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Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928). The Harlem Renaissance. Harlem as white neighbourhood ‘Great Migration’ and black movement to Northern cities ‘New Negro Movement’, 1920s and 30s Racial pride Progressivist /socialist politics
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Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928)
The Harlem Renaissance • Harlem as white neighbourhood ‘Great Migration’ and black movement to Northern cities • ‘New Negro Movement’, 1920s and 30s • Racial pride • Progressivist/socialist politics • Cross cultural (literature, art, music, theatre, intellectual life) • Black gentility v. Africanist primitivism
Harlem as refuge • The ‘race capital’ • Movement away from a Southern past • Publishing and black consumers: The Crisis • Intellectual and artistic value based on self-determined criteria
Harlem as ghetto • Betrayal of community/family • Space to be inhabited but not claimed • Responsibilities of black culture? • W.E.B. Du Bois on Home to Harlem: • For the most part [it] nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel like taking a bath.... He has used every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as bold and as bright colors as he can.