Collins Memorial Library: AFAM 375: The Harlem Renaissance: Getting Started

Welcome!

This course examines the renaissance of African American literature, music, and visual art that, for the most part, emerges from Harlem, a cultural hub in the 1920s and 1930s. The course also approaches the literature, music, and visual art, as well as the social changes in Harlem, from different disciplinary perspectives, including literary criticism, cultural history, music criticism, art criticism, and aesthetic theory. Students explore social and aesthetic debates that arose during the Harlem Renaissance and connect these to parallel debates today. Students also make connections between and among different artists and thinkers of the period, including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Jean Toomer, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Sargent Johnson, Romare Bearden, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, and Walter White. The course invites students to make connections between literature, visual art, and music from the period and between the Harlem Renaissance and their own ideas about art and society.

Online Resources

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture: A New African American Identity

Library of Congress Research Guide: Harlem Renaissance

National Gallery of Art : Uncovering America- Harlem Renaissance

Poetry Foundation: An Introduction to the Harlem Renaissance

Oklahoma City Museum of Art- Harlem Renaissance Educator Resource Guide

History.com- Harlem Renaissance

Chicago PBS: From Riots to Renaissance

Book @ Collins Library

A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (Editor)
ISBN: 9781118494141
Publication Date: 2015-05-26
A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that address the literature and culture of the Harlem Renaissance from the end of World War I to the middle of the 1930s.
Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in The 1920s by Erin Chapman
ISBN: 1283427761
Publication Date: 2012-04-02
In Prove It On Me, Erin D. Chapman explores the gender and sexual politics of this modern racial ethos and reveals the constraining and exploitative underside of the New Negro era's vaunted liberation and opportunities.
Looking for Harlem: urban aesthetics in African American literature by Maria Balshaw
ISBN: 9781849645164
Publication Date: 2000-01-01
In a provocative revision of African-American literary history, Balshaw examines the creation of an 'urban aesthetic' and explores the links between the engagement with the city and fictional reconstructions of racial identity and race writing. Focusing on the material culture of the city, the visual sense of the urban environment, the class dynamics of urban culture and the crucial importance of consumerism, this study presents a critically astute, challenging and very welcome new approach to a much-studied area of contemporary American fiction.
Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance by Amy Helene Kirschke (Editor)
ISBN: 1628460342
Publication Date: 2014-08-04
Including seventy-two black-and-white illustrations, this book chronicles the challenges of women artists, who are in some cases unknown to the general public, and places their achievements in the artistic and cultural context of early twentieth-century America. Contributors to this first book on the women artists of the Harlem Renaissance proclaim the legacy of Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Elizabeth Prophet, Lois Maillou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and many other painters, sculptors, and printmakers. In a time of more rigid gender roles, women artists faced the added struggle of raising families and attempting to gain support and encouragement from their often-reluctant spouses in order to pursue their art. They also confronted the challenge of convincing their fellow male artists that they, too, should be seen as important contributors to the artistic innovation of the era.