English 11 / Unit 5: Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
5.4 The Harlem Renaissance
Notes
The Harlem Renaissance (about 1918-1937) was a flowering of Black art, music and literature centered in Harlem, New York.
- Cause: the Great Migration, in which many Black Americans moved from the rural South to northern cities, bringing new communities and ideas.
- Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925) announced a new pride and creative confidence.
- Writers drew on jazz and blues rhythms, folk speech and African American history and addressed racial pride, identity and injustice.
- W. E. B. Du Bois described double consciousness (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903): seeing oneself through one's own eyes and through the eyes of a prejudiced world.
- Worked example: a poem with a repeated line like a blues refrain and subject matter about Black pride reflects the movement's themes.
Practice
What was the Great Migration?
It helped create communities like Harlem.
Which pair best captures major goals of Harlem Renaissance writers?
They celebrated Black culture and confronted racism.
Du Bois's term "double consciousness" refers to:
The idea names the divided experience of living under racism.
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