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Dr. Bordelon's American Lit II On Campus | |||||||
Langston
Hughes and Countee Cullen
Terms | Life | Times | Class Discussion | Group Questions | Links | Pictures | Quotes from Critics Terms to Know Major figures in the Harlem Renaissance were Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, many of whom treated the themes of black life in a way that felt modern, while borrowing elements from the folk literature of black tradition. Visual artists of the Renaissance, including Aaron Douglas and William H. Johnson, incorporated African and primitive motifs into their work. Among the magazines founded at the time which devoted themselves to "Negro studies" were Crisis (edited by DuBois), Opportunity, and the Messenger. These magazines were not exclusively literary, but the significance of the Harlem Renaissance did not lie solely in its literary impact. Although much that was produced from Harlem in the 1920s is of greater historical than artistic importance, the Renaissance made white America aware for the first time of the modern art of a people it had not long before kept in slavery. For an account of this development see Harlem Renaissance, by Nathan Irvin Huggins (New York, 1971). When Harlem Was in Vogue, by David Levering Lewis (New York, 1981) is a study of broader scope, with less emphasis on the literary life of the 1920s. Campbell, James. "Harlem Renaissance, The." The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Ocean County College. 14 April 2009. For a more detailed definition, read the entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Lynching: a form of illegal execution, usually of a person accused of a crime or some type of deviant behavior. Historically, most lynching victims in the United States have been African-American males. However, women, native-born white males, and members of other minority groups (including European immigrants, Chinese, and Hispanics), were also lynched, though in much smaller numbers. Although lynchings are often equated with hanging, other methods that have been used include shooting, burning, and drowning, sometimes followed by the mutilation and/or public display of the corpse. Some lynchings were carried out by large mobs, while others involved groups of only three or four members. White supremacist or nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan perpetrated some lynchings, but the informal and spontaneous organization of citizens into lynch mobs was more common. Most lynch victims had been accused, but not convicted, of such serious crimes as murder, assault, or rape. Other victims were killed because of transgressions of racial codes such as insulting a white person or using inflammatory language. Follow link for remainder of essay Stewart E. Tolnay , E.M. Beck. "Lynching." The Oxford Companion to United States History. Paul S. Boyer, ed. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Ocean County College. 16 April 2009. And see the Without Sanctuary website for a flash movie of lynching postcards. Uncle Tom: Although Harriet Beecher Stowe 's extremely successful 1852 abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was the original source for the Uncle Tom idiom, its meaning is best understood through an examination of the numerous stage shows loosely based on the best-selling book. Theatrical entrepreneurs who did not share Stowe's antislavery zeal took great liberties with the novel's protagonist. Uncle Toms of the stage were usually depicted as thoroughly subservient individuals who willingly betrayed their black brethren in order to please their white masters. As a result, the Uncle Tom label is assigned to individuals who sabotage other blacks in order to further their own advancement. Known popularly as Tom shows, stage productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin were a mainstay of American theater well into the twentieth century. Uncle Tom became a trope, a figure of speech used to refer to fawning, selfish black men. Thus Uncle Tom's ubiquitousness had a definitive impact on mainstream society's assumptions about actual black men. By the turn of the century, a curious battle developed between the purveyors of popular culture, who continued to promote Uncle Tom, and African American writers and social critics eager to bury the demeaning image. Thus filmmakers made several films similar to the stage shows. Even the Siam-based musical The King and I (1951) contains an ode to Uncle Tom's Cabin. For a collection of short stories on the black experience in the South, Richard Wright used the title Uncle Tom's Children (1938). Ralph Ellison noted that a Tom show was one of the original impetuses for his novel Invisible Man (1952). Ishmael Reed manipulated characters' names for his novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and Robert Alexander wrote a provocative play entitled I Ain't Yo Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin (performed in Hartford, 1995). Nonetheless, the negative associations of the name remain consistent. For example, the Uncle Tom label is often applied to staunchly conservative African American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It seems likely that this pejorative label will remain in the American vernacular. Patricia A. Turner. " Uncle Tom." The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Ocean County College. 