Social media engagement means losing and finding oneself on a sea of disparate and divergent rhythms, which in this chapter is taken as both material condition and metaphor for the mixture of playful surprise and persistent dread that characterizes the digital dimension of contemporary Black life in the United States. This chapter reads together a collection of technologies, digital and nondigital texts, and memory to explore how contemporary Black social media protest draws on and extends legacies of Black textual play.

Modernist American writers and artists had multiple and often conflictual responses toward the many environmental issues that became a growing concern as a result of rapid modernization at the outset of the twentieth century. Few artists in the modernist period avowedly declared themselves to be environmentalists or subscribed to what came later to be defined as being “green.” This chapter examines methods used especially in recent years by scholars in studying the range of environmental matters of form and content in modernism. Close readings are provided of important texts by Zora Neale Hurston and John Steinbeck as examples of how to apply these ecocritical research methods.

Soyica Diggs Colbert explores the dramas of the Harlem Renaissance, which were usually nurtured in Washington, DC, to reveal how dramatists such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita Bonner, among others, created dramas that asserted the “value” of African American life. Writing during a period when not only the lynchings of Black men and women were common but also rarely punished, these artists’ assertion of Black respectability demanded a reassessment and, indeed, a revaluation of Blackness.

This chapter focuses on the writing of Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, specifically their representations of the folk and folk culture in the 1930s. In addition, it charts the development of their work from the 1920s into the 1940s and World War II. Both writers critiqued the practices and discourses of contemporary ethnography and their assertion of the disappearance of the folk and their culture in the face of modernization, a perspective largely adopted by the politics of the New Deal and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Both writers confirmed the continued relevance and adaptability of Black culture and its place within both the African Diaspora and the national project of the United States so that their work for the FWP produced a counternarrative to its perspective. This chapter argues that a focus on the work of Brown – himself a self-identified leftist – and Hurston demonstrates that the writing of this period does not break down along strictly oppositional lines but is expansive, dialogic, and malleable.

Young’s “African American Magazine Modernism” argues that it is important to recognize the extent to which African American writers and artists appeared in a wide range of magazines in the 1920s. This chapter examines moments of cross-cultural interaction, including such examples as the pieces of Jean Toomer’s Cane distributed across race-conscious, avant-garde, and regional magazines (1922-23); Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in the pacifist-socialist journal The World Tomorrow (1928); and the infamous case of Nella Larsen’s “Sanctuary” in Century Magazine (1930). Reading African American modernism across these disparate bibliographical environments yields not an easily coherent picture but what John Bryant terms the “muddy materiality” of textual history.

Reading Zora Neale Hurston's recently recovered urban stories and the first ethnography she wrote, Barracoon, Genevieve West argues that Hurston’s fictional exploration of gender tensions, ethnic conflicts, and psychological dislocation in Harlem established the contours of her emerging critique of and contribution to Boasian anthropology. There has been an abiding critical tendency to see these stories as an anomaly within Hurston’s oeuvre, but West contends that it was in her fictional portrayals of cultural conflict in Harlem that Hurston began to interrogate the objectivity that was so central to Boasian anthropology in the early decades of the twentieth century. Much Boasian anthropology was concerned with the study of “cultures as articulated wholes,” but the attention Hurston paid to cultural friction in the urban stories became a hallmark of her fictional and ethnographic explorations of black diasporic cultures from Barracoon onwards.

This chapter traces one of the formative transitions of the Harlem Renaissance in its literary encounter with jazz and blues culture, arguing that its aesthetic was not only shaped by the music’s vital expressive forms but also its means of production, the technical recording apparatus itself. Many Harlem Renaissance writers were motivated in their artistic efforts to preserve the folk culture they felt was rapidly being lost. To do so, they paradoxically harnessed the very recording technologies they believed were hastening the demise of folk culture. Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others engaged with popular music and its processes of recording – its possibilities of preservation, representation, and collectivity, but also displacement and alienation – in part, as a way of understanding the craft of writing as a related technology and their own predicament as writers within commercial literary markets requiring specific kinds of raced performances.

