Abstract
This work brings together themes underlying black theatre, performance, and drama from 1910 to 1927. I pick up where my previous work, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 ,leaves off, with theatre and performance during what I term “the first half of the Harlem Renaissance—New Negro era.”3 The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed in American cultural history, and drama and performance were at the forefront of it. Regrettably, few studies acknowledge this fact. Yet drama and performance consistently played a pivotal role in the evolution of Black Nationalism, which in turn led to an indigenous black theatre; the development of black dramatic theory, which bolstered black literature as a whole; and the rise of black performance, which added significantly to black cultural expression. The era’s musical and literary content have received significant attention, which has led to an emphasis on selected areas of aesthetic development at the expense of others. I hope to correct the imbalance by bringing theatre, performance, and drama into focus.
If in connection with it [art] we study the Negro we shall find that two things are observable. One is that any distinction so far won by a member of the race in America had been almost always in some one of the and; and the other is that any influence do far exerted by the Negro on American civilization had been primarily in the field of aestheties.
— Benjamin Brawley (1918)1
In the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is becoming transformed.
— Alain Locke (1925)2
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Notes
Benjamin Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United Stated (New York: Duffield & Co., 1918) 4.
Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (1925; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1992), 6.
The Harlem Renaissance—New Negro era was a period of the greatest single shift in consciousness of black life and thought prior to the Civil Rights Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement itself was deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance’s theories and practices. The term “New Negro” dates as early as 1895, but it is primarily known by the title of the book, The New Negro,edited by Alain Locke in 1925 and emanating from the essays collected in Survey Graphic 6.6 (March 1925) that composed of articles defining a new African American agenda. For a survey of the term “New Negro,” see Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988), 30–47.
Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem (New York: Noonday, 1981)
Arna Bontemps, ed., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1972)
James De Jongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1981, 1997)
Victor Kramer, ed., The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined (New York: AM S Press, 1987)
Amritjit Singh et al., ed., The Harlem Renaissance: Reevaluations (New York: Garland, 1989)
Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1995)
Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1995).
For important collections of plays, see James V Hatch and Leo Hamalian, eds., Lost Flays of the Harlem Renaissance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996)
Hamalian & Hatch, eds., The Roots of African American Drama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991)
Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens, eds., Strange Fruit: Flays on Lynching by American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Judith L. Stephens, “The Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement,” in American Women Playwrights, Brenda Murphy, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 98–117
For a study on the musicals of the era, see Thomas L. Riis, Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theatre in New York, 1890–1915 (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1989)
Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989)
Bernard L. Peterson, A Century of Musicals in Black and White (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993)
Wayne D. Shirley, “The House of Melody: A List of Publications of the Gotham-Attucks Music Company at the Library of Congress,” The Black Perspective in Music 15.1 (Spring 1987), 79–112
John Graziano, “Sentimental Songs, Rags, and Transformations: The emergence of the Black Musical, 1895–1910,” in Musical Theatre in America,ed. Glenn Loney (London: Greenwood Press, 1984), 211–232.
Locke, “The Negro and the American Stage,” Theatre Arts Monthly 10.2 (February 1926), 116.
Gregory Holmes Singleton, “Birth, Rebirth, and the ‘New Negro’ of the 1920s,” Phyton 43.1 (March 1982), 31.
Bernard W Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 114.
In this analysis of “paradox” I build on Howard A. Slaatte, The Pertinence of the Paradox (New York: Humanities Press, 1968)
Nicholas Rescher, Paradoxes: Their Roots, Range, and Resolution (Chicago: Open Court, 2001).
Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88.
This view is more or less in agreement with Daylanne K. English, “Selecting the Harlem Renaissance,” Critical Inquiry 25.4 (Summer 1999), 807–21.
Thomas C. Holt, “The Political Use of Alienation: W E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903–1940,” American Quarterly 42.2 (June 1990), 305.
Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 51.
Lucius Outlaw, “Toward a Critical Theory of ‘Race’,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 77.
Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Collected Essays, Vol. 1 (1924; London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), 319–337.
For a history of African American participation in World War I, see Herbert Aptheker, Afro American History: The Modern Era (New York: Citadel, 1992), 159–72.
For important studies on migration, see Alferdteen Harrison, ed., Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991)
Daniel M. Johnson and Rex R. Campbell, Black Migration in America: A Social Demographic History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981)
Joe William Trotter, Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Kerry Candaele, Bound for Glory, 1910–1930 (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1997), 7.
Still one of the best discussions of migration is Charles S. Johnson, “The Negro Migration: An Economic Interpretation,” Modern Quarterly 2 (1924–25), 314–26.
Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper, 1971), 135.
For statistics, see Osofsky, Harlem, and Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; reprint, New York: Hill & Wang, 1997), 228.
Sterling Brown, Negro Poetry and Drama (1937; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1969), 138
James Weldon Johnson, “The Dilemma of the Negro Author,” in American Mercury 15.60 (December 1928), 477.
Benjamin Brawley, “The Negro Literary Renaissance,” The Southern Workman 56.4 (April 1927), 177.
For an illuminating study on the rise of Harlem’s Caribbean community, see Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
Gottfried Benn, ed., Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrhundert (Lyrics of the Expression-istic Century, 1955), quoted in Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1.
Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 14.
Alain Locke, “Introduction,” Plays of Negro Life, eds. Locke and Montgomery Gregory (New York: Harper, 1927)
See, for instance, Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991)
Manthia Diawara, “Cultural Studies/Black Studies,” in Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies, ed. Mae Henderson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 209.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4
Yvonne Ochillo, “The Race-Consciousness of Alain Locke,” Phyton 47.3 (Fall 1986), 174.
W E B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth (1903),” in Writings (New York: Library Classics, 1986), 842–861.
Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9.
James Weldon Johnson, “Preface to the First Edition,” The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922), 9.
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© 2002 David Krasner
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Krasner, D. (2002). African American Performance in the Harlem Renaissance. In: A Beautiful Pageant. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06625-1_1
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