ENGL W3934 - Harlem Renaissance

Institution:

Columbia University in the City of New York

Subject:

Description:

The novelist Ralph Ellison called the Harlem Renaissance "a sophisticated moment" when black Americans had survived the shocks of slavery and the disappointments of Reconstruction sufficiently to think of leadership on a very broad scale. Ellison referred to black political leadership, in the United States and abroad. But like Alain Locke and many of the founders of the Harlem Renaissance, he also stressed the importance of leadership across the spectra of the arts: in literature, music, and the visual arts. This course will focus on the arts of the Harlem Renaissance as experiments in cultural modernity and as forms of incipient political empowerment. What was the Harlem Renaissance? Where and when did it take place? Who were its major players? What difference did it make to everyday Harlemites? What were its outposts beyond Harlem itself? Was there a rural HR? An international HR? As we wonder about these problems of definition, we will upset the usual literary/historical framework with considerations of music and painting of the period. How to fit Bessie Smith into a frame with W.E.B. Du Bois? Ellington with Zora Neale Hurston? Aaron Douglas with Langston Hughes? Ellison also wrote that "Harlem is Nowhere." (There is an important new book by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts that borrows Ellison's title.) Where is Harlem today? Does it survive as more than a memory, a trace? How does it function in "our" "national"/(international?) imagination? Has the Harlem Renaissance's moment ended come and gone? What continuities might we detect? What institutions from the early twentieth century have endured?

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.columbia.edu

Phone Number:

(212) 854-1754

Regional Accreditation:

Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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