Definition

• The Harlem Renaissance was a period in

American history from the 1920s and
1930s. During this time, many African-
Americans migrated from the South to
Northern cities, seeking economic and
creative opportunities.

• Within their communities creative

expression became an outlet for writers,
musicians, artists, and photographers, with
a particular concentration in Harlem, New
York.
"Harlem Renaissance" did not
appear in print before 1940, and it
only gained widespread appeal in
the 1960s.

During the four preceding decades,

writers had mostly referred to a
"Negro Renaissance."
History
With the end of the Civil War in 1865,
hundreds of thousands of African
Americans newly freed from the yoke of
slavery in the South began to dream of
fuller participation in American society,
including political empowerment, equal
economic opportunity, and economic and
cultural self-determination.
• Unfortunately, by the late 1870s, that dream was largely dead, as white
supremacy was quickly restored to the Reconstruction South. White
lawmakers on state and local levels passed strict racial segregation laws
known as “Jim Crow laws” that made African Americans second-class
citizens.

• While a small number of African Americans were able to become

landowners, most were exploited as sharecroppers, a system designed to
keep them poor and powerless.

• Hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) perpetrated lynchings and
conducted campaigns of terror and intimidation to keep African
Americans from voting or exercising other fundamental rights.
Economy

• With booming economies across the North and Midwest offering industrial jobs
for workers of every race, many African Americans realized their hopes for a
better standard of living—and a more racially tolerant environment—lay outside
the South. By the turn of the 20th century, the Great Migration was underway as
hundreds of thousands of African Americans relocated to cities like Chicago, Los
Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York.

• The Harlem section of Manhattan, which covers just three square miles, drew
nearly 175,000 African Americans, giving the neighborhood the largest
concentration of black people in the world. Harlem became a destination for
African Americans of all backgrounds. From unskilled laborers to an educated
middle-class, they shared common experiences of slavery, emancipation, and
racial oppression, as well as a determination to forge a new identity as free
people.
The Great Migration

• The Great Migration drew to Harlem some of the greatest minds and
brightest talents of the day, an astonishing array of African American
artists and scholars. Between the end of World War I and the mid-
1930s, they produced one of the most significant eras of cultural
expression in the nation’s history—the Harlem Renaissance.

• Yet this cultural explosion also occurred in Cleveland, Los Angeles and
many cities shaped by the great migration. Alain Locke, a Harvard-
educated writer, critic, and teacher who became known as the “dean”
of the Harlem Renaissance, described it as a “spiritual coming of age” in
which African Americans transformed “social disillusionment to race
pride.”
LITERATURE

The Harlem Renaissance encompassed poetry and prose, painting and

sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance.

What united these diverse art forms was their realistic presentation of
what it meant to be black in America, what writer Langston Hughes called
an “expression of our individual dark-skinned selves,” as well as a new
militancy in asserting their civil and political rights.
Harlem Renaissance Contributors

Among the Renaissance’s most significant contributors were

intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs, and
Walter Francis White; electrifying performers Josephine Baker and
Paul Robeson; writers and poets Zora Neale Hurston, Effie Lee
Newsome, Countee Cullen; visual artists Aaron Douglas and
Augusta Savage; and an extraordinary list of legendary musicians,
including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway,
Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, Josephine Baker, Fats
Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and countless others.
MOVEMENT

• At the height of the movement, Harlem was the epicenter of American

culture. The neighborhood bustled with African American-owned and
run publishing houses and newspapers, music companies, playhouses,
nightclubs, and cabarets. The literature, music, and fashion they
created defined culture and “cool” for blacks and white alike, in
America and around the world.

• As the 1920s came to a close, so did the Harlem Renaissance. Its

heyday was cut short largely due to the Stock Market Crash of 1929
and resulting Great Depression, which hurt African American-owned
businesses and publications and made less financial support for the
arts available from patrons, foundations, and theatrical organizations.
• However, the Harlem Renaissance’s impact on America was
indelible. The movement brought notice to the great works of
African American art, and inspired and influenced future
generations of African American artists and intellectuals.

• The self-portrait of African American life, identity, and culture

that emerged from Harlem was transmitted to the world at
large, challenging the racist and disparaging stereotypes of the
Jim Crow South. In doing so, it radically redefined how people
of other races viewed African Americans and understood the
African American experience.
• Most importantly, the Harlem Renaissance instilled in
African Americans across the country a new spirit of self-
determination and pride, a new social consciousness, and a
new commitment to political activism, all of which would
provide a foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the
1950s and 1960s. In doing so, it validated the beliefs of its
founders and leaders like Alain Locke and Langston Hughes
that art could be a vehicle to improve the lives of the
African Americans.
THE THREE THEORIES USED IN DIGESTING LITERARY PIECES

AUTHOR READER’S
DEPENDENT TEXT DEPENDENT DEPENDENT
THEORY THEORY
THEORY
Focuses on the
Focuses on the Focuses on the form, perspective and
perspective and style and structure of own interpretation
the background the literary text itself. towards the literary
of the author. text of the reader
himself.
Criticism Approaches
Lenses used in Analyzing Literary
Pieces
• Literary Criticism – a systematic study and evaluation of
literary works.
• Biographical Criticism – begins with simple but central insight
that Literature is written by actual people and that
understanding an author’s life can help readers more
thoroughly comprehend the work.

• Cultural Criticism- an approach to literature that focuses on the

historical as well as social political and economic contexts of a
work.
• Deconstructionism- critical dismantling of tradition and
traditional modes of thought.
• Feminist Criticism- an approach to literature that seeks to correct and
supplement what may be regarded as a predominantly made
dominated critical perspective with a feminist consciousness.

• Formalist Criticism- an approach to literature that focuses on the

formal elements of a work such as its language, structure and tone.

• Gay and Lesbian- an approach to literature that focuses on how

homosexuals are represented in literature.

• Gender Criticism- an approach to literature that explore how ideas

about men and women- what is masculine and feminine- can be
regarded as socially constructed by particular cultures.
• Historical Criticism – an approach to literature that uses history as means
of understanding literary work more clearly.
• Marxist Criticism- an approach to literature that focuses on the
ideological content of work of Karl Marx
• Mythological Criticism- an approach to literature that seeks to identify
what in work creates deep universal response in readers, by paying close
attention to the hopes, fears and expectations of the entire cultures.
• New Criticism- an approach to literature that focuses in explication-
extremely close textual analysis.
• New Historicism – an approach to literature that emphasizes the
interaction between the historic context of the work and a modern
reader’s understanding and of the work.
• Post Colonial Criticism – an approach to literature that focuses on the
study of cultural behavior and expression in relationship to the colonized
word.
• Psychological Criticism – an approach to literature that draws upon
psychoanalytic theories.
• Sociological Criticism – an approach to literature that examines social
groups, relationship and values as they are manifested in literature.
• Reader Response Criticism- an approach to literature that focuses on
the reader rather than the work itself.

• Structuralism – an approach to literature that examines how literary

texts arrive at their meanings rather than the meaning itself.

 Queer Criticism – focused its inquiries into natural and unnatural

behavior with respect to homosexual behavior, queer theory expands
its focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that falls
into normative and deviant categories.

 Moral- Philosophical Criticism – evaluates a work in terms of the

ideas and values it contains – in relation to particular ethical,
philosophical or religious system.