Alain Locke's proclamation in The New Negro (1925) that “we shall let the Negro speak for himself” rested on an assumption of shared ideals and identities that continues to shape our understanding of what has come to be known as the “Harlem Renaissance” (109). But it is an assertion that is largely debunked by two new edited collections on the period, which instead unearth many of its conflicts, contradictions and elisions. In the first of these texts, The Harlem Renaissance Revisited, the writers show how class consciousness and the conservativism of leaders such as Locke operated alongside white patronage to commodify Harlem as a site of fascination for white cultural consumers while constraining the outputs of black artists and obscuring the voices of ordinary Harlemites. However, they also evidence the movement's diverse and far-reaching implications, which helped to situate the “Renaissance” within a much broader national and international framework of cultural and social transformation and anticipated change, but whose radical potential was overtaken by an artistic mission, led by Locke, which sought to project an unthreatening image of black culture to mainstream America.

One of the key strengths of this study is the wide range of disciplinary approaches that it incorporates in order to complicate our understanding of the era. Across fourteen diverse chapters, The Harlem Renaissance Revisited provides multiple perspectives on some of the complex themes of race, nationality, gender and sexuality which fuelled the movement and also precipitated its undoing. At the heart of almost all of the essays are issues of skin-tone prejudice and class conflict, as well as divisions between southern and Caribbean migrants (who comprised as many as three quarters of Harlem's inhabitants in 1930) and northern city-dwellers.

Two chapters are particularly effective in unpacking the human realities and dispelling the fantasies that continue to dictate depictions of the period. Jacob S. Dorman's “Back to Harlem: Abstract and Everyday Labor during the Harlem Renaissance” critiques scholarship on 1920s Harlem for “having paid little attention to the masses of people who lined its streets, as opposed to the few people who lined its poems” (75). His sociological study depicts a borough characterized by poverty and social exclusion and thus far removed not just from the fantasies of white Americans who went “slumming” in venues such as the Cotton Club but also from Harlem's art establishment. Perry A. Hall's examination of recent scholarship on the period, “Perspectives on Interwar Culture: Remapping the New Negro Era,” unearths the militant political background to the movement. Through scrutiny of recent critical texts, he argues that

The – perhaps inevitable – consequence of the sheer range of analyses in this study is that some chapters subtly contradict others. For example, Mónica González Caldeiro contrasts Zora Neale Hurston's plays with a Harlem theatre circuit which she dismisses for adhering to minstrelsy-derived representations of black life, yet Frank A. Salamone argues that Duke Ellington brought a sacred message to even his Cotton Club compositions. Similarly, Martha E. Cook situates The Blacker the Berry (1929) as formative in its exploration of skin-tone prejudice amongst African Americans, but Claire Oberon Garcia shows that such a theme was an important feature of much earlier work by Jessie Redmon Fauset, such as her 1913 short story “Emmie.” There is also little agreement amongst the contributors as to how the term “Harlem Renaissance” might best be defined and explored. While some of the articles unpack the orthodoxy of the “Renaissance” as a primarily Harlem-based literary movement of the 1920s and position its art as conveying merely a “symbolic abstraction” of the actual Harlem (76), others continue to interpret the movement in these terms. Such a reading is largely reinforced by a study in which literature remains the main focus. Although the collection features sections on theatre and music, more than a third of the chapters are devoted to texts by some of the movement's key literary icons.

However, the text's contradictions should not necessarily be read negatively as they open up dialogue between the contributions and the themes they explore. In fact, the great value of this collection lies in the multifaceted perspectives that it has assembled, and The Harlem Renaissance Revisited should be applauded for its wide-ranging contribution to scholarship on the movement. Although Ogbar's collection does not wholly sweep away perceptions of the era of the “New Negro” as primarily literary, middle-class, Harlem-based and a “high-water mark of black creative expression,” it provides readers with new directions for considering both its origins and its cultural impact (246).

