Mapping the Terrain of Black Writing during the Early New Negro Era

The literary movement that so many refer to as the Harlem Renaissance remains contested terrain. Even so, the need to periodize and name the movement continues, or for our purposes here there continues to be a need to map the terrain and provide a literary cartography for the New Negro era. 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, Dorothy West, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and others offered different accounts of its value, its beginnings, and its end. Beginning in 1947, the historical research of John Hope Franklin brought scholarly attention to the New Negro Movement in literature, and Franklin apparently formalized the appellation "Harlem Renaissance" that has come to define it. Continuing research has expanded the now prodigious scholarship on the New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance. However, very little consensus on key questions of periodization has been established either among participants in the New Negro Movement in literature or the literary and historical scholars who came after them.A number of eminent historians have periodized the social and political history of the New Negro: notably John Hope Franklin in From Slavery to Freedom (1947), Nathan Irvin Huggins in Harlem Renaissance (1971), and David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981). The titles of their books clearly indicate that the focus of their valuable scholarship goes well beyond the literary history. Huggins and Lewis centered their work on the larger political and cultural history as it had occurred in a particular place, Harlem, and Franklin's chapter is but a small part of an historical tour de force of African descended peoples. All three locate the beginning of the era in 1919 with the parade of the 369th Infantry Regiment from downtown to uptown Manhattan. In the 1947 edition of From Slavery to Freedom, Franklin engaged the literature very specifically and connected it to the long history of New Negro resistance, making the argument that the literary movement occurred in phases and was ongoing. However, the ninth edition, co-written with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published in 2007, does not reflect this idea of an ongoing literary movement. Huggins in his book ends "the innocent Harlem Renaissance" in 1930 (1971, 303). And Lewis, who has borrowed the title of his book from Langston Hughes, ends the New Negro "vogue" with the 1935 Harlem riot (1981, 306). In subsequent publications, Huggins and Lewis shift their periodization, moving back as far as 1917 and in the case of Huggins shifting forward as far as 1935. Both scholars emphasize the social, political, and cultural history and employ markers that indicate those interests. Clearly, these markers provide worthwhile points of interest for examining New Negro literature. Yet to outline the terrain of the New Negro Movement in literature we must examine what the writers produced and determine when they began to present the varied perspectives, ideas, and world of the New Negro in literature, even while recognizing that close examination of the literature reveals differences, tensions, and anxieties among its writers.Literary scholars similarly find little agreement on the question of periodization. Some follow the divisions set in the well-established social histories; others set their own specifically literary or sometimes even social markers. Speaking to concerns with periodization, Gloria Hull observes in Color Sex and Poetry that "women writers are tyrannized by periodization" (1987, 30). While there is certainly room for Hull's concern for the disparate impact of periodization on women, the position taken here is that sexism, which Hull also addresses, together with genre and thematics are central to decades of women's marginalization in scholarship on New Negro literature. Recognizing the importance of the consideration of genre and thematics along with gender in the construction of periodization, Venetria Patton and Maureen Honey (2001) have revised the New Negro literary movement's beginnings to 1916 and the production of Angelina Weld Grimke's play Rachel that year. …