New Negro writers and artists often spotlighted the contrast between the liberatory potential of dynamic bodily movement and the restricted social spaces of Harlem, which were shaped by segregation. This chapter examines a variety of cultural texts – social and cultural history by Wallace Thurman and James Weldon Johnson, visual art by Winold Reiss, and short fiction by Rudolph Fisher and Langston Hughes – to argue that representations of dance and bodily movement opened the way for creative engagement with the spatial dynamics of segregation and overcrowding in Harlem, which was fascinated by the look, the sound, and the feel of dance. Fisher’s short story “High Yaller,” for instance, probes the affective or subjective dimensions of segregation, passing, and colorism through a sustained focus on dancing bodies in “jim-crowed” scenes of Harlem cabaret and the traversing of “color lines” in the cityscape of New York.

Chapter 9 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s adventures in Black New York, which they largely omitted from their published work. Soviet antiracism offered little guidance when it came to understanding or recounting the unsettling intersections of gender, sexuality, pleasure, and race the writers encountered at a Harlem nightclub or the unexpected meeting with a Russian-speaking African American singer in the cast of "Porgy and Bess." To the extent that Ilf and Petrov told the story of Black New York at all, they relied on a “romantic racialization” of African Americans as naturally spiritual and musical.

The eight chapters in Part II focus on the most sedentary portion of Ilf and Petrov’s journey, the month they spent in and around New York City in fall 1935 hobnobbing with literary celebrities and immersing themselves in American popular culture. Investigating Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with renowned American artists and authors offers a way of tracing the transnational networks that connected Soviet and American cultural producers. How and what did they learn from each other? Where and why did they fail to understand one another? The role of immigrants in these networks looms large and allows consideration of how Soviet art and Russian artists become “American.” How did Ilf and Petrov make Soviet sense of American culture and American consumption?

This chapter considers the material and violent circumstances that surrounded Black performers such as Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fredi Washington, and Fats Waller, as they produced some of the most memorable work of the Harlem Renaissance. To survive, these artists employed strategies of gender fugitivity to navigate a world of labor, poverty, and policing, while claiming spaces of survival and creativity. The first of three sections explores fugitive gender, arguing that the purposeful instability caused through the relationship between gender and Blackness created the conditions of possibility in everyday life for Black folks. The second section excavates the meanings of Duke Ellington’s cosmopolitan dandyism as seen in the 1929 film Black and Tan.The final section considers the fugitive sociality of rent parties, informal musical venues born of necessity and delight, which served the community of Harlem by providing shelter, food, entertainment, and sexual pleasure.

This chapter discusses how an unusual group of works, featuring a character nicknamed Simple, help us think about the complexities of Black political consciousness. The Simple stories appeared in the Chicago Defender over the course of twenty-three years, and were also collected in The Best of Simple and other volumes. Characters therein debate race and class from the local standpoint of the neighborhood of Harlem and extending into other worlds. Hughes’s movement across literary genres (having written in so many) takes shape in these stories as a question about the porous boundary between realist and imaginative modes, when Black people are pondering the limits of freedom and mobility. And the resemblance between Simple’s main interlocutor, an intellectual narrator, and the author is an example of how Hughes sees himself as implicated. Ultimately, in formalistic and affective terms, the Simple stories advance multiplicity as central to the experience of Blackness.

Chapter Five turns to the Harlem Renaissance author and illustrator Richard Bruce Nugent, arguing that his “Geisha Man,” which centers on the erotic relationship between a white American father and his mixed-race child, should be understood as emerging from his sustained engagement with Decadence and the Salome story. I position this work within the framework of Nugent’s extensive experimentation with Decadence to argue that the text’s Orientalism and its preoccupation with incest should be understood as more than a simple echoing of Decadence’s more troubling tendencies. This content operates within the text in service to Nugent’s efforts to conceptualize mixed-race identity and the rupturing of Black kinship structures within the United States. Salome is for Nugent a story about a fetishized performer attempting to enact erotic agency within a system of fractured familial formations, and revising her story allows Nugent to theorize kinship and multiraciality in relationship to what Hortense Spillers refers to as the “losses” and “confusions” that accompanied the “dispersal of the historic African American domestic unit.” This chapter sheds light on the manner in which Orientalist Decadence was transported across the Atlantic to perform different types of service for Black thinkers in Harlem in the early-twentieth century.

