Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Vicious Modernism
- I The Legendary Capital: The 1920s and 1930s
- 1 The Legendary Capital
- 2 City of Refuge
- 3 Crossing the Color Line
- 4 Me revoici, Harlem
- II The Emerging Ghetto: The 1940s and 1950s
- III The Inner City: The 1960s and 1970s
- Epilogue: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination
- Appendix 1 A Checklist of Black Harlem in Poetry
- Appendix 2 A Checklist of Black Harlem in Novels
- Notes
- Index
4 - Me revoici, Harlem
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Vicious Modernism
- I The Legendary Capital: The 1920s and 1930s
- 1 The Legendary Capital
- 2 City of Refuge
- 3 Crossing the Color Line
- 4 Me revoici, Harlem
- II The Emerging Ghetto: The 1940s and 1950s
- III The Inner City: The 1960s and 1970s
- Epilogue: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination
- Appendix 1 A Checklist of Black Harlem in Poetry
- Appendix 2 A Checklist of Black Harlem in Novels
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Black Harlem's meteroic rise to prominence coincided with the emerging racial self-awareness of parallel international generations of young black writers, particularly poets, born around the turn of the century, at roughly the same time as the New Negro generation, in different parts of the black diaspora. These authors, coming to adulthood like their New Negro contemporaries in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, had grown up in decades when racism carried the authority of wide popular and scientific acceptance, but they were not disposed to endure the status quo ante as the permanent condition of the Negro race. Guided by somewhat older luminaries, such as Jean Price-Mars in Haiti and Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, these racial cohorts undertook the elaboration of a Negro identity in literature. Corresponding to the New Negro movement in the United States, their parallel movements – indigenism, in Haiti; negrismo, in Cuba and Puerto Rico; and negritude, in French West Africa and the Caribbean – laid the cultural framework of a philosophy of racial selfhood that shaped and directed the evolution of Africana literatures in this century. The literary use of Harlem by the New Negro poets, particularly Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, was available to these artists as a historically unique portent of their own impulse to assert the primacy of their experience and the authority of their blackness against the supposedly universal values of European culture, and, according to the respective views of their distinct cultures, they repeated and revised the motif of black Harlem.
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- Information
- Vicious ModernismBlack Harlem and the Literary Imagination, pp. 48 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990