Chapter 5 shows how Zora Neale Hurston draws upon the model of the church congregation to theorize the audience as an assembly of participant-observers. Hurston’s work traces the porous boundaries that separate scripted drama from embodied religious practice. I foreground her achievements not only as a playwright but also as a theorist of performance, focusing on the late 1930s and early 1940s, a period not previously recognized as formative to her theater. As I discuss, these years consequentially refashioned Hurston’s understanding of performance through her immersion in the ethnographic study of Black religion in the American south and across the Atlantic world. Hurston’s many plays about religion borrow from her ethnographies, just as her ethnographies approach religion as a collective performance practice. Through the reciprocal activation of performance and ethnography, she transports us behind the scenes of her dramatic writing, revealing the collaborative cultural processes that give rise to it.

Whereas the previous chapter traced the early debates between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois over the proper strategies for African American advancement – between Washington’s emphasis on vocational training and gradual assimilation and Du Bois’s call for the “talented tenth” to lead in social and political uplift – the Harlem Renaissance represents a new, more experimental phase of African American thought. Concentrated in Harlem during the 1920s, this movement produced groundbreaking literature, art, and music that explored the meaning of Black identity, freedom, and creativity. Figures like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and George Schuyler interrogated existing social norms while celebrating the distinctiveness of Black culture. Locke’s philosophy of cultural pluralism emphasized that African American culture was not a problem to be solved but a source of inherent value, teaching readers how culture can shape identity and influence broader societal understanding. Magazines like Fire!!! and works such as Jean Toomer’s Cane and Nella Larsen’s Passing pushed narrative boundaries, illustrating the ways in which art can challenge assumptions about race, gender, and desire.

The history of Black poetry in New Orleans is so vast and complex that no one has yet undertaken a comprehensive study of its history. Such a history would sort out its origins in the Spirituals sung by those trafficked in and out of the city’s antebellum commerce in the enslaved and in the very different Afro-Creole poetry of the 1840s and 1860s; would grapple with the ways the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance shaped careers in poetry associated with the city, pulling some away and but also inspiring others to cultivate a keen pride in the deep cultural roots of Black America in the city; it would explore the meaning of the Black Arts Movement here as well as the central theme of memory-work in the generations that followed, especially as post-Katrina gentrification continues to change the city’s complexion.

Chapter 2 examines the adaptation of the unemployment novel in midcentury African American fiction and in the racialized labor market of the United States. It argues that the resentment in the traditional unemployment novel was given a tone of despair in mid century African American literature – similar in affective structure to the longer tradition of the blues.

This chapter examines the evolution of African-American short fiction in the 1940s, focusing on Ralph Ellison’s contributions. It traces the genre’s development from early twentieth-century foundations through the Harlem Renaissance to a flourishing in the 1940s. Ellison’s stories, including “Flying Home” and “King of the Bingo Game,” exemplify the decade’s shift toward more experimental, psychologically complex narratives that blend African-American folklore with modernist techniques. The chapter argues that this period was pivotal in African-American literature, as writers like Ellison combined vernacular traditions with high modernist styles to address themes of identity, alienation, and the American experience. This synthesis laid the groundwork for major novels of the 1950s and beyond, marking the 1940s as a transformative decade that propelled African-American literature into a new era of artistic achievement.

This chapter investigates how the African American autobiography is in itself a unique subgenre within the genre of nonfiction. It explores how the African American autobiography intricately weaves together intensely personal elements of the authors’ lives with the larger forces of historical changes. The specific autobiographies that I discuss were works that were published between the 1940s and 1960s, a time bookended by World War II and the Civil Rights Movement. These texts are Langston Hughes’ The Big Sea, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks, and Ezra Bells’ American Daughter. This essay explores how these writers’ lives, dreams, and dreams deferred are largely defined by their identities as Americans of color in a racially stratified America.

This chapter traces how Langston Hughes (1901–1967) documented the Black experience in America from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movemen and some key legacies of the Black world building he pursued by engaging with social justice and political activism. To this end, the chapter details overlooked correspondence to reveal the mentoring Hughes provided to Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Amiri Baraka. These letters illuminate the unmistakable confidence Hughes instilled in both Brooks and Walker while the often overamplified tension between Hughes and Baraka quietens into a spirit of working admiration among equals.

