African American folk roots and Harlem Renaissance poetry

2007 ◽  
pp. 96-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Sanders
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Poetry

Gwendolyn Bennett's “The Ebony Flute”

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 744-755
Author(s):  
Belinda Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Assistant Editor ◽  
Cover Art ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

IntroductionGwendolyn Bennett (1902-81) is often mentioned in books that discuss the harlem renaissance, and some of her poems Occasionally appear in poetry anthologies; but much of her career has been overlooked. Along with many of her friends, including Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, Bennett was featured at the National Urban League's Civic Club Dinner in March 1924, an event that would later be “widely hailed as a ‘coming out party’ for young black artists, writers, and intellectuals whose work would come to define the Harlem Renaissance” (McHenry 383n100). In the next five years Bennett published over forty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, such as Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; she created magazine cover art that adorned two leading African American periodicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and the National Urban League's Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several magazines, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!; and she wrote a renowned literary column, “The Ebony Flute.” Many scholars, such as Cary Wintz, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, and Elizabeth McHenry, recognized the importance of Bennett's column to the Harlem Renaissance in their respective studies, but their emphasis on a larger Harlem Renaissance discussion did not afford a detailed examination of her column.

scholarly journals Semantic Set of N-Word Choices in Afro-American Fiction: A Corpus Analysis of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

2021 ◽  
Vol VI (I) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
Rizwan Aftab ◽  
Asim Aqeel ◽  
Saba Zaidi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Word Choice ◽  
Lexical Choice ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Basic Concepts

This study explores the linguistic selection focusing on the use of N-word choice by African-American fiction writers. This study explains the basic concepts of language and language use, language as a text and discourse, and also the function it plays within the context. With Halliday and Hassan's semantic set of choices, this study argues that Zora Neale Hurston does not seem aware of consciously using N-words in her novel, but her use of Nword linguistic choice to communicate the theme of race is in line with her true reflection of the society and culture she is born and bred in. Hurston might have used N-word deliberately both to appropriate lexical choice with that of characters' roles as many of the Harlem Renaissance writers did and to establish a kind of community building and collective cultural solidarity, the major determinants of Hurston's use of the N-word in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Conclusion: Noah’s Kin

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Scott Parrish
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter considers the question of what made the recent disaster called Katrina in 2005, and its mediation, distinct from its 1927 forerunner. It argues that what was most different about the two events is that artists and commentators in 2005 could be more openly critical of the racial and class dimensions of their disaster before a multiracial mass audience. The chapter also considers a poem that appeared in print in April 1927, which must have seemed a providential coincidence to many readers. The poem, called “Noah Built the Ark,” moves from the halcyon days in Eden to the point at which “God got sorry that he ever made man.” Like other works of the Harlem Renaissance, the poem called upon the currency of folk form to create a public awareness of traditions within African American culture.

Imperial Embellishment

Black Land ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 90-118
Author(s):  
Nadia Nurhussein
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
The World

This chapter examines the case of Harry Foster Dean, whose “The Pedro Gorino: The Adventures of a Negro Sea-Captain in Africa and on the Seven Seas in His Attempts to Found an Ethiopian Empire” recounts the tale of his ambition to build a black empire in Africa. Dean's effort led one of the major British participants in the Scramble for Africa to call him “the most dangerous ‘negro’ in the world.” The chapter also addresses the unofficial diplomatic role of William Henry Ellis, a flashy African American millionaire and the first American to visit with Emperor Menelik in 1903. Ellis was not the only African American to visit Abyssinia prior to the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. In 1922, A'Lelia Walker, daughter of the famed Madame C. J. Walker and host of a Harlem Renaissance salon, visited Empress Zauditu. Ellis did his best to curry favour with Emperor Menelik but was rumored to be planning to oust the emperor in order to take his seat on the throne.

Sketching Out America’s Jazz Age in British Vogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Kalich
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
New Negro ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter investigates the contributions to modernism of Dorothy Todd’s British Vogue (1922-1926) as the magazine traced the evolution of Bloomsbury in England and the Jazz Age in America. While scholarship on this periodical has traditionally focused on the publication of Bloomsbury artists in the magazine, this chapter examines Todd’s displacement of the high/popular cultural binary through her unflagging support of jazz music and avant-garde literature. Furthermore, in examining Anne Harriet Fish’s and Miguel Covarrubias’s cartoons and illustrations, the chapter reveals the era’s use of visual humour as a means of coping with deeper anxieties regarding women’s increasing independence and the emergence of African-American culture as a fixture in mainstream, American culture. Analysing the construction of the Modern Woman and the New Negro in a commercial magazine demonstrates readers’ initial introduction to Bloomsbury and the Harlem Renaissance, broadening our understanding of modernism’s function in commercial settings.

Anthologizing Race

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 552-575
Author(s):  
Anna Muenchrath
Keyword(s):  
Weimar Republic ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Renaissance Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Abstract This article reads the introductions of two anthologies of Harlem Renaissance poetry published in the Weimar Republic in 1929 and 1932 respectively. Taking into account the history of the concept of Volk and its changing connotations in the interwar years, I argue that both editors problematically and subversively interpret the Harlem Renaissance as an American Volk tradition for their German readers. I contend that this act of interpretation questions and critiques the limits of not only the linguistic meaning of Volk, but also the limits of the concept of political belonging that the word represents in the German inter-war years. The article argues, concomitantly, for closer attention to anthologies of world literature and the paratexts of translations.

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