The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940. Vol. 6 - Analysis and Assessment, 1940-1979, and Vol. 7 - Analysis and Assessment, 1980-1994.

Cary D. Wintz, ed. New York: Garland, 1996. Vol. 6, 504 pp., $83.00. Vol. 7, 482 pp., $80.00.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

These final two volumes of Cary D. Wintz's seven-volume Harlem Renaissance anthology present a large sampling of valuable essays on the literary phenomenon. Within each volume, the contents are grouped by subject matter or approach rather than by chronology - e.g., "The Harlem Renaissance: An International Perspective" or "The Politics and Aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance." Generous if not encyclopedic in scope, the collection holds discoveries, I dare say, for even the most seasoned Harlem Renaissance aficionados; but perhaps its chief value will be for those with little access to the journals in which most of the criticism first appeared.

In volume 6 are the lucid, groundbreaking essays of Arthur P. Davis, Abraham Chapman, Blyden Jackson, Nathan Huggins, August Meier, Saunders Redding, and Charles I. Glicksberg, giving a sense of shifting historical perspectives through the rise and fall of "integrationist" criticism. It is fascinating to compare, for example, Saunders Redding's optimistic essay of 1949 for The American Scholar with his far more ambivalent and cantankerous 1964 article on "The Problems of the Negro Writer" for Massachusetts Review. The 1949 essay situates the Harlem Renaissance as a moment of genuine, if not unalloyed, self-realization that began to bridge the divide of the "two audiences." The best work of James Weldon Johnson, McKay, Hughes, Cullen, Fisher, and Du Bois "considerably furthered the interest of white writers and critics in Negro material and Negro art expression. Whatever else Eugene O'Neill, Paul Rosenfeld and Du Bose Heyward did, they gave validity to the new concept of the Negro as material for serious artistic treatment." Commercialism and the exotic fantasies of the "mass mind of white America" latched on to Harlem but could not wholly undo the emergence of the black literary field; by the 1940s, Redding believes, the gulf between white and black audiences had nearly disappeared, and "anthologists no longer [needed to] think it risky to collect, edit and issue the works of Negro writers."

In 1964, however, Redding would find the gulf between white and black audiences as wide as ever, the literary field a bastion of segregation dominated by whites refusing to face the reality of black experience because of what it would reveal to them about themselves. Anthologists ignored black writers, and black authors prostituted themselves to white readers who forced them to function within a "structure of ideology and myth" in which "the comic, the frightening, the pornographic, the unnatural and grotesque provide the comforting shock of unfavorable contrast to the social 'realities' and cultural values" of the white mainstream - thus justifying the exclusion of the black masses from the "American dream." If this sounds like a litany against the Harlem Renaissance, it in fact echoes Redding's new point-of-view on that earlier cultural phenomenon, remembered in 1964 for having been "prostituted and commercialized by gangster impresarios, who literally bled white the black writers, artists, musicians, and performers." As if to confirm the failure of the movement to provide any solid base for later generations, we learn that "now the undermining of James Baldwin's creative integrity seems to proceed apace" (exhibit A: Another Country) and that Richard Wright, leaving the U.S. to achieve distance from the enforced neuroses of American culture, had "failed disastrously, almost totally," and lost his way.

Not all the critics of Redding's generation shared his judgments, of course; what stands out, rather, is how significant the Harlem Renaissance was to a diverse range of black writers and critics getting their bearings and marking their positions in the moving present. (They do not question, as some do today, whether there even was a "Negro renaissance" in the 1920s.) Blyden Jackson in 1965 seems more in tune with the 1949 than the 1964 Saunders Redding, for example: "The Harlem Renaissance, if it had done nothing else, had at least introduced a new literary respect for the Negro masses." Indeed, it was precisely "on this new front" that the writers of the next generation "challenged America." The very work which Redding perceived in 1964 as the epitome of James Baldwin's ruination, Another Country, Jackson regards as a beacon of achievement, guiding black writers out of the literary ghetto and into "the benign cavalcade of the great tradition in our culture and our literature, the cavalcade which is itself the church militant of our one American transition devoutly to be wished . . . which all men of good will proclaim as the purpose and the end of our democratic dream."

I offer these samples to suggest the fascinating juxtapositions that Wintz's sixth volume, particularly, affords. The seventh volume, on criticism since 1980, has a more academic flavor, reflecting the changing institutional status of African American literature. It also includes a number of important and oft-cited essays, among them "Flower-Dust and Springtime: Harlem Renaissance Women" by Sharon Dean and Erlene Stetson, Arnold Rampersad's "The Origins of Poetry in Langston Hughes," Gerald Early's "Three Notes Toward a Cultural Definition of the Harlem Renaissance," Houston Baker's "Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance," Cheryl Wall's "Passing for What?: Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen's Novels," and Paul Lauter's "Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties." Along with these one finds such (unfortunately) less well-known articles as Carl Pedersen's "The Harlem Renaissance and the American Twenties" and Mbulamwanza Mudimba-Boyi's "African and Black American Literature: The 'Negro Renaissance' and the Genesis of African Literature in French." Wintz has done a service in making available such pieces, which appeared in journals that are difficult for many of us to access. Although, inevitably, some worthy essays do not appear, the best advertisements for these two books are their tables of contents.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of these volumes is their simple existence, a sign of the current explosion of interest in the Harlem Renaissance, which has been signaled as well by major conferences in the U.K., France, and the U.S. within the past two years, and the choice of Cane as a required text for the French universities' aggregation in English. This brings up another point in favor of Wintz's anthologies: For those who teach abroad, where most U.S. scholarly journals (and even standard histories of African American literature) can be hard to come by, these volumes should be invaluable. The future of the Harlem Renaissance is world-wide.