthology of notable African-American works entitled The New Negro and published by philosopher Alain Locke in 1925.

References

Background Information

• Houston A. Baker, Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1989) ISBN 0226035255
• Lionel C. Bascom, A Renaissance in Harlem : Lost Essays of the WPA, by Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, and Other Voices of a Generation (Amistad, 2001) ISBN 0380799022
• Mary Schmidt Campbell, Harlem Renaissance : Art of Black America (Abrams, 1994) ISBN 0810981289
• Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1973) ISBN 0195016653
• Nathan Irvin Huggins, Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1995) ISBN 0195093607
• George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Belknap, 1997) ISBN 0674372638
• David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (Penguin, 1997) ISBN 0140263349
• Alain Locke, The New Negro (1925)
• Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance : Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930 (Pantheon, 1996) ISBN 0679758895
• Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (University of Texas Press, 1997) ISBN 089096761X