The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930.

Steven Watson. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. New York: Pantheon, 1995. 235 pp. $22.00.

The Harlem Renaissance still entrances. As an important part of the period that swept America to the forward look of the metropolis, it forces commentary on Black or Black-derived secula music, on successive cycles of sexual revolution, on migration from the South and Europe, on experiments in literature and visual arts. Commentary has been diverse and plentiful, evaluating the period as a success or failure, as a watershed of cultural activity, as a confluence of political, economic, and cultural forces. Steven Watson's The Harlem Renaissance is an attempt to synthesize for the general reader some of the most recent scholarship on the decade. In his early chapters Watson briskly traces the socioeconomic framework--failed Southern economy, migration, war, a rising middle class--before focusing on the social, literary, and sexual pressures borne by young writers, specifically Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston. He duly notes the significant role of the patrons and supporters such as Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Charlotte Mason, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and James Weldon Johnson. With informative and entertaining sidebars as well as fresh photographs, Watson provides his readers with an ever-widening and busy view of Harlem, "capital of the Negro world."

Watson's intention is to show the connections among some of the principal figures of the Harlem Renaissance with snapshots of their careers at the beginning, middle, and end of the decade. He supports this with brief descriptions of relationships. For example, he demonstrates Alain Locke's importance to the careers of Cullen, Hughes, and Hurston. Watson's portrait of Locke is consistent with that of others; the philosophy professor and former Rhodes Scholar can often appear the name-dropper and go-between. On a slightly different note, Watson suggests a Hughes-Cullen-Locke unconsummated "love triangle." Still later in his roster of nighttime gathering places, the author includes commentary on gay nightlife. Thus the connections, Watson would suggest, are not limited to the economic or aesthetic plane. Those familiar with earlier versions of the period would view such revelations as those which tantalized the many who traveled to Harlem for its nightlife. In our liberated times it is standard to note or conjecture the sexual habits of the subjects without demonstrating their relevance to artistic expression. To his credit, however, Watson does show us that the "dictie/rat" dichotomy is limited.

Less important to the study is the idea of the Harlem Renaissance--art as cultural arbiter, the city as refuge and site of hope and renewal, the tension between reverence toward old forms and the "play" of the new, the optimism of the here and now. The movement would end, according to the author and as it is so often characterized, with the onset of the Depression. This book ends, as does Hughes's chapter "Negro Renaissance" in The Big Sea or F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Echoes of a Jazz Age," with nostalgia for a long and glorious party. We know now that the movement did not die so suddenly; some of its energy lingered on in the works of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ama Bontemps. Also it would have been useful to suggest, even if briefly, the international dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance as an artistic movement.

Yet it would be unfair to burden this slim volume with a call for closure to every question raised by recent scholarship on the period. The claim here is for a focus on a social history for the general reader. Engaging, visually exalting, the volume is a useful and sympathetic introduction.