Fiction

Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance is notable for its concentration on contemporary life and its cultural instability—in other words, for its modernity. Anticipated by earlier novelists such as James Weldon Johnson in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (published anonymously in 1912; republished under his name in 1927) and Du Bois in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), the novelists of the renaissance explored the diversity of Black experience across boundaries of class, colour, and gender while implicitly or explicitly protesting anti-Black racism. In There Is Confusion (1924) Jessie Redmon Fauset considered the transformation of mainstream culture effected by the new Black middle class and by the Black creative arts. Using the conventions of the novel of manners, Fauset advanced themes of racial uplift, patriotism, optimism for the future, and Black solidarity. Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924) focused on the career and then the lynching of a Black physician and veteran of World War I. Protesting racial oppression and exposing its most barbaric expressions, White’s novel also brought attention to a distinguished Black professional class whose progress was being blocked by prejudice.

After the publication of Toomer’s, Fauset’s, and White’s books, which proved that Black authors could place their work with prestigious publishing firms, Black writers and critics debated the directions Black fiction might take away from the propaganda of racial uplift and toward more nuanced and psychologically complex treatments of Black experience. The question also arose as to whether new styles and literary forms might be needed to convey Black experience and sensibilities in fiction. On the other hand, were there elements of Black experience that, considering the continuing power of damaging white stereotypes, would be better left untouched? Du Bois worried that white editors and readers would draw Black authors into an empty aestheticism or salacious modes of primitivism. The immense sales of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven seemed to confirm his fears, especially after some younger Black authors came to that novel’s defense and, about the same time, Harlem became a popular nightlife destination for slumming whites. Interracial parties, hosted by Blacks as well as whites, also developed supportive networks and patronage for the movement. The extent to which such patronage led the movement astray and ultimately destroyed it has been a point of contention ever since.

Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher were two significant novelists (and friends) whose work explores issues of racial psychology, class, and sexuality in the modern city. Larsen explored the psychology of urban sophisticates in her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), analyzing the psychological intricacies of race consciousness and exposing the massive pressures to subordinate women’s sexuality to the rules of race and class. The daughter of a white immigrant from Denmark and a Black West Indian cook, Larsen knew intimately the price colour-line culture exacted of those who transgressed its most fundamental rules, and her fiction remains unequaled for the originality and incisiveness with which it exposes the contradictions of identities founded on the assertion of absolute difference between “Black” and “white.” Hers was a unique achievement at a time when de facto and de jure segregation were becoming ever more entrenched features of American society.

Overall, Fisher’s work presented a nuanced interpretation of the urban geography—and modernity—of Harlem. He expertly explored the ethnic and class diversity of the Black metropolis as rural Southern and Caribbean migrants adjusted to and transformed it. In his short stories his use of Black music as well as its contexts of performance to complement or advance narrative tensions and thematic concerns was groundbreaking. His novels The Walls of Jericho (1928) and The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)—the latter among the earliest Black detective novels—also display a keen concern with Black male psychology that in some respects prefigures the work of much later authors in the canon of African American fiction, particularly Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and John Edgar Wideman.

Two prolific and central figures of the renaissance produced significant, politically radical novels that envision Black political identity in a global framework: Du Bois in Dark Princess (1928) and McKay in Banjo (1929). Both novels show the strong influence of Marxism and the anti-imperialist movements of the early 20th century, and both place their hopes in the revolutionary potential of transnational solidarity to end what they consider to be the corrupt and decadent rule of Western culture. However, in many respects the books could hardly be more different, both formally and thematically: Du Bois’s takes the form of the quest romance, McKay’s that of the picaresque tale. The similarities and contrasts between the novels both reveal the importance of Marxist and anti-imperialist thought to the Harlem Renaissance and suggest enduring tensions in the Black radical tradition.

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African American literature: The Harlem Renaissance

The decade of the 1920s was an age of satire and “debunking”—urbane, sophisticated, sometimes cynical and decadent. H.L. Mencken, a white magazine editor and satirist at the height of his career in the 1920s, was greatly admired by a number of major Harlem Renaissance authors, especially White, Schuyler, and Wallace Thurman. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) explores the possibilities of satirical fiction more thoroughly than any other novel of the era by centring on American racial mores. Thurman’s novels The Blacker the Berry… (1929) and Infants of the Spring (1932) also direct fundamentally satirical barbs at the contradictions in American racial culture and at the “Negro renaissance” itself. Black No More and Infants of the Spring are often read as comments on the failure of the Harlem Renaissance, but they were much in tune with the spirit of the age of burlesque and debunking. Satire of the Negro Vogue was an important aspect of the renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance also coincided with a rising interest in “folk fiction,” particularly that about the Black South. White authors such as Paul Green and Julia Peterkin enjoyed tremendous success in the mid-1920s, indicating the existence of an audience for work that took a more realistic, if still limited and sentimental, approach to the Black Southern “folk.” Black authors and critics felt the time had come for Black writers to reveal the truth of Black Southern experience as no white authors could, and no one was more successful in doing this than Zora Neale Hurston. A native of the rural South who was intimate with Black folklore as well as modernist ethnography, Hurston departed from the scholarly ethnographic practice of the time as her literary ambition grew. A dialectical relationship can be noted between her ethnographic and “purely” fictional texts. The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) treats the maturation of Janie Crawford through a series of relationships and dramatic experiences while using a free indirect discourse (a mode of representing a character’s consciousness from a third-person point of view but in an informal, colloquial style seemingly identical to the character’s) that melds vernacular language and folk motifs with a more standard “literary” voice. It is widely regarded as one of the signal achievements of the Harlem Renaissance.

