Chapter 4 - The Bildungsroman in the Harlem Renaissance

Summary

This chapter considers the prominence of the Bildungsroman in the Harlem Renaissance. Classically structured around the tension between self-fulfillment and social acclimation, the genre became an important site for African American authors to consider the Jim Crow logics of what childhood and maturation meant in the USA. It was also the vehicle for many of the Renaissance’s explorations of the multiple meanings of education – both education for race leadership, and conversely what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “caste schooling” system designed to replicate white hegemony. The genre also has a close relationship to the passing novel in a social situation where normative narratives of success and achievement were coded as racially white. The chapter focuses on Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun, but includes discussion of fiction by Nella Larsen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Wallace Thurman.