Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance

by Genevieve Fabre (Editor), Michel Feith (Editor)

Overview

The Harlem Renaissance is rightly considered to be a moment of creative
exuberance and unprecedented explosion. Today, there is a renewed interest in this
movement, calling for a re-evaluation and a closer scrutiny of the era and of
documents that have only recently become available. Temples for Tomorrow reconsiders
the period -- between two world wars -- which confirmed the intuitions of W. E. B.
DuBois on the "color line" and gave birth to the "American dilemma," later evoked by
Gunnar Myrdal. Issuing from a generation bearing new hopes and aspirations, a new
vision takes form and develops around the concept of the New Negro, with a goal: to
recreate an African American identity and claim its legitimate place in the heart of
the nation. In reality, this movement organized into a remarkable institutional
network, which was to remain the vision of an elite, but which gave birth to
tensions and differences.

This collection attempts to assess
Harlem's role as a "Black Mecca", as "site of intimate performance" of African
American life, and as focal point in the creation of a diasporic identity in
dialogue with the Caribbean and French-speaking areas.

Essays
treat the complex interweaving of Primitivism and Modernism, of folk culture and
elitist aspirations in different artistic media, with a view to defining the
interaction between music, visual arts, and literature.

Also
included are known Renaissance intellectuals and writers. Even though they had
different conceptions of the role of the African American artist in a racially
segregated society, most participants in the New Negro movement shared a desire to
express a new assertiveness in terms of literary creation and
indentity-building.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253109101
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	09/19/2001
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	408
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Geneviève Fabre is professor at the University Paris 7 where she is
director of the Center of African American Research. Author of books on James Agee,
on African American Theatre (Paris, CNRS and Harvard U P), she has contributed to
several collective volumes and encyclopedias. Co-author of books on F.S. Fitzgerald,
American minorities, she has edited or co-edited several volumes: on Hispanic
literatures, on Barrio culture in the USA, on ethnicity, two volumes on "Feasts and
Celebrations among Ethnic Communities," two on Toni Morrison, and a book on History
and Memory in Afr Am Culture. She is now co-editing with Michel Feith a collection
of essays on The Harlem Renaissance. A Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute,
Harvard, The National Humanities Center and the American Antiquarian Society, she is
currently working on African American celebrative culture (1730-1880).

Michel Feith is an Assistant Professor at the University of
Nantes, France. He has spent several years abroad; his experience of living in
Australia, Japan and the United States has sensitivized him to issues of
multiculturalism. He wrote a doctoral thesis under the direction of Professor
Geneviève Fabre, on " Myth and History in Chinese American and Chicano Literature "
(1995), and his publications include articles on Maxine Hong Kingston, John Edgar
Wideman, and the Harlem Renaissance.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction /
Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith
1. Racial Doubt and Racial Shame in the
Harlem Renaissance / Arnold Rampersad

Part I. Criteria of
Renaissance Art
2. The Syncopated African : Construction of Origins During
the Harlem Renaissance / Michel Feith
3. Oh Africa!: The Influence of
African Art During the Harlem Renaissance / Amy Kirschke
4. The Heart of a
Woman : Florence Price's Symphony in E Minor in the Context of the Harlem
Renaissance / Rae Linda Brown
5. Ethel Waters: The Voice of an Era /
Randall Cherry
6. Race Movies and the Harlem Renaissance / Clyde
Taylor

Part II. Enter The New Negro: Some Writers of the
Renaissance:
7. The Tragedy and the Joke: James Weldon Johnson's The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man / Alessandro Portelli
8. "The Spell of
Africa Is Upon Me": W.E.B. Du Bois's Notion of Art as Propaganda / Alessandra
Lorini
9. Subject to Disappearance: Interracial Identity in Nella Larsen's
Quicksand / George Hutchinson
10. No Free Gift: From Jean Toomer's "Fern"
to Fisher's "Miss Cynthie" / William Boelhower
11. Harlem as a Memory
Place: Reconstructing the Harlem Renaissance in Space / Dorothea
Löbbermann
12. "Thoughts Untouched by Words": Language in Their Eyes Were
Watching God / Claudine Raynaud
13. Langston Hughes's Blues / Monica
Michlin

Part III. The Negro Mind Reaches Out: The Renaissance in
International Perspective:
14. The Tropics in New York: Claude McKay and
the New Negro Movement / Carl Pedersen
15. The West Indian Presence in
Alain Locke's New Negro / Françoise Charras
16. Three Ways to Translate
the Harlem Renaissance / Brent Edwards
17. Modernism, the New Negro and
Négritude / Michel Fabre

Chronology
Selected
Bibliography
Index