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The flowerings of the Negro Renaissance in Harlem (1917–1935) and Chicago (1935–1950) were initiated by Pan Africanism, which speculates that black people share an origin and a heritage, that the welfare of black people is inevitably linked, and that the cultural products of blacks should convey their particular fundamental beliefs. The “extended forms” that Renaissance leaders wanted to see were produced by Duke Ellington. However, the New Negroes may not have perceived these events as significant to their goals, since Ellington's works did not meet their social requirements: Renaissance leaders' use of the term “symphonic” (meaning “orchestra”) was stimulated by the politics of “racial elevation,” and of the noble aspirations of Alain Locke and other intellectuals.

This chapter evaluates how the Great War modified the perceptions of gender. This chapter looks into the changing perceptions of gender that dominated during wartime. During the war period, the figure of a black officer trained at Des Moines became the symbol of New Negro masculinity and this was used in the New Negro literature of the 1920s. This New Negro masculinity was associated with patriarchal authority, Victorian gentility, and traditional ideas of martial heroism. These new forms of masculinity were often celebrated and subjected to subtle criticism in the literature of the 1920s. The most notable of these were Edward Christopher Williams's The Letters of Davy Carr, Walter White's The Fire in the Flint, and Nella Larsen's Passing. In contrast, several narratives also attempted to revise and broaden the masculinist articulations of the New Negro. These new articulations of the New Negro and black subjectivity were not only observed in literary representations and literature, this new black subjectivity also had an impact on the system of mass testing the physiology and IQs of soldier draftees. This new data garnered from these tests was much debated in the 1920s. The debate centered on issues of the racial basis of scientific methodology and the capacity of this new technology and science to quantify racial identity. Debates on the link between race and intelligence and the data garnered by these tests were used by anthropologists as basis for their claim of the emergence of a new and distinct African American physiology which paved the way for the emergence of the so-called “brown America”. Anthropologists and African American writer alike presumed and suggested the emergence of the cultural shift of the New Negro Renaissance, and this was largely connected to physiological changes that were observed during the 1920s.

The second chapter analyzes Davis’s literary style and intellectual agenda during the New Negro Renaissance. It shows how Davis, along with his good friend Sterling Brown, aimed to endow the poor black masses with humanity and virtue through a distinctive style of critical realism called “Negro Stoicism.” Publishing in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity magazines, Davis combined literature with polemical essays that promoted racial solidarity and critiqued the approaches of leading black intellectuals of the time. He criticized the “race chauvinism” of the older generation, led by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who used art as propaganda. He also castigated sordid representations of black people developed by many of the younger artists, led by Langston Hughes, who were influenced by modernism. Because Davis participated in the Renaissance from Virginia, and because he drew inspiration for his work from the poor blacks he encountered there, his ideas reveal the national scope of the New Negro Renaissance, and they make clear how bottom-up forces shaped the movement.

This chapter argues that the “Negro Renaissance” in Harlem and Chicago was spawned by Pan-Africanism, which suggests the belief that black people all over the world share an origin and a heritage, that the welfare of black people everywhere is inexorably linked, and that the cultural products of blacks everywhere should express their particular fundamental beliefs. The chapter describes the quandary of renaissance artists, intellectuals, and entertainers who drew inspiration from the vernacular yet professed allegiance to the styles and tone of high or modern culture. It also notes that the black arts manifesto of poet Hughes' generational cohort exemplifies the refusal of these artists and intellectuals to accept the hierarchical oppositional distinction between high (middle class, northern, urban) and low (folk, spiritual, rural).

This chapter focuses on American novels written during the Harlem Renaissance, a period of unprecedented artistic production spanning the early 1920s and the mid-1930s. Also known as the Negro Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance coincided with the New Negro Movement in which art and culture became the primary medium for black writers, artists, and intellectuals to counter racism and to advocate social and political change. The chapter explores how Harlem Renaissance novels offered representations of black people using new technologies such as photography, film, and recordings. It also considers the Harlem Renaissance novel's depictions of sex and sexuality, along with the genres with which Harlem Renaissance writers experimented, including science fiction and detective fiction. Finally, the chapter looks at a number of Harlem Renaissance novels, including Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (1926), Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932), Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), W.E.B. Du Bois's Dark Princess (1928), Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring (1932), and Countee Cullen's One Way to Heaven (1932).

The rise of modernism coincided with the emergence and reach of the blues. This chapter explores the influence of blues music on modernism, focusing on the importance, intricacies, and intimacies of Harlem or New Negro Renaissance. It argues that the achievement of African American writers (and sculptors and artists) should be considered one of the heights of modernism. The chapter also comments on the recent disregard heaped upon the notion of Africa as a popular theme in the Harlem Renaissance and how this attitude denies the power of place in the black imagination.

The chapter discusses the relationship between Zobel’s novels and the Négritude movement. By providing the first detailed contextualisation of the conditions in which he began to write novels, it also addresses the impact of the Harlem Renaissance (also known as the Negro Renaissance) for Zobel, and demonstrates how his work engages – through conceptual and formal resonances – with the two movements.

This chapter focuses on Black Americans and how they expended a remarkable amount of energy describing the history, culture, and current conditions of people in the nearby republic of Haiti. Their efforts went beyond nonfiction, with a diverse bunch of cultural producers turning their hands to the task, including librettists, composers, visual artists, filmmakers, photographers, and writers of short stories, poetry, novels, and plays. Such products were part of a cultural-political movement, known as the New Negro Renaissance, characterized by an intense scrutiny of all issues relating to black identity. Culture produced during the era challenged mainstream and dominant accounts of history, which claimed for the United States a unique position as the most progressive of nation-states, the founder of modern democracy, the place where the ideals formulated in ancient Greece finally came to fruition.

Big Bill left the Deep South for Chicago in the early 1920s for Chicago, a rapidly industrializing city with an expanding black population in the city’s south side. There, he discovered Bronzeville, the African American section of Chicago. At the time, Bronzeville was fully engaged in the New Negro Renaissance of the age where black southern migrants like Big Bill challenged established class, political, cultural, and social norms in a contest centered on remaking American blackness over as modern. Black Chicago and its expanding consumer marketplace became one of the nation’s centers for transforming African American identity and culture of the age.

The first chapter traces Davis’s social and intellectual influences in the first third of his life, from 1902 to 1931. In 1902, Davis was born into a relatively affluent black family in Washington, D.C. Though his family suffered from Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the federal government, Allison nevertheless achieved a first-rate education from Dunbar High School and was firmly part of the black middle class. After graduating as valedictorian, Davis studied English literature at Williams College from 1920 to 1924, again graduating as valedictorian. Then, he completed a master’s degree in English literature from Harvard College in 1925, where he was influenced by the New Humanism of Irving Babbitt. In 1925, Davis took a job as a professor of English at Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he worked until 1931. During these years, he contributed to the New Negro Renaissance while encouraging students to protest the administrative paternalism at Hampton and other white-run black colleges.