The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White

3 Credits.

This course surveys American literature and social history during what was then known as the New Negro movement (roughly 1912-1934), today popularly called the Harlem Renaissance. Since the1980s, scholars have revised claims that the “Renaissance” was a literary failure characterized mainly by exotic and primitive caricatures. Today the era is noted for renewing ideas of American pluralist nationality, a project, in the words of one critic, “of reconceiving the United States as something other than a white nation.” To think through some of these claims, the course juxtaposes the classic modernist work of white American writers alongside the classics of African American Harlem Renaissance literature. We will pay close attention to the evolution and instantiation of racial stereotypes during the 1920s and the operation of modernist literary techniques.