This chapter analyzes the rich essayistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940). Through the visual arts, music, and literature, many African Americans responded to the changing national and international dynamics of the 1920s as an opportunity to leverage their creative arts and redefine their place within the nation. Poetry and fiction were the literary genres African Americans increasingly employed for these efforts. More ubiquitous was their frequent complement: the essay. Writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence infused the essay with this ethos and positioned it as an equally important genre for chronicling the period. Indeed, it was through the essay that readers in the United States and in other parts of the world encountered rhetorical styles reflecting the racial pride and determination of the “New Negro.” Essays from the period detailing the array of forces and ideas shaping African American life – including migration, racial violence, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism – constitute dynamic narratives combining history, opinion, and critical redress.

This chapter studies the literary representation of dancers, particularly child dancers, in Harlem Renaissance fiction, arguing that this focus can help explore anxieties about generational conflict, gender, sexuality, tradition, and urban life. Attending to representations of children provides a fresh perspective from which to examine the significance of dance both in relation to questions of cultural identity (including black modernists’ engagement with the legacies of minstrelsy) and the emotional cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance. Against the backdrop of a broader preoccupation with black childhood among social scientists, educators, and political activists, representations of child dancers were freighted with contradictory emotions that complicated discourses of racial uplift. This chapter engages with a range of texts, including Zora Neale Hurston’s “Drenched in Light” and Dorothy West’s “An Unimportant man,” to argue that dancing children sometimes embody new possibilities for the future and resistant aesthetics that defy categorization, but they make for anxious, loaded imagery that flickers between embarrassment and pride, pleasure and unease.

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.

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.”