By contrast, Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz's collection downgrades the role of Harlem in early twentieth-century black creative expression. The book's hypothesis is that the “Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro literary and artistic movement, was a truly national phenomenon and must be understood as such” (2, emphasis added). Glasrud and Wintz observe that very few African American artists of the era were actually from Harlem, some major artists never visited the borough, and those that did often spent a great deal of time elsewhere. As the contributors to this study also note, many of the events that gave rise to the “New Negro” era – including race riots, lynchings, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as resistances to these abuses such as campaigns to prevent screenings of southern propaganda film The Birth of a Nation (1915) – occurred, or at least were felt, nationally.

Key to Harlem's significance to African American artistic expression in the 1920s was its status as a literary and networking centre. Glasrud and Wintz's study therefore challenges more substantially than does The Harlem Renaissance Revisited tendencies to interpret the “Renaissance” primarily as a literary movement. By instead exploring art, music, and musical theatre, The Harlem Renaissance in the American West succeeds in shifting much of the movement's impact westwards and in demonstrating how African American cultural establishments in urban centres such as Kansas City and Minneapolis and states including California and Oklahoma were affected by and in turn influenced Harlem's creative outpourings. The text concentrates chiefly on Texas and the states north and west of it, together with Minnesota. The rationale for such a geographical focus is that these areas were popular destinations for participants in the Great Migration of the early twentieth century. Although their local African American populations had traditionally been small, they grew by as much as 60 percent between 1900 and 1930.

Each contributor provides rich and insightful details of forgotten artists and obscured cultural centres. Key to all of the chapters is an emphasis on reciprocal creative interaction between Harlem and the American West, and particularly interesting is Douglas Flamming's claim that Los Angeles took over from Harlem following the Great Depression and enjoyed a temporary, if unsustainable, cultural renaissance. Jean van Delinder draws important attention to filial and artistic links between Native and African American communities in Oklahoma. Michael Phillips's persuasive contention that Dallas continues to ignore its African American art heritage at least partly out of cultural anxiety points up the extent of black artists' critical neglect and is a powerful reminder of enduring racist attitudes towards cultural production.

Due to the overall smallness and geographical isolation of many of their black populations relative to Harlem, the western centres explored in this study failed individually to rival the borough's cultural impact. A concluding chapter, which could have drawn together some of the contributors' claims for the artistic importance of such communities, would therefore have been welcome in underscoring the American West's creative significance during the “New Negro” era. Douglas Henry Daniels does acknowledge that ragtime was performed in the San Francisco Bay Area at the beginning of the twentieth century. Elsewhere, historians such as Marshall and Jean Stearns and Herbert Asbury have claimed that ragtime dances, such as the Turkey Trot and Texas Tommy, were first executed publicly along San Francisco's Barbary Coast. Such assertions suggest that Los Angeles's cultural offerings were not only comparable to Harlem's but anticipated them and that the American West may in fact have made vital contributions to jazz music and dance. A concluding chapter could also have better explained why the notion of a specific “renaissance” is still relevant when many of the artists discussed in this study were active outside the 1920s and 1930s.

Yet the most surprising omission of a text dedicated to breaking down the geographical boundaries by which early twentieth-century black cultural expression has traditionally been defined and understood is that it fails to grapple with such creativity's international ramifications, characterizing it instead as a national movement. As noted above, a sizeable proportion of Harlem's population in 1930 was Caribbean-born. In this respect, the text compares less than favourably to The Harlem Renaissance Revisited, which, whilst continuing to privilege Harlem as a cultural centre, does feature a chapter that scrutinizes black artists’ interactions with Soviet Russia and another that emphasizes connections between the writings of Jessie Redmon Fauset and three of her Caribbean contemporaries, Suzanne Césaire and Paulette and Jane Nardal. Two contributors to The Harlem Renaissance in the West do acknowledge that Garveyism enjoyed support in African American communities as far afield as Dallas and Los Angeles, but much more could have been made of its impact in these areas.

Nevertheless, The Harlem Renaissance in the West does an important job of recovering artists and communities traditionally obscured in cultural histories and also of challenging a too-easy privileging of Harlem as the primary site of African American cultural production in the interwar era. As chapter-length studies, both books inevitably can only begin to explore complex social interactions and artistic careers, but they provide vital starting grounds by which to unearth the multifarious cultural outpourings – and diverse human experiences – of a broad range of African American communities during the early decades of the twentieth century.