16 April 2009. River Jordan: The Egyptian river the Israelites had to cross to to be free from slavery -- the river crossed to reach the promised land. It can also be considered a movement from life to death (temporal world to heaven), and conversely, death to life (temporal world to heaven -- and yes, the repetition is intentional). Cotton Club: The Harlem cabaret is perhaps the most fabled intersection of the jazz age and the Harlem Renaissance, and no cabaret was more fabled than the Cotton Club -- the "aristocrat of Harlem -- at the northeast corner of Lenox Avenue and 142 Street: Between its opening in September 1923 and its relocation downtown in February 1936, the Cotton Club would boost the early careers of Edith Wilson, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Aida Ward, Adelaide Hall, Earl "Snakehips" Tucker, Mantan Moreland, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, the Nicholas Brothers, and the bands of Duke Ellington (in 1927-1931 and 1933), Cab Calloway (in 1930-1933), and Jimmie Lunceford (in 1934-1936). As famous for its exclusionary racial policies as for its fast-stepping revues, the Cotton Club embodied many of the contradictions of the popular Harlem Renaissance; its cultural meaning was shaped by the combined forces of Prohibition economics, postwar trends in musical theater, black performance traditions and innovations, white patronage, and the mass media. [. . . .] Joseph Urban, Florenz Ziegfeld's celebrated set and costume designer, redesigned the interior in what [Barry] Singer describes as "a brazen riot of African jungle motifs, Southern stereotypology, and lurid eroticism" (1992, 100) [. . . . ] A key innovation in creating the Cotton Club's exclusive atmosphere was Madden's seemingly paradoxical introduction of a strict color line into the heart of Harlem. In establishing a whites-only policy regarding customers, Madden was following the practice at Connie's Inn, a rival Harlem club favored by moneyed whites. At the Cotton Club, the concept was extended to the division of labor, creating a strict divide between the whites who ran the club and produced, wrote, and choreographed its shows, and the blacks who cooked, waited and bussed tables, and entertained. Women in the chorus line faced their own color bar; they were essentially conceived as part of the club's decor, and they were expected to be "tall, tan, and terrific": at least 5 feet 6 inches, no darker than a light olive tone, and under twenty-one. From The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. The Life To get an understanding of Hughes' role in promoting a black aesthetic, review the short excerpt from "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," in our textbook (1512) and the full essay here. 2015 New Yorker essay on Hughes -- insightfully captures many of the contradictions in his work and life. The Times
For an idea of the animus Hughes faced, consider this excerpt published byThe Cross and the Flag
Perhaps a reason he wrote this poem, can be found in an earlier and also explicitly religious poem -- which comes with an illustrative photograph.
Consider, as well, his essay "In the Death House with the Scottsboro Boys" The FBI and the Harlem Renaissance. It would be amusing if it wasn't sad. And the connection to politics? Consider the views of a Mississippi politician, circa 1920s. In 1923 former senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, popularly known as 'the Great White Chief' (his campaign slogan was "A vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy"), published his own newspaper, Vardaman's Weekly, in effect an early version of social media. That May Vardaman's Weekly proclaimed its editor a man who had fought the battle to make America "pure, free and safe" That may sound unobjectionable, but in practice, the battle to make America pure had included Vardaman's notorious declaration, "If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched in order to maintain white supremacy" (qtd. in Churchwell 143). From Barbara Churchwell's Behold America. Hughes Hughes exploration of popular music is part of a larger black aesthetic first promulgated by W. E. B. Dubois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) which ends with an evocation of black folk music as the song of America:
This explains, in part, Hughes' embrace and emphasis on the Blues, spirituals, and other forms of black folk music. And Hughes was strongly influenced by the voice and aims of Walt Whitman poetry. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (2027)
"I, Too" (2028)
"The Weary Blues" (2029)
"Democracy" (title Freedom in our textbook)
"Theme for English B" (2038) Vol. D
Countee Cullen (circa 1920s) "Yet Do I Marvel" (2061)
"Uncle Jim" (2065) "For a Lady I Know"
Links Pictures, Pictures,
Pictures Click to enlarge images.
Quotes from Critics Langston Hughes "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" 23 June 1926 The Nation. "But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro--and beautiful!'"
© David Bordelon 2009
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