“Seeing” the Harlem Renaissance: Observations on the Position of Visual Art in Harlem Renaissance Studies

Abstract

The matrix of ideas and questions that inform scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance as remained fairly consistent across several generations. For example, among the more commonly asked questions over the years have been: Was the Harlem Renaissance modernist or even modern in worldview or artistic form? Did it signal in any real sense the rebirth of a people or was it simply the invention of an intellectual elite with a naive faith in the transformative power of art? What was the relation of the Harlem Renaissance to American cultural and racial ideology? To what extent can we think of it as chronologically or geographically determined, that is, did it begin and end in Harlem in he 1920s? What is the role in this renaissance of an enlightened consciousness about Africa, its people, its art, and its culture? To what degree can we regard the Harlem Renaissance as symptomatic of an emergent black nationalism or move toward cultural separatism within America or the African diaspora? What are we to make of the interracial dynamics within the Harlem Renaissance? How are we to understand the problematic fascination with primitivism and folk culture that preoccupied not only participants in the Harlem Renaissance but also many of its subsequent critics? How did the Harlem Renaissance expand our notions of black subjectivity and identity? What was its relation to the sociopolitical agendas of the early 20th century? And, finally, did it succeed or did it fail? This list is by no means exhaustive, but in the decades that