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 develops a productive comparison between James VanDerZee’s photography and James Weldon Johnson’s fiction in order to weigh up the possibilities and limitations of photographic and literary portraiture as a means of challenging, or at least complicating, dominant visual economies of race in the 1920s. Throughout, Lamm clarifies the specific ways in which literary representation facilitates a more probing exploration of African American sartorial self-fashioning, especially its more subjective, less visible dimensions.

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.

Sherrard Johnson’s chapter identifies some of the various aesthetic models and modes with which African Americans experimented in telling individual life stories during the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the interwar years. Sherrard Johnson argues that in migration and travel narratives and other autobiographical writings of the New Negro era, African American authors travel literally and figuratively; the power of these self-stories resides in an author’s interior reflection fused with external observations that both harness and resist the collective self.

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 follows the lasting influence of Harlem Renaissance writers on Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry, even after the 1967 Fisk Writers’ conference. Specifically, it turns to Riot (1969) to think about its continuity with the poetry most closely associated with the New Negro Renaissance. This is not done for the sake of periodizing Brooks as part of the earlier generation, nor to detach her later work from its formation in and of the Black Arts Movement. Rather, the chapter traces in Brooks’s work the development of a tradition of Black migratory poetics: poetry that formally and imaginatively enacts human transnational movement. Brooks’s migratory poetry illuminates and at times dismantles violence and constraint, but also turns its back on borders, attempting to find, create, define, and take up space beyond the nation state. As such, Riot also provides a key pivot or transition between Black modernist poetics and our contemporary moment in poetry.

This chapter focuses on three stages in the career of James Weldon Johnson. It deals first with Johnson’s expressed ambition to be the first great African American poet at the moment when he had just written “Fifty Years” and was set to publish The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. When Johnson’s hopes for a national literary reputation were disappointed, he then turned to the promotional, critical, theoretical, and editorial work that laid important groundwork for the Harlem Renaissance, which would help establish conditions for the quantitative production of African American writing from which great individual work, and more modern, experimental work, would emerge. The chapter argues for Johnson’s understanding of the extent to which a people’s literary output is inescapably measured in an international context, an understanding he grasped as a result of his familiarity with Latin American modernismo, even as he seemed unfamiliar with the expatriate American modernist agenda of Ezra Pound. During the 1920s and at the high point of the Harlem Renaissance he helped launch and promote, Johnson was able to capitalize on the arrival of a substantial body of African American writing to reissue his nearly forgotten novel as a “classic of Negro literature” and publish his major poetic effort, God’s Trombones.