Movements
The Harlem Renaissance
Also Known As New Negro Movement
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A flowering of African American literature, music and visual art centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, part of a broader cultural and intellectual movement asserting Black identity, achievement and self-representation in the aftermath of the Great Migration. Its literary figures include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen, working across poetry, fiction and essay, often self-consciously in dialogue with, and in reaction against, both white literary expectations and older accommodationist Black cultural politics.
Facts
Disputed
Period, From (Year)Some historians date the movement's beginning to the end of the First World War and the Great Migration's acceleration around 1918, others to the early 1920s when its defining publications began to appear; both are in real use and the movement's roots reach further back than either date. Period, To (Year)Most commonly closed with the mid-1930s onset of the Great Depression, which curtailed the patronage and publishing opportunities the movement had depended on, though some scholars extend it to the start of the Second World War; no single closing date is universally used. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated Authors
One of the Harlem Renaissance's most visible founding poets; his 1926 essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain in The Nation is widely read as a founding manifesto of the movement's aesthetic independence.
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