Connections 375: The Harlem Renaissance Fall 2008 Professor Hans Ostrom, Department of English MWF 12:00 Wyatt 308
Welcome to Connections 375. Here is some basic information:
My office-hours: Monday and Wednesday, 3:00-4:30 p.m., and by appointment.
My office: Wyatt 336.
Telephone: x3434 (my office number); x3235 (number of English-Department secretary).
Electronic Mail: ostrom@ups.edu . Electronic mail is a good medium through which to ask brief questions, including those about assignments and scheduling, but for more complicated questions, please talk with me before or after class or visit me during office hours. I prefer that you don’t send me papers or drafts via email, as attachments, unless I ask you to do so.
English Department’s telephone: x3235 (messages); my telephone: x3434 (voice mail). Electronic mail: ostrom@ups.edu. The English Department’s mailboxes are located in the room next to the Philosophy Department’s main office on the third floor of Wyatt Hall.
Home page: www.ups.edu/faculty/ostrom/. A printable copy of this syllabus will be posted on the home page.
The University’s Equal Opportunity Statement
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Harlem
Harlem is a part of New York City, a metropolis built on top of an island that Europeans purchased from the people who were there first. After the purchase, this part of Manhattan was resettled by colonists from the Netherlands and Germany. (Harlem takes its name from Haarlem, a Dutch city.) In the early part of the 20th century, African Americans and West Indians resettled in Harlem. Shortly thereafter, a cultural transformation occurred. Its influence is still felt, every day, in the United States and worldwide. In this course, we will study the transformation, focusing on the literary part of it, with the understanding that the literature cannot be studied properly without reference to the broader cultural context; therefore, we’ll listen to music, look at art, glance at politics, examine debates about aesthetics, and trace the connections among all of these subjects.
If we were to locate Harlem geographically, both today and in 1920, we might say that it lies north of 110th Street (Central Park North), east of St. Nicholas Avenue and the Hudson River, west of the Harlem River and the Bronx, and south of 156th Street.
Locating Harlem in our minds—our "consciousness," if you will—is a much more complicated task, one that the course is designed to help accomplish. Studying how such a small urban district can have such a big impact on a whole society is one purpose of the course.
Some Aims of the Course
This course features the reading and analysis of, the writing and talking about, literature. The University Bulletin indicates that a Connections course should “develop an understanding of the interrelationship of fields of knowledge.” Therefore, the course also examines connections between literature and, in alphabetical order, aesthetics, art, ethnicity, gender, history, music, politics, religion, and sexuality. However, the Harlem Renaissance itself forged connections and revealed conflicts between these elements of culture, so to some degree, when we consider multiple ideas, issues, and cultural products, we’re going where the Harlem Renaissance leads us.
We will examine our own preconceived notions of Harlem, African-American literature, the Blues, jazz, the 1920s in the U.S., and so on. We’ll be alert to how these notions change, or not, and why. That is, we’ll look at our own positions, vis-à-vis the Harlem Renaissance and topics related to it. Such topics include concepts of “race” (ethnicity); characteristics and effects of racism; the purposes of art; intersections of ethnicity and gender, ethnicity and social-class, ethnicity and nation; the African diaspora; slavery, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and beyond; beliefs people hold (and challenge) with regard to how identity is “essential” or “constructed” or . . . what?; how actual participants in the Harlem Renaissance disagreed with each other, formed unexpected alliances, fulfilled plans, and disrupted plans; concepts of “The Talented Tenth,” “The New Negro,” “double-consciousness, and “exoticism”; positions represented by iconic figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, and Marcus Garvey; how Black and White Americans interacted (or not) in the Harlem Renaissance, including the complex case of Carl Van Vechten and an infamous novel with an infamous title. Because we live in the U.S., “race” is always part of current events, so if events arise locally, regionally, or nationally that seem to resonate with the Harlem Renaissance, we will take the opportunity to discuss them, looking through the lenses of the course. I have yet to teach this course without something obviously pertinent happening on campus, in the region, or in the nation.
One assumption with which I begin, with which the course begins, is that many issues, values, and conflicts in the Harlem Renaissance and its literature persist, so that as we study Harlem then we will also be studying the United States and the world and even this campus now. Only a very few literary periods and groups of writers have received as much widespread renewed attention as the Harlem Renaissance and its writers. Works of these writers have been republished at an astonishing rate in recent years; moreover, the renewed attention has come not just from scholars but also from the public at large. This literary era, the core of which belongs to the years 1920-1930, may not be unique, but it is distinctive in powerful, interesting, and enduring ways. Therefore, another aim of the course is to develop an understanding of this distinctiveness. The Harlem Renaissance is also a maddeningly complicated era, a kind of puzzle that satisfies and frustrates simultaneously. One additional aim is to balance the satisfaction and frustration as we honor the complexity.
The Etiquette and Atmosphere of the Course
Here are some guidelines to which all of us should try to adhere. None of them will be surprising or difficult. In fact, I hope they’ll seem familiar, even obvious, but sometimes it’s good to reaffirm the familiar. All are aimed at creating a productive, workable environment.
Briefly, About the Professor
Sometimes students want to know a bit about the professor, particularly in connection with the course. Here, in a brief paragraph, is a bit: I’ve taught here for quite some time. My repertoire includes courses in literature, writing & rhetoric, and creative writing. I’ve published poetry, fiction, criticism, and scholarship. The works that bear most directly on teaching the Harlem Renaissance include Langston Hughes: A Study of the Short Fiction (1993); A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia (2002); and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature, 5 volumes, edited with J. David Macey (2005).
Books Required for the Course
Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey, Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology. New Brunswick: Rutgers U. Press, 2001. Paperback edition.
Langston Hughes. The Ways of White Folks. New York: Vintage, 1990. Paperback. A collection of short stories first published in 1934.
Jessie Redmon Fauset. Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Paperback. The book was first published in 1929.
Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Paperback.
George Schuyler, Black No More. New York: Modern Library, 1999. Paperback.
In addition, we will study images of visual art produced by Aaron Douglas, Archibald Motley, Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence, Lois Mailou Jones, Palmer Hayden, Romare Bearden, Sargent Johnson, and William H. Johnson. We will listen to blues and jazz from the period by such artists as Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson (who composed the song of the 1920s, “Charleston”), Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller. We will listen to spoken-word interpretations of poetry, as performed by Alfre Woodard, Ice T, Debbie Allen, Branford Marsalis, and others. We also interpret such art-forms as Hip Hop music “backwards,” looking for influences and sources that may reside in the Harlem Renaissance and well beyond (much earlier). We will also consider dance, looking (for example) at Youtube footage of the lindy hop, as performed by African American dancers, while reading commentary from the period on the dance. We will consider how attitudes toward dance contributed to African Americans being perceived as “exotic.”
Elements on Which Your Final Grade Will Be Based
Participation. This includes attendance; productive contribution to discussions and group-