Jonathan Shandell offers an overview of the Negro Little Theatre Movement, the twenty-year period between the 1910s and 1930s that witnessed the flourishing of small, independent theatres across the country. As Shandell notes, these theatres “took root in library auditoriums, churches, community centers, universities, and anywhere else a platform could be built and artists and audiences might gather.” This chapter spotlights a handful of these theatres – the Anita Bush Stock Company, the Ethiopian Art Theatre, the Krigwa Players, the Harlem Suitcase Company, and the Karamu Theatre of Cleveland – and discusses both their evolution and lasting impact. Along the way, Shandell chronicles the efforts of several individuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Charles Gilpin, who were instrumental to their creation. The chapter ends with a brief account of the Federal Theatre Project’s “Negro units” and their aesthetic similarity to African American little theatres.

Writing the history of African American literature in the 1930s necessitates reconsidering issues that emanated from the 1920s, with a view toward showing how they underwent change in the 1930s. Four overlapping foci demonstrate how change, in these two eras, was less disjunctive than evolutionary: (1) a shift in the meaning of racial uplift, (2) quest for racial authenticity, (3) efforts to increase cultural competence, and (4) the writing of literary history. By the mid-1920s, this history can be gleaned, at least initially, in the adult education movement, which had come to define its mission as not simply acquiring knowledge but applying it to problem-solving in real-life situations. Organizations like the American Association for Adult Education (AADE), the Carnegie Foundation, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund provided financial support for education that reconciled intergroup conflicts, inequities, and the marginalization of citizens. Adult education in the 1930s slowly gave way to a list of competing literary critical approaches that revised the earlier conversation taking place about the nature and purpose of performing African American literary history.

This chapter addresses the potency of the idea of Harlem as a crucible for the formulation of Black modern cultural identity. By focusing on community politics during the 1920s, King rereads James Weldon Johnson’s representation of Harlem in Black Manhattan (1930) as a space of interracial comity and liberalism as a form of propaganda and myth-making. Written as the nation’s economic situation worsened, Black Manhattan functioned as cultural treatise that legitimized the Harlem Renaissance as well as the possibilities it held for urban Black America and the nation at large. King juxtaposes Johnson’s liberal image of Harlem with the lived experience of Harlemites’ encounters with police surveillance and violence, displacement of Black leisure life, as well as labor exploitation. In this way, the chapter challenges Johnson’s narrative of New York exceptionalism, without underestimating the significance that Harlem held for Johnson and many other Black elites during the advent of the Great Depression.

This chapter considers Ellison’s contradictory relationship to the black writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. While Ellison met and conversed with Alain Locke about black writing as an undergraduate at Tuskegee, and benefitted directly from mentoring by African American creative forebears like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright after his move to New York in the late 1930s, he also expressly distanced himself from these figures later. In chapters like 1963-64’s canonical “The World and the Jug,” for example, Ellison emphasizes the influence of various white modernists like T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and André Malraux as he downplays his debt to Hughes and Wright, both of whom bookended the politicized aesthetic of the Renaissance. As a counterpoint, I consider Ellison stylistic points of resemblance with these earlier black modernists to suggest a more substantial genealogical connection than Ellison himself admitted at times in his own rhetorical self-fashioning.

Conceptualizing “black space” as both human and spatial geographies enables a linkage of New Negro modernism and southern realities, a linkage that in turn foregrounds the importance of the American South in the making of the literary and cultural production of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance. The American South contributed literally and figuratively to the burgeoning critical and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, and not merely in terms of contemporary writers and artists of southern birth but especially in terms of historical customs, traditions, and practices of racial segregation, discrimination, and trauma underpinning the modern race writing appearing in magazines, journals, and newspapers during the 1920s.

This chapter identifies an alternative trajectory for tracing Alain Locke’s role in shaping the New Negro movement of the 1920s. As argued, Locke’s development as a theorist and architect of the New Negro movement can be traced back to the first decade of the twentieth century when Locke “swerved” away from the notion of the individual artist as “genius.” Locke found inspiration in Paul Laurence Dunbar, who himself had moved away from the notion of artist as genius to that of artist as “representative poet.” In particular, through this engagement with Dunbar, Locke formulated a notion of a race tradition rooted in intellectual influence and in the cultural and literary material that constitute an archive, which could stand in for an absent independent physical nation. This innovative notion laid the groundwork for the definition of the modern artist of the twentieth century, launching, in effect, a new theory of literature and the work that it does in the world.

Research in recent decades has drawn out the Caribbean dimensions and occlusions of the Harlem Renaissance and its historiography. Building on the foundations of such work, this chapter focuses on a rarely discussed Caribbean backstory to a symposium on Negro art that W. E. B. Du Bois ran in The Crisis through much of 1926. As a backdrop to US-tropical American fissures, the discussion charts some of the graphic, textual, and representative tensions between Alain Locke’s Survey Graphic, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” and The New Negro anthology and rival work by Eric Walrond and Miguel Covarrubias in Vanity Fair. In the foreground, it examines how Knopf’s 1925 edition of Haldane Macfall’s 1898 novel, The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer – which is virtually unheard of today – prompted one of the most significant discussions on the issue of black representation in the arts in the 1920s.

This chapter details Alain Locke’s contributions to value theory and their relationship to the overall cultural project of the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that Locke viewed the New Negro Renaissance and the transvaluation of black art – that is, the re-estimation of its value according to new principles of judgment – as one moment in a deeper and ongoing axiological transformation. To do so, it looks at his writings on African American spirituals and his “cultural retrospectives” of the 1930s and 1940s (annual reviews that took stock of the year’s work in black themes) as exemplary instances of such transvaluation. In these writings, Locke continually revised the significance and boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance.

Alain Locke located the New Negro movement within the context of minority nationalisms. The tendency to view nationalism as an ideology based on notions of purity and segregation has resulted in a mis-reading of the cultural politics of minority nationalisms, whether in Harlem or Dublin. A significant strain of black cultural nationalism has emphasized the internal diversity of African American culture. In close readings of works by Duke Ellington, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston this chapter foregrounds the ways in which the artists of the Harlem Renaissance sought to explore and emphasize the inner diversity of black culture. This emphasis on the hybridity of a minority culture is a characteristic of minority nationalist movements. It is significant in that it poses a challenge to the homogenizing gaze of the dominant culture, and continues to challenge the terms in which nationalism is rejected in much contemporary progressive thought.

An argument about the interpretation of black atlantic music is used here to articulate a joyful and shamelessly sentimental response to the dry defaults of ‘afropessimist’ thinking. An extended discussion of the relationship between music and freedom provides a means to explore the possibility of a dissident politics of culture articulated in terms derived from the vexed history of organised musical sound.

Modernists of the African diaspora rethink liberal governance after 1919 through subtle critique (as in René Maran’s Batouala), through direct engagement (as in the Pan-African Congresses organized by W. E. B. Du Bois), and through diasporic romance (as in Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth). The chapter commences with the “new internationalism” claimed for African-American art by Alain Locke in 1919, and ends with the global response to the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the occasion for Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth and wide range of other engaged poetry and prose. These and other diasporic African modernisms respond to the paternalism of post-Wilsonian rhetoric by reworking the narratives of reproduction, education, and labor that subtended liberal internationalist rhetoric and continued neo-imperial rule. Connecting the global response to 1919 to Pan-African aesthetics and Harlem Renaissance internationalism allows us to articulate a distinctive black diasporic response to interwar liberal order, a modernism attuned to what Du Bois called the “global color-line.”