The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond
Instructor: Dr. Chiara Patrizi
2022/2023
The Harlem Renaissance:"Old" vs "New" Negro
- Self-expression
- Jazz and Blues music/literature
- Renewal and Rebirth
"[Harlem] is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life."Alain Locke, "The New Negro," 1925.
Music in the Harlem Renaissance
- Harlem Nightlife: music clubs > The Cotton Club
- Jazz musicians and famous performers: Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, etc.
Langston Hughes (1901–1967)
"The Weary Blues" (1925)
Ideas of Art in the Harlem Renaissance
Alain Locke
Langston Hughes
W. E. B. DuBois
Langston Hughes (1901–1967)
"I, Too" (1926)
- Painful complexity of the relationship between the poet/the Black community and the US
- Somehow optimistic tone
- Celebrating African American leaders and people in general
Richard Wright (1908–1960)
- Born in Mississippi; parents: an illiterate sharecropper and a schoolteacher.
- 1927: moves to Chicago > becomes involved in the US Communist Party and works for the Federal Writers Project
- 1937: moves to NYC > editor of the Daily Worker and coeditor of Left Front.
Richard Wright (1908–1960)
- Major Works: short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938); novel Native Son (1940); a sociological account of the Great Migration, 12 Million Black Voices (1941); autobiography, Black Boy (1945).
- Posthumous: Eight Men (1961):"The Man Who Was Almost a Man""The Man Who Lived Underground""Big Black Good Man""The Man Who Saw The Flood""Man Of All Work" "Man, God Ain't Like That...""The Man Who KIlled a Shadow""The Man Who Went to Chicago"
"The Man Who Lived Underground"
I've got to hide, he told himself. His chest heaved as he waited, crouching in a dark corner of the vestibule. He was tired of running and dodging. Either he had tofind a place, or he had to surrender. A police car swished by through the rain, its siren rising sharply. They are looking for me all over... He crept to the door and squinted through the fogged plate glass. He stiffened as the siren rose and died in the distance. Yes, he had to hide, but where? He gritted his teeth. Then a sudden movement in the street caught his attention. A throng of tiny columns of water snaked into the air from the perforations of a manhole cover. The columns stopped abruptly, as though the perforations had become clogged; a great spout of sewer water jutted up from underground and lifted the circular metal cover, juggled it for a moment, then let it fall with a clang.
Ralph Waldo Ellison
- Born in Oklahoma
- Originally studied music and art but was drawn eventually to literature (Tuskegee Institute, Alabama)
- 1930s: Moves to New York City, where he meets Langston Hughes and Richard Wright
- Disillusionment/loss of faith in the Communist Party (CPUSA)
- 1940s: Starts writing Invisible Man (1952)
Invisible Man
- Published in 1952
- 1953: the first African American novel to win the National Book Award for Fiction
- One of the most important American novels of the XX century
- THE African American Novel
- A novel of consciousness: "invisible man," not "the invisible man" (the protagonist is one among the others) > double-consciouness expression
Invisible Man
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.
Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.
Invisible Man
Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"—all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis' music.
Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead Feel like Old Ned, wish I was dead All my life through, I’ve been so black and blue Even the mouse ran from my house They laugh at you, and scorn you too What did I do to be so black and blue? I'm white—inside—but that don't help my case Cause I can't hide what is in my face How would it end? Ain't got a friend My only sin is in my skin What did I do to be so black and blue?
3.UniVE - Am. Cult. St. 2 - HR and After
Chiara Patrizi
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Transcript
The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond
Instructor: Dr. Chiara Patrizi
2022/2023
The Harlem Renaissance:"Old" vs "New" Negro
"[Harlem] is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life."Alain Locke, "The New Negro," 1925.
Music in the Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes (1901–1967)
"The Weary Blues" (1925)
Ideas of Art in the Harlem Renaissance
Alain Locke
Langston Hughes
W. E. B. DuBois
Langston Hughes (1901–1967)
"I, Too" (1926)
Richard Wright (1908–1960)
Richard Wright (1908–1960)
"The Man Who Lived Underground"
I've got to hide, he told himself. His chest heaved as he waited, crouching in a dark corner of the vestibule. He was tired of running and dodging. Either he had tofind a place, or he had to surrender. A police car swished by through the rain, its siren rising sharply. They are looking for me all over... He crept to the door and squinted through the fogged plate glass. He stiffened as the siren rose and died in the distance. Yes, he had to hide, but where? He gritted his teeth. Then a sudden movement in the street caught his attention. A throng of tiny columns of water snaked into the air from the perforations of a manhole cover. The columns stopped abruptly, as though the perforations had become clogged; a great spout of sewer water jutted up from underground and lifted the circular metal cover, juggled it for a moment, then let it fall with a clang.
Ralph Waldo Ellison
Invisible Man
Invisible Man
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.
Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.
Invisible Man
Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"—all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis' music.
Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead Feel like Old Ned, wish I was dead All my life through, I’ve been so black and blue Even the mouse ran from my house They laugh at you, and scorn you too What did I do to be so black and blue? I'm white—inside—but that don't help my case Cause I can't hide what is in my face How would it end? Ain't got a friend My only sin is in my skin What did I do to be so black and blue?