This chapter mainly focuses on the life and work of Blue Lu Barker, wife of Danny Barker, who was a major blues and jazz singer in the 1930s and 1940s, who continued her career in New Orleans into the 1970s. Starting out as a singer and dancer, she came to New York as a teenager, chaperoned by the legendary clarinettist Lorenzo Tio Jr. She cut her first discs for Decca, including an all-star cast with such musicians as Benny Carter and Henry Allen. The Texan pianist Sammy Price also played on her records. She gives an insider's view of living with 'Show people' in New York, including the drummer Paul Barbarin, who later worked on her records after she signed to Capitol. She discusses making records in New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans. Her career is compared to that of the contemporary singer Topsy Chapman, who started out singing gospel but starred in the show One Mo Time. Chapman discusses the imprtance of festivals in a singer's career.

This chapter argues that previous discussions of Harlem Renaissance literature have overlooked the role of religion in shaping ideas of Black modernity. Examining the literature and art of the 1920s, Farebrother posits that religion plays a key role in shaping Black modernity, serving as the means through which Rudolph Fisher can explore anxieties about generational conflict, gender, sexuality, tradition, consumerism, and the Great Migration. Not only are there a large number of Black modernist texts that include religious scenes, but also these texts reveal the relationship between religion and entertainment, church and cabaret. Spatially, scenes of the cabaret and the church are depicted in similar ways, and the role of the spectator is significant in both church and cabaret scenes – someone who can observe the scenes and remark upon unusual elements.

This chapter analyzes the early history of New York’s Harlem, from its Dutch beginnings to its status as an iconic symbol of Black urban modernity in the 1920s. Drawing upon the biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, and George S. Schuyler, and with references to Marcus Garvey, the chapter details the links between Harlem as a Dutch location and its locale as a “Negro Mecca.” It highlights some of the surprising ways in which Harlem Renaissance figures claimed a biographical connection to Dutch New York to illustrate “the Dutch strain in the ancestry of key Harlem Renaissance figures.” The essay focuses on how, in the 1920s, New Negro intellectuals, especially Du Bois, Schuyler, and Toomer, explored what it meant to incorporate Dutchness in their genealogical self-fashioning, and how Marcus Garvey exploited Holland Society-style stagecraft in his rise to power.

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.

Ellison spent more time in New York City than in any other place. The half-century Ellison lived in post-World War II New York coincided not only with the city’s ascendance to the global center of arts, letters, and finance, but also with the transformation of the U.S. into a global hegemon. By the 1970s Ellison had become an important figure in several of the city’s institutions. As one of the nation’s foremost writers, and a resident of Harlem, Ellison’s life in New York highlights the artistic center and the cultural margins of the city.

A rich body of recent scholarship has commented on the depth of Ellison’s engagements with major developments in sociology and psychology, including direct engagements with the work of Robert Park, John Dollard, Gunnar Myrdal, and the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem. Ellison showed a sustained interest and concern with the new prominence of sociology and psychology in mid-century policy decisions in the U.S. Accordingly, his fiction and chapters consistently engaged with these disciplines’ claims to knowledge of African American culture as compared with other ways of knowing, such as naturalist fiction, Marxist analysis, music, and folklore.

New York City had a significant role in Richard Wright’s search for political and artistic freedom. During the ten years he spent there, the emerging writer reached the pinnacle of his career amid the city’s magazines, newspapers, publishers, and cultural brokers. Wright utilized various professionalizing networks, including the CPUSA and WPA, and he published Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son shortly after his arrival in 1937. Additionally, he radicalized the short-lived New Challenge, exposed Harlem’s poverty in the Daily Worker, and fictionalized his research on black domestic workers and juvenile delinquency in “Black Hope” and Rite of Passage, respectively. Wright’s years in New York were his career’s most productive, and this success was reflected in his personal life, which included settling into marriage and fatherhood as well as the 7 Middagh artistic community. Although New York fostered these interracial domestic relationships, its boroughs were not free from the Jim Crowism African Americans lived under elsewhere. The prejudices Wright encountered in Brooklyn and Manhattan, on top of those he had experienced in the South, influenced his decision to leave the U.S., as he believed the move to Paris would free him to write with new perspective on American race relations.