When Richard Wright read deeply in the social sciences, he became informally trained in the Chicago school of sociology led by Robert Park. Chicago sociology was an antidote to the idea of race. It replaced the dominant view of group-based identity as determined by race with a truer view of group-based identity determined by culture and environment: a paradigm of culture as not immutable, genetically inherited, natural, and hierarchical, but rather as malleable, learned, conventionally arbitrary, and relative. This social science vision undergirded his fiction, especially his most famous novel Native Son. But while Chicago sociology denied white racial superiority, it tended to accept white cultural supremacy, a contention shared by the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation. Critics have frequently misunderstood Wright as a progenitor of late twentieth-century multicultural literature. That recognition more properly belongs to Wright’s rival Zora Neale Hurston, who had a different social-science-inspired model of minority culture that allowed her to see African American culture as healthy, continually creative, adaptive, and long-enduring.

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.

Given the increasingly important role that music, especially jazz, played in the American literary soundscape, my second chapter explores two instances of jazz autobiography: Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (1950) and Sidney Bechet’s Treat It Gentle (1960). Through my analysis, I reveal the critical intervention of Zora Neale Hurston in shaping the practices of transcription so that the voices represented on the page adhere to the “laws of sound.” While the tendency has been to read Lomax and Bechet’s books in the context of popular jazz autobiography, I argue that the avant-garde nature of their transcription practices warrant their consideration alongside more canonical works of modernist prose. These books are not oral histories but rather aural histories that require readers to think critically about the sonic identities of musicians who themselves experimented with recording technology.

This chapter considers how a range of U.S. southern writers with varying political views responded to the Depression and New Deal. It stresses that even when competing visions of and for the South were articulated by different “fronts” in the period’s “cultural wars,” such visions were not always reducible to left versus right, communism versus capitalism, or “Agrarian versus Industrial.” William Faulkner’s short fiction between 1941 and 1943 reveals complex, contradictory attitudes toward the New Deal, especially the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The writing of Zora Neale Hurston, including texts produced for the WPA’s Federal Writers Project, includes a critique of Jim Crow labor exploitation comparable to the work of her supposed antagonist (and fellow FWP author) Richard Wright. Arna Bontemps’s historical novels, especially Black Thunder (1936), approach Depression-era social upheaval allegorically by depicting earlier black laborers revolting against slavery in the U.S. South and the Caribbean.

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.

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.

The films shot by Zora Neale Hurston during her anthropological research trip through the US South (1927–1930) were perhaps the first professional recordings ever made by an African American woman. Durkin examines this footage to explore Hurston’s contributions to ethnographic cinema and to black southern cinema more broadly, and to elucidate some of the connections between her anthropological and creative work. The films show how Hurston understood and sought to depict black folk cultures on the page and stage. They draw attention to the international focus of her research and suggest that the textual and cinematic strands of her research project should not be read in isolation because they were conceived as a joint corrective to mainstream US distortions of black artistry. Moreover, the films are rare cinematic documents of the everyday lives of black working-class subjects whose artistry underpinned so much of Hurston’s creative work and interwar US culture more generally.

This chapter focuses on the the literary career of Zora Neale Hurston, which notably takes off after the Harlem Renaissance. It first focuses on the relative failure of her ambitious musical pageant “The Great Day,” which might have led to a theatrical career. Hurston then wrote her first novels, Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God, against the propagandistic, race-conscious novels she associated with the Harlem Renaissance, using the novel instead to showcase African American oral-performative art and to elaborate her key theme of the tension between individualistic leaders like herself and a vital but leveling, resentful African American community. Hurston both consolidated her literary reputation and began reinventing herself in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, before turning away from African American subject matter in her ambitious novel for Scribner’s, Seraph on the Suwanee. The chapter analyzes Seraph on the Suwanee in terms of Hurston’s efforts to write a kind of national epic, then argues for the increasingly universalist direction of Hurston’s work as articulated in her many letters about her long-standing work-in-progress “Herod the Great.” Unable to finish or publish this book, Hurston’s career uncannily recapitulates that of Jean Toomer, insofar as broader reaching after literary universality increasingly undercuts her literary power.