RE-MEMBERING THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN PAST
2011; Routledge; Volume: 25; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502386.2011.605269
ISSN1466-4348
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoAbstract The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was part of the New Negro Movement that swept the USA in the early twentieth century. Through fiction, poetry, essays, music, theatre, sculpture, painting and illustration, participants in this first Black arts movement produced work that was both grounded in modernity and an engagement with African-American history, folk culture and memory. This paper focuses on two Harlem Renaissance artists, the poet and fiction writer Langston Hughes and the illustrator and mural painter Aaron Douglas, who were particularly concerned with matters of history, memory and meaning. Themes such as the African past, slavery, freedom, lynching and migration figure powerfully in their art; and they employed modes of artistic expression that were accessible to a broad audience of African Americans. I explore such works as Hughes' 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers', 'The Negro Mother', 'Afro-American Fragment' and 'Aunt Sue's Stories' and Douglas' four-part mural Aspects of Negro Life. I ask: What were the cultural politics of this art? Why was it so concerned with shared experience and collective memory? Keywords: Identitycultural politicsHarlem RenaissanceNew NegroLangston HughesAaron Douglas Notes 1. From the 1960s to the present, other renamings have occurred: 'Black', 'Black American', Afro-American', 'African-American', 'African American'. These shifts reflect changing stances in relation to Africa, White America and the African diaspora. 2. Needham Roberts (seated left) and Henry Johnson (standing right) were both members of the all-Black 369th Regiment of the US Army. The 369th Regiment, which was from Harlem, served with great distinction in France – and the French recognized their contributions. Roberts was a recipient of the Croix de Guerre with Palm – making him one of the most highly decorated American soldiers of the First World War. Although the photograph is dated 1916 by the photographer, it 'was probably made in the VanDerZee studio in 1932, when he also photographed Roberts alone' (Willis-Braithwaite 1993, p. 142). 3. Key texts on James VanDerZee include Willis-Braithwaite (1993), Mercer (2002 Mercer, K. 2002. James VanDerZee, London: Phaidon. [Google Scholar]) and Westerbeck (2004 Westerbeck, C. 2004. The James VanDerZee Studio, Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago. [Google Scholar]). To place VanDerZee's work in the relation to that of other African-American photographers, see Willis (2000 Willis, D. 2000. Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. [Google Scholar]). 4. There is a voluminous literature on the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Arts Movement. 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Hughes (1958 Hughes, L. 1958. The Langston Hughes Reader, New York: George Braziller. [Google Scholar]) provides an excellent selection of work from the various genres in which he worked. 12. There are many other examples of poems written by African-American artists that appropriate the collective memory of slavery as a story of survival. The most famous example is 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' (Johnson 1993 Johnson, J.W. 1993. Saint Peter Relates an Incident, New York: Penguin Books. orig. 1935 [Google Scholar], pp. 101–102). Written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson and set to music in 1905 by his brother, the composer John Rosamond Johnson, the lyrics have been sung daily by African Americans for 100 years (e.g. in historically Black American colleges and universities). The song is referred to as their 'national anthem'. 13. Arguably, in terms of influence, Aaron Douglas was the most important African-American artist of the twentieth century: indeed, he is sometimes referred to as 'the father of Black American art'. On Aaron Douglas' life and work, see Earle (2007 Earle, S. 2007. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]), Kirschke (1995 Kirschke, A.H. 1995. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. [Google Scholar]) and Bearden and Henderson (1993 Bearden, R. and Henderson, H.B. 1993. A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, New York: Pantheon Books. [Google Scholar], pp. 127–135). Various books on the Harlem Renaissance include discussions of aspects of Douglas' work: see, e.g. Powell and Bailey (1997 Powell, R.J. and Bailey, D.A. 1997. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, London, Hayward Gallery: Institute of International Visual Arts and University of California. [Google Scholar]). Douglass is also discussed in a number of books on African-American and African diaspora artists; see, e.g. Bearden and Henderson (1993 Bearden, R. and Henderson, H.B. 1993. A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, New York: Pantheon Books. [Google Scholar]), Lewis (1990 Lewis, S. 1990. African American Art and Artists, Berkeley: University of California. [Google Scholar]), Patton (1998 Patton, S.F. 1998. African-American Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]) and Powell (2002 Powell, R.J. 2002. Black Art: A Cultural History, London: Thames & Hudson. [Google Scholar]). 14. This representation still has currency. The Wedgewood medallion was re-released in 2007 in commemoration of the official abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 15. Aaron Douglas did cover designs and illustrations for a number of books during the Harlem Renaissance era, including several books by Harlem Renaissance writers: e.g. James Weldon Johnson's novel Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1927), Arthur Huff Fauset's For Freedom: A Biographical Story of the American Negro (1927), Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933) and A Long Way from Home (1937), Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929) and Langston Hughes' Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). His illustrations of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) and Paul Morand's Black Magic (1929) are widely acclaimed. (A number of White American and European intellectuals were associated with members of the Harlem Renaissance movement. Paul Morand, the French novelist, poet and playwright, was one of them.) Also see his illustrations in Georgina A. Gollock's Sons of Africa (1928). 16. Douglas' murals were usually painted on canvases, which were then glued to the wall. 17. The Fisk University Library Murals (1930) was Douglas' first large-scale commission, offered by Charles S. Johnson, former editor of the Urban League' journal Opportunity, who had become president of Fisk University, the historic Black college in Nashville, Tennessee. The intent of these murals was to inspire African-American students – to seek knowledge, especially classical education, and to engage with their history. The seven panels include Apollo, Philosophy, Drama, Music, Poetry, Science and Diana. In two of these panels, and in some of his other work, Fisk University's Jubilee Hall stands as a symbol of African-American freedom. (Among the first students to attend this institution were the sons and daughters of slaves.) 18. Dance Magic (1930–1931) is a five-panel mural behind a bar at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. This mural linked modern African-American musical and dance culture, in particular, jazz and cabaret, to traditions of African music and dance. Douglas described the mural as 'going back to the primitive thing before we came, our people were brought here and then up to the present…. Singing, dancing and cabarets, and that sort of thing.' The panels used the 'gay, fanciful side of Negro life as subject matter… I tried to use a flowing, rhythmic, progressive series of tones and special areas to create a visual equivalent of joy, lightness of movement and laughter' (quoted in Kirschke 1995 Kirschke, A.H. 1995. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. [Google Scholar], p. 115). 19. See Earle (2007 Earle, S. 2007. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 98–112) for a fascinating discussion of the Hall of Negro Life at the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 – including how there came to be such a hall, what it contained and the audience's response to Aaron Douglas' contribution. 20. On Harriet Tubman, see Clinton (2004 Clinton, C. 2004. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, New York: Little, Brown and Company. [Google Scholar]) and Sernett (2007 Sernett, M.C. 2007. Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, Durham, Duke, NC: University Press. [Google Scholar]). 21. Organized by opponents of slavery, the 'underground railroad' (see Still 1970 Still, W. 1970. The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, & c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggle of the Slaves in their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Author, Chicago, Johnson Publishing Company. orig. 1871 [Google Scholar] and Buckmaster 1992 Buckmaster, H. 1992. Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. orig. 1941 [Google Scholar]) consisted of secret routes and safe houses that could be used by escaping African-American slaves and their 'conductors' (chief among whom was Harriet Tubman). As the historian Benjamin Quarles explains in his foreword to the 1970 edition of The Underground Railroad (orig. 1871), an extraordinary collection of narratives told by escaped slaves and edited by William Still, who was himself a former slave: The underground railroad may be defined as the organized effort to assist runaway slaves in their dash for freedom. Since slipping away from one's master was a hazardous step, most runaways required help. The underground railroad was the popular name for the process of receiving the fugitives, hiding them overnight and then conducting them to the next station in en route to freedom. (Quarles 1970, p. v.) 22. On runaway African-American slaves, see Franklin and Schweninger (1999 Franklin, J.H. and Schweninger, L. 1999. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). 23. On the cultural politics of modernism's encounter with 'the primitive' (and with Black artists), see chapters 10, 11, 12 and 13 in Jordan and Weedon (1995): that is, 'Primitives, Politics and the Avant-garde: Modern Art and Its Others' (pp. 315–394); 'Dialogues: Race and the Cultural Politics of the Avant-garde' (pp. 395–431); 'Encounters: Postcolonial Artists and the Art Establishment' (pp. 432–472); and 'From Primitivism to Ethnic Art: Neo-colonialism in the Metropolis?' (pp. 473–488). 24. In addition to Harriet Tubman (1931) and Into Bondage (1936), there are other paintings by Douglas, in which Black people are in chains: see, e.g. Study for God's Trombones, 1926 (reproduced in Earle 2007, p. 146) and The Founding of Chicago, 1933–1940 (in Earle 2007, p. 29). Perhaps the most interesting point about Douglas' appropriation of this motif is that his chained Africans and African Americans do not appear to be fully subjected: they raise their arms, they pull the chain and they even break the shackles. 25. Incidentally, the Harlem Renaissance art movement, along with surrealism, would profoundly influence the Négritude movement, which developed in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s among French African and Caribbean students, intellectuals and artists. Surrealism. Key figures in the movement include the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, the French Guyanese poet Léon Damas, the Senegalese poet Léopold Senghor. Visual artists connected with the Négritude movement include the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. 26. The struggle between 'New Negroes' and Old Negroes' led to serious conflicts on various African-American college campuses in the 1920s. See Wolters (1975 Wolters, R. 1975. 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