The sonnet has been in wide use among African American poets since the late nineteenth century. This chapter traces the African American sonnet from its emergence through the Harlem Renaissance in order to understand the popularity of a form often associated with white European literature. It shows that the sonnet initially was a means for Black writers to get published in the genteel quality magazines which shaped literary and political debates around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, the sonnet served as a vehicle for community building and as a forum in which foundational questions of Black poetics could be negotiated. Discussing writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, the chapter identifies four impulses that guided African American approaches to the sonnet form: the contests over the commemoration of the Civil War; the subversive appropriation of genteel poetic conventions; the self-confident political protest of the Harlem Renaissance; and the quest for a vernacular modernist idiom.

Race has been a dominant theme in studies of US black art and politics in the 1910s and 1920s. This chapter shifts focus to imperial concerns during a period marked by US occupations in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, as well as the acquisition of the Danish Virgin Islands. It explores how the era’s print culture both revealed and obscured the expansion of a US Empire or Greater United States in the Caribbean. US governance in places like Haiti did not go unchallenged in leftist and race-conscious periodicals such as The Nation, The Crisis, and The Crusader. While non-fiction provoked anti-imperial analyses, fiction did not prompt the same responses. Assessing reviews and commentary of fiction, including Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, this chapter examines why anti-imperial reading proved so elusive in this context.

Harlem’s sensuous poetics refers to an aesthetic sensibility that turned toward the possibilities of feeling, sense, and perception – the realm of the sensuous – to imagine new experiences of Black bodies and pleasure. Its poets drew from the maelstrom of urban life (nightlife in particular) to conjure new ways of inhabiting the body, new desires, and new ways of moving individually and collectively. They provided a new way to understand the role of Harlem as a space of illicit sexuality and self-expression in poetry. This chapter surveys this tradition, situating Harlem’s sensuous poetics in the context of representational challenges to the politics of respectability that shaped Black middle-class cultural norms in the era. It looks first to recurrent poetic tropes (such as the “dancing girl” and the “laughing boy”) that contested such politics. It then turns to the enunciation of a sensuous poetics within normative middle-class institutions such as women’s civic clubs and literary salons. In doing so, it argues that this tradition is less a set of formal principles than a way of being in the world that begins from the body’s sense perception and its felt response.

This essay aims to expand the geographic and cultural understanding of jazz history by exploring how the after-hours jam sessions in the homes of Alma Scott, Mary Lou Williams, and Alice Coltrane were vital to the progression of jazz. During the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the home of Scott in Harlem became an important meeting space for a circle of Black musicians, who were significant in shaping the musical language of American musical theater, swing, and the vaudeville blues. In the mid-1940s and early 1950s, Williams’s Hamilton Terrace apartment attracted a collective of young musicians who would create the modern jazz aesthetic. More than two decades later, a basement recording studio in Coltrane’s Dix Hills home played a similar role, providing a space that fostered a new wave of avant-garde jazz in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

From its “Golden Age” in Paris during the interwar years, to its subsequent rearticulations and revisions in the following decades, negritude has remained something of a moving target for literary-historical inquiry while garnering significant criticism, especially leading up to and in the immediate wake of formal decolonization. This chapter reconsiders negritude’s contested origins and complex trajectory through African and Afro-diasporic thought, identifying suggestive new lexical sources for this supposed neologism that stand to shed light on the underappreciated “oracular” or “prophetic” dimensions of negritude. It argues for the enduring relevance of negritude as a key site for articulations of blackness in French and as a horizon for African literature more broadly.

