Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) remains central to the New Negro literature with its unique focus on its biracial protagonist, Helga Crane, and her search for belonging. However, the novel presents a unique critical voice in understanding performance of the New Negro Renaissance. Be it the Copenhagen vaudeville stage, the Harlem storefront church, or the Black Southern college lecture hall, each location marks a specific racial performance that disturbs Helga’s sense of self. It is Helga, reporting across the diaspora, that brings our attention to the difficulties of the cosmopolitan New Negro to pull away from the figurations of the old.

This article reexamines the Harlem Renaissance by emphasizing Florida’s crucial yet often overlooked contribution to its development. Focusing on influential figures like Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Augusta Savage—whose lives and work exemplify Florida’s impact—the study explores how Florida’s Black communities served as both catalysts and sustainers of the movement’s creative and cultural legacy. Using a multidisciplinary approach that combines archival research, visual art analysis, and regional cultural history, the narrative demonstrates that Florida was more than a peripheral region; it was a vibrant hub for artistic innovation and intellectual exchange. Through the recounting of two curated exhibits, the authors highlight Florida’s rich cultural landscape by showcasing artworks, manuscripts, and oral histories that emphasize regional storytelling’s influence on national and global Black cultural movements. By tracing migration patterns, community resilience, and artistic networks, this work reveals how Florida’s Black towns fostered resilience amid systemic oppression, producing key figures who shaped Harlem’s legacy while cultivating a distinctive regional identity. This investigation underscores the importance of reclaiming regional histories to deepen the broader story of Black art and culture. It also highlights implications for contemporary efforts in cultural preservation, community empowerment, and representation. Ultimately, this article affirms Florida’s integral role in the ongoing narrative of Black cultural renaissance and innovation.

This essay explores the work of artist and activist Fredi Washington during the New Negro Renaissance. It frames Washington as an unconventional “Triple Threat,” not as an artist who dances and sings and acts, but as a performing artist, a writer, and a civil and human rights activist. It focuses upon Washington’s most direct engagement with the failures of American democracy—her writings for the progressive Black newspaper The People’s Voice from 1942 to 1947. A fierce advocate for Black people in the United States and around the world, Washington offers a model of resiliency and resistance in the face of white supremacy, misogyny, and the contemporary collapse of democratic institutions across the globe.

Inspired by teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City in the 1890s, Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote 12 stories about children in an urban neighborhood targeted for uplift. Around 1900, she drafted a table of contents for the collection, The Annals of ‘Steenth Street. The collection was never published as such, but some of these stories were published individually in multiple periodicals over several decades. Dunbar-Nelson’s stories center on the neighborhood’s children and their perspectives. This was literature intended, at least in part, for a child audience. Both the content and the publication history of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories raise important points for scholars of African American children’s literature. Our discussion focuses on the story Dunbar-Nelson intended to appear first in her collection, “The Revenge of James Brown,” published in the Chicago Daily News in 1899 and in the Methodist Episcopal Church School Publications’ weekly paper, the Classmate, in 1930. This story extends notions of where we might look for children’s literature of the Harlem Renaissance to include print venues not often examined with Black children in mind. Moreover, Dunbar-Nelson’s revisions of this story allow for complex considerations of her representations of Black childhood. This essay’s authors are co-founders of the Black digital humanities project, Taught by Literature, the work of which includes creating a freely available digital edition of “The Revenge of James Brown” and Dunbar-Nelson’s other ’Steenth Street stories, working with K-12 educators to create materials to facilitate teaching these stories to children in the present.

“What is Africa to me?” asks Countee Cullen in his famous poem, “Heritage,” which first appeared in 1925 in the special issue of Survey Graphic: “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro”; the question haunts not only this magazine issue but also the anthology it inspired, Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), and it is a question which Black American authors have wrestled with ever since. Cullen’s poem has been widely studied, but not much work has been done on its placement in this special issue of Survey Graphic, especially considering the fact that it directly follows Alain Locke’s article, “The Art of the Ancestors.” Clearly, there is a dialogue going on between the authors featured in this magazine about African art, African American art, and the transnational relationship between the two. In this article, I do re-readings of “Heritage” both as it appeared in Color, Cullen’s first book of verse, and also as it appeared in this special issue of Survey Graphic. Ultimately, I argue that “Heritage” has to be understood as a collaborative poem, especially in its original incarnation, and it is a poem that in its various versions is also in argument with itself.

While Jamaican émigré, New Negro author Claude McKay’s desired reading public by the mid-1920s became and remained the general American readership, at various moments during the (Long) Harlem Renaissance he enjoyed a diverse if limited reception. After early attention in Jamaica as the British Crown Colony’s first Black poet to publish a collection of verse, McKay eventually gained a measure of notice among North American politically progressive poetry enthusiasts, and then at various stages of his career gathered interest among British, French, Pan-African, and even Russian readerships. In the late 1920s, when McKay’s novel Home to Harlem became a bestseller, the New Negro author believed his star was finally rising with the broad spectrum of US readers, but the novel’s popularity was momentary, and the author’s glory transpired to be fleeting. In his lifetime, McKay never again realized the level of popular American readership he sought. During the early 1920s, the concept of an emergent, transnational American identity forged McKay’s aesthetic and accordingly his ambition to reach a US public. By the late 1930s, however, McKay rejected the idea that organized leftist politics was invested in aiding the struggling Black masses. Around the same period, he abandoned his former unique vision of a transnational America.

This article examines three key debates about Black humor during the Harlem Renaissance, framing them as public “symposia” that reflect conflicting views on comedy’s role in Black cultural and political life. It argues that Harlem Renaissance comedy can be grouped into three categories: repression, rebellion, and revision. While scholars often interpret Black humor as a tool for survival or subversion, this article contends that it is rooted in cynicism—a “Black cynical reason” aware of the illusions of racial capitalism but skeptical that self-aware satire could resist them. Harlem Renaissance comedy critiqued white supremacy but also created internal tensions within the Black community, highlighting the complex relationship between resistance and complicity. The article explores this dynamic through three debates: the 1926 Crisis exchange between W. E. B. Du Bois and Carl Van Vechten, reflected in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Comedy: American Style; the 1926 Nation debate between Langston Hughes and George Schuyler, explored through Schuyler’s Black No More; and Ralph Ellison’s 1958 exchange with Stanley Edgar Hyman in the Partisan Review, examined through Ellison’s essays. The article concludes that while Harlem Renaissance comedy advanced sharp critiques and inspired future activism, comedy itself struggles to produce putative political or social change.