The Harlem Renaissance

Harvard FAS

This course consists of close readings of the key works of African American art and literature in the period during the 1920’s initially called “The New Negro Renaissance,” and which would soon come to be known as “The Harlem Renaissance.”Accordingly, the course begins by tracing the evolution of the trope of a “New Negro” from its beginnings in 1887, as a response to Henry Grady’s conceit of a “New South,” through its successive, often contradictory definitions over the next thirty-eight…