In Chapter 4, I consider the third and most controversial and canonical novel in the Pittsburgh Courier’s anti-lynching trilogy, Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924). Rather than presenting white transformation, the novel ends with the bitterness of a failed cooperative initiative and the lynching of both of its New Negro protagonists. When the New Negro physician’s culminating gesture of selfless professionalism is misconstrued by the town’s Klansmen, a white mob – another such mob had already murdered his more radical New Negro brother – ambushes and kills him. Loosely based on White’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lynching investigations of the 1919 Elaine massacre, the novel is the only work of fiction I examine that generated a published letter to the editor criticizing it. Considered within the montaged paratextual elements that surrounded it, women’s voices gain significantly more agency. In particular, the advertisements for guns around the serial installments emphasize the “ghostly” presence of Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching militance. In addition, just one month before the serialization of White’s novel appeared in January of 1926, the Courier began publishing a column by anti-lynching activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

The Harlem Renaissance Weekly asks that we consider the largely overlooked newspaper serial fiction of the 1920s in relation to, and sometimes in direct response to, events of daily interest to Black people, and especially Black women, who likely constituted its primary readers. By recentering Black newspapers and by reading them as part of a reader-generated weekly montage, I show how this broad-based popular form helped readers renegotiate the cultural work of New Negroes, refiguring civil rights protest as they navigated the pleasures and dangers of the Jazz Age. At the same time, I demonstrate how the twenties New Negro Woman featured in the Pittsburgh Courier increasingly dominated racial representation and contested patriarchal Black leadership. If the New Negro Man led the race on the editorial page, the New Negro Woman represented the race on the front page. It was not Alain Locke’s implicitly male New Negro who defined the Harlem Renaissance week to week, but rather the New Negro Woman, who, almost invariably in the context of a heterosexual love plot, propelled narratives, spurred sales, and defined a distinctly modern Black sociopolitical consciousness.

This chapter explores how African intellectual knowledge systems have been shaped by the cultural interchange between the African continent and the African diaspora in the Americas. In particular, I explore how notions of Africa and Pan-African thought have both shaped and been shaped by thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter attempts to trace a series of connections through a sampling of anglophone poetry, plays, letters, novels, speeches, music, and the ideas these texts embody in creating an alternative archive to that established by European thinkers. By focusing on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Drum Generation, political icons like Nkrumah, Garvey, Fanon, and Mandela, with odd pairings like Mugabe and Marley and a sampling of West African plays, I trace how the African diaspora shifted understandings of an imagined community on the African continent, while African thinkers changed how its diaspora understood the continent itself in terms of those imaginings. I am arguing for a vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African literary production as a repository of cultural strategies with material effects, which centralize how Pan-Africanisms imagine modernity.

By the early twentieth century, a handful of students of African descent were attending the Academia de San Alejandro. Some of them managed to continue their studies in Europe, frequently with fellowships from national and local institutions. The so-called sociedades de color – clubs and mutual aid societies organized by people of African descent – played key roles in procuring state support for these artists and their careers. By the late 1930s, a small but consolidated group of artists of African descent, including a few women, exhibited regularly in Havana. Several participated in international exhibitions as well. Yet many, indeed most, of these artists are barely remembered today. The rise of the artistic vanguardia (avant-garde) of the 1920s and 1930s depicted their works, which were executed in the academic language, as obsolete and mediocre. As in the early nineteenth century, what the vanguardia described as true – and certainly as new – art was produced mostly by white artists. This is ironic, for much avant-garde art constructed visions of national identity that were centered on Afro-Cuban cultural expressions, to the point that the movement is known as Afrocubanismo in Cuban arts and letters.

This chapter explores the rap debates of philosophical aesthetics, where early academic discourse on rap was at its most active. Rap aestheticians (led by Richard Shusterman) accentuated rap’s nature as an “art form”. The chapter examines the key issues within this debate, including the aesthetic experience of rap, flow (Mtume ya Salaam), the need for public support (and Herbert Grabes’ criticism of this position), and rap’s affinities with the Harlem Renaissance (Marvin Gladney). Rap’s engagement with other cultural practices, like driving and everyday culture, was discussed very early within philosophical aesthetics. Right from the beginning the debate was very international, with many of the authors coming from the Nordic Countries (Esa Sironen, Stefán Snaevarr, Martti Honkanen). It argues that there is still a lot to learn from aesthetic discussions on rap, and these philosophical debates are an interesting historical phenomenon, which rap scholars should know more about.