I. Business - preview discussion questions for Friday, etc.
II. Recall Griffith's vision of Americanism in Birth of a Nation
A. Backward-looking, racialized vision of American identity
B. One that idealizes conventionalized vision of gender and family
C. Family as metaphor for American nation - the American family tends to be racially endogamous - implications of this for racial contours of national community
1. significance of Silas Lynch's desire to marry Elsie Stoneman
2. national reunification takes the form of double marriage between Stoneman and Cameron families
D. Depiction of African Americans in the film
1. faithful servants versus unruly freedmen and women
2. significance of mulatto figures
3. contrast between African-American womanhood and white American womanhood (gender and American cultural formation)
4. The film 's depiction of African Americans raises three critical questions that will be taken up by the writers, artists, and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance:
a. Who will control the representation of African Americans in modern American culture? Will the representation of African Americans contiunue to be controlled by white racists like D.W. Griffith? Or will it be controlled by racially self-conscious African Americans?
(see Langston Hughes' poem "Minstrel Man")
b. Will the representation of African Americans continue to look backward to the Southern rural past of slavery and oppression? Or will it look forward to a utopian urbanism represented by Harlem, the "race capital"?
c. How will popular and high culture interact in the modern, urbanist representation of African-American identity?
i) just as Griffith sought to bring cultural refinement to the popular medium of film
ii) African American writers and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance sought to harness the popular cultural vitality of jazz and blues expression to the aesthetic aspirations of the African-American literary and artistic elite
III. Compare Griffith's vision of Americanism with that of Harlem Renaissance artists, writers, and musicians
A. Social history of Harlem and the Great Migration
1. Harlem as the most important of several Northern, urban destinations for Southern black migrants beginning in World War I
2. Social and cultural landscape of Harlem - its relation to the broader geography of New York and urbanizing America
a. working-class Harlem and the racial nationalism of Marcus Garvey
b. blues and jazz music, Harlem nightlife, and white fascination with black primitivism and exoticism
c. the "New Negro" movement as a middle-class response to Garveyism and the cultural vitality of blues and jazz
3. Importance of Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925) in attracting national attention to Harlem
B. The New Negro's vision of Harlem, African-American Identity, and Urban Life
1. Tension between Southern hinterland and Northern metropolis runs throughout the music, art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance
2. Importance of urban setting - "the thrill of the urban" (Maria Balshaw, Looking for Harlem)
a. Locke's emphasis on Harlem as a utopian "race capital" is reflected in changes he made to the collection from the Survey Graphic edition to The New Negro
b. Rudolph Fisher's "City of Refuge" exemplifies urban tone of the whole collection
c. other examples of The New Negro's urbanism: James Weldon Johnson, J.A. Rogers
3. Ambivalent portrayals of Harlem culture and community
a. Rudolph Fisher's "City of Refuge"
b. Langston Hughes' and Claude McCay's celebratory, blues-inflected poetry
c. literary portrayals of jazz performance and African-American double consciousness
4. motifs of New Negro writing: primitivism, exoticism, jazz expression
C. Overview of The New Negro collection and its history
D. Harlem Renaissance Writers and American Identity
1. Langston Hughes, "I Too"
2. J.A. Rogers, "Jazz at Home"
3. James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: The Culture Capital"
D. Harlem and African-American Experience in the 1920s
1. Literature, art, and music of the Harlem Renaissance speaks to broader American experience in the 1920s
a. urbanism, self-conscious modernism of 1920s America
b. increasing sexual expressiveness of American culture
c. growing interest in primitivism and exoticism after World War I
2. Also speaks specifically to African-American experience in the 1920s
a. Speaks to the hope and dreams of African Americans
b. Also to their experience of hardship, toil, and disillusionment
c. finally, it speaks to their efforts to claim authorship over representations of African Americans, and thereby to challenge racist portrayals like Griffith's Birth of a Nation
d. it is important to keep in mind what is left out of Locke's New Negro collection
i) these are predominantly middle-class reflections on African-American urban experience in the 1920s
ii) even the poems of Hughes and McKay and the commentary of J.A. Roger, which celebrate the vitality and sexual openness of African-American popular music, filter that music through a heightened literary or academic language, even as they saw it as inalienable from African-American identity
IV. Conclusions
A. Racial accents of 1920s American culture are complex -- intersect with class, gender, regional accents
B. The stark contrast between Birth of a Nation and The New Negro reflects that racial complexity
1. both Griffith and the contributors to The New Negro sought to reconcile racially specific rural pasts with a modern, urban, industrialized present
2. both Griffith and many of The New Negro's contributors sought to direct that reconciliation in particular ways
a. Griffith sought to control the cultural impact of film
b. Harlem Renaissance writers and intellectuals sought to control the cultural impact of blues and jazz performance
c. Neither was ultimately successful in sanitizing or guiding the development of potent new means of popular entertainment