This chapter examines the literary portrayal of music in Alain Locke’s The New Negro, Claude McKay’s poem “Negro Dancers,” Hurston’s “Characteristic of Negro Expression,” and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade.” It considers the role of spirituals in the work of Du Bois and Locke before detailing how writers of the 1920s represented the innovations of new jazz sounds. The chapter notes the significance of the spirituals for both W. E. B. Du Bois and Locke, suggesting that, while Du Bois viewed them almost as an archeological deposit, Locke saw these songs as an important artistic tool to help progress African Americans forward: Locke ‘uses’ the spirituals as an inspiring precedent for the new ‘task’ facing the descendants of slaves on the verge of democratic transformation. Close readings of McKay’s poem, Hurston’s essay, and Nugent’s short story illuminate the term “orinphrasis,” or the description of sound or music in narrative or poems.

Rudolph Fisher was unique among Harlem Renaissance authors in making Harlem itself the exclusive focus of his writing. Across a rich body of work (of short stories and novels), he demonstrated keen powers of social observation in revealing how class, regional, phenotypical, and generational distinctions defined Harlem and shaped an appropriate literary aesthetic. Fisher’s satirical yet loving eye is matched by a musical ear in stories about African Americans becoming modern in the black metropolis. Southern greenhorns are vulnerable to being fleeced by urbane northern hustlers. Grandmothers bearing the memory of the South fear and admire in equal measure the way Harlem shapes their grandchildren. Blues and jazz underscore vernacular speech, as street talk engages rural accents and bourgeois tongues. And such sensitivity to the city’s quotidian features informs Fisher’s ultimate understanding of Harlem as the space of encounter between logic and faith, science and superstition for African Americans.

While the story of Caribbean literature in English generally focuses on its emergence in relation to Great Britain, Caribbean writers also urgently explored the Caribbean’s relationship to the United States. US imperialism in the region was most explicit with the US presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War, in the occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the 1910s to 1930s, and in its post-World War II involvement in various territories. Caribbean migration into the US fuelled the alliances that Brent Hayes Edwards describes as ‘the practice of diaspora’. In the 1920s, Caribbean activists and writers such as Hubert Harrison, Claude McKay, and Eric Walrond helped shape the Harlem Renaissance. That movement’s aesthetic experiments and pan-African identifications inspired the development of literature within the region. The United States was also a hub from which some writers travelled to other parts of the world (Russia, France, the UK) and became part of a network of mutual influences. US writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston travelled to the Caribbean. Later, the ranks of the predominantly male writers in the United States were expanded with the emergence of women writers such as Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall, and growing Caribbean immigration to the US coupled with the rise of US cultural institutions meant that the US location continued to influence Caribbean writing.

Chapter 3 turns to cultural expressions -- music, literature, art, and film -- to show the transnational manifestations of Mexico’s black radical tradition, especially as explored by caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, composer Carlos Chávez, and historian and novelist José Mancisidor. This complex geographic matrix, with cultural centers in Mexico City, Cuba, Harlem, and Spain, was more visible in the interdisciplinary threads of culture than in the dense footnotes of historicism. Music -- jazz, in particular -- came to symbolize the simultaneous recasting of postrevolutionary nationalism and blackness in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This chapter traces these cultural conversations from Mexico’s first encounters with jazz in New York City through its incorporation into the Marxist cultural politics of 1930s Mexico and then abroad again, as Mexican cultural producers working with African American and Afro-Cubanist (afrocubanista) intellectuals like Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén fought against global fascism in Mexico, New York City, and Spain.