Drama

Drama of the Harlem Renaissance sought to overcome the decades-long hold on the popular imagination exerted by blackface minstrelsy, which had created a powerful range of damaging stereotypes that constrained theatrical presentation of Black life. Critics, playwrights, and actors debated the function of drama, as well as its subject matter and the style of presentation of “Negro experience.” A number of white-authored plays about Black life gained great critical and box-office success from the late 1910s through the mid-1930s, giving valuable experience to Black performers and inspiring Black dramatists. Most notable were Ridgely Torrence’s Plays for a Negro Theater (1917), Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1921), Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom (1927), and Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures (1929). These plays also moved some Black playwrights to present more authentic examples of what were called “Negro plays.” New all-Black theatre groups arose in several cities.

Alain Locke, partly influenced by the Abbey Theatre of Ireland, believed that Black drama should develop from the “folk play” and reveal the soul of a people rather than focusing on protest or promoting a political agenda. Du Bois, on the other hand, emphasized that “all art is propaganda.” The tension between these two positions defined much of Black-authored drama between 1917 and 1937. Playwrights included Dunbar Nelson, Grimké, Hurston, Thurman, Hughes, Mary P. Burrill, Marita Bonner, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, Eulalie Spence, Frank Wilson, and Randolph Edmonds. Richardson was the most prolific. Much influenced by Locke’s ideas, he focused his early plays on folk experience in the South, but over time his plays came to have more of an educational or encouraging message. The Chip Woman’s Fortune was picked up by the Ethiopian Art Theater of Chicago (a “Black” company organized by white director Raymond O’Neil), and, when the troupe played a season in New York City in 1923, it became the first Black-authored nonmusical drama on Broadway. Other significant plays by Richardson include Compromise: A Folk Play (1925) and Broken Banjo (1925).

A friend and admirer of Locke, Georgia Douglas Johnson also authored a number of plays in the 1920s and ’30s. Her plays tended to focus on folk experience, often centring on women, but they also protested racial oppression and especially lynching—a common theme in Harlem Renaissance drama by women. Hurston held a position similar to that of Locke about the importance of folk plays, but she went further, suggesting that such drama should grow from the styles and modes of performance found in rural Southern “jook joints” (small-town nightclubs) and storefront porches and in urban all-Black cabarets. In her view, mimicry, ostentatiousness, angular movement, and playfulness characterized Black folk expression, whereas Locke (more influenced by the folk theatre of Europe and Romantic aesthetic theory) emphasized simplicity, poise, and formal symmetry. Hurston’s plays drew on her vast firsthand knowledge of rural Southern folklore and freely used humour and exaggeration in depicting everyday Black life, risking charges even today that they reinforce stereotypes. Some of her short plays made Broadway after being incorporated into the musicals Fast and Furious (first performed 1931) and The Great Day (first performed 1932).

Thurman cowrote with William Jourdan Rapp the successful and somewhat controversial play Harlem, a fast-paced slice of the “lower” end of Harlem life, notable for its vernacular and slang-ridden dialogue. It landed on Broadway for 93 performances, and, while it drew much praise in the white press, it had a mixed reception among Blacks, some of whom resented its concern with only the “lowest” aspects of a population too often identified in the mainstream imagination with vice, crime, and moral lassitude.

Most successful of all the Black-written plays of the Harlem Renaissance was Hughes’s Mulatto (written 1931, first performed 1935), adapted from his short story Father and Son. Set on a plantation in Georgia in contemporary times, it concerns the tragic consequences of a white man’s inability to acknowledge his only children because they are mulatto, born to the Black house servant with whom he lives in a common-law marriage of sorts. The play explores the Oedipal struggle between the plantation owner and his eldest son, who is much like him and demands acknowledgment, and it ends with the patriarch’s death at the son’s hands and the subsequent lynching of both the eldest son and his younger, less rebellious brother, their mother cursing the corpse of the white man she once loved.

Overall, Black drama of the Harlem Renaissance shows a steady development of dramatic form, with folk drama becoming a successful vehicle of reflection on the nature and significance of the Black American experience that often included an indictment of white institutions. At the same time, Black actors gained unprecedented opportunities (though still limited by racism) to perform before all-white, mixed, and all-Black audiences. By the mid-1930s a Negro Actors Guild had formed, and Black actors had achieved a significant foothold in American theatre.