The literary movement that so many refer to as the “Harlem Renaissance” remains contested terrain and the need to periodize and name the movement is ongoing. As the literary production of the New Negro era came to a close, participants in the literary movement such as Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Wallace Thurman, James Weldon Johnson, Dorothy West, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson and others gave different accounts of its value, its beginnings, and its end. Subsequently, historians and literary scholars, as well as New Negro Movement participants, have found very little consensus on key questions of periodization. This essay returns to the question of periodizing this movement by identifying a broad range of its distinguishing characteristics and by bracketing its duration, although with a clear recognition that the temporal frame and characteristics may be re-positioned yet again. The project here is not to determine the perceived failure or success of the literary movement or the collective quality of the literary production, a project that would involve determining by whose standards of success, failure, or quality such judgments would be made. This study of the New Negro era expands its boundaries and opens a space for engaging the literary movement by mapping it in ways that scholars too often have deemphasized or have not explored.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. St. Louis University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review. W hen in 1935 the Martinican writer Aime Cesaire coined the term negritude in an essay published in L'Etudiant Noir, he grounded this term in the historicity and particularity of the imperialist and supremacist subjugation of black people and in the ensuing cultural and political resistance by black people to that subjugation. Even in 1939 with the publication of his celebrated piece in prose and poetry titled "Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal" ("Notebook of a Return to My Native Land"), Cesaire situated negritude within the lived realities of his life as a French colonial subject and his rejection of that condition. Over time, however, this term, along with its English predecessor and analogue blackness, has come to be associated with some sort of mystical and transcendent African/Black essence or soul.This essentialist conceptualization of black culture has locked far too many discussions of African diasporic cultural and political issues within a binary prison of black versus white or dominant versus subordinate, and focused far too many discussions on transgressions against the purported power of whiteness instead of on understanding the operations-at all of their various intersections, social, political, historical, intellectual-of the culture at hand. In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to Leopold Sedar Senghor's anthology of black literature (Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie Negre et Malgache) positioned negritude writers within the self-reflexive and transgressive qualities of the orphic, and referred to these writers as Black Orpheus. This, very likely inadvertent, act of un-naming potentially usurps the particularity suggested in the term negritude as well as contests the negritude writers' desire to position themselves in an African heritage rather than in the hegemonic and often tyrannical embrace of universalism located in ancient Greek culture. Subsequent uses of Sartre's appellation by Ulli Beier and Janheinz Jahn, the German founders of the Nigerianbased literary magazine Black Orpheus, contrast with the titles of similar journals (founded by diasporic Africans) from the 1930s through the 1950s, L'Etudiant Noir and Presence Africaine, as well as the title of Senghor's book, all of which conspicuously reclaim the contested terms black and African. Along with this reclamation or reconstruction of identity comes the concomitant revisions that the African enacts upon the received and privileged European culture in which she also is situated.In African American literature, Kimberly Benston's revision, in the 1970s, of the orphic as a "re-membering" -a un...

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review.The CD revolution of the past decade has helped to fuel an interest in traditional blues, both acoustic and electric, unequaled since the 1960s. As a result, 1996 has seen more books about the blues in print than has been the case for many years. Add to the list Austin Sonnier's A Guide to the Blues, a sometimes adequate, but often deeply flawed, introduction to the blues. More specifically, the thumbnail artist biographies which make up over half of this book's text are frequently so inaccurate and incomplete that their historical and biographical weaknesses greatly compromise their usefulness. Novices to the blues will assume to be true "facts" which are, in reality, incorrect, while long-time blues students and fans will be so frustrated by the sloppy documentation that whatever value Sonnier's theoretical and factual content may offer is frequently not worth the effort.Sonnier's original vision is admirable, as he strives to present a concise, distilled view of the blues to serve as an introductory volume for beginners and a condensed biographical and media reference for more seasoned blues scholars and fans. He opens with ninety pages (six chapters) that lay out the history of the blues, starting with African musical and social sources and then preceding through the evolution of African American music in the New World. His third chapter presents a solid overview of early blues history, including sections on the Mississippi Delta, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, the Piedmont area of the East Coast, and Chicago. The historical review continues with a chapter on the jazz-and vaudeville-influenced Classic Blues singers of the '20s and '30s. Sonnier's next overview chapter is a discussion of blues poetry as it reflects traditional African American religious beliefs, a theology born in the earliest years of the African American experience and blending West African animism withChristianity under names as diverse as Condomble, Santaria, Obeah, Voodoo, and Hoodoo. His discussion of this issue is very brief, running only eight pages, but it will be a fascinating introduction to the subject for readers whose only knowledge about traditional African American religion comes from Hollywood or pulp fiction. Concluding the introductory overview, A Guide to the Blues presents a six-page discussion of the role of the blues in shaping modern American music, including rhythm & blues, jazz, soul, rap, and rock 'n' roll. Unfortunately, discussions of the blues' influence on more far-afield musics, such as traditional hill music, country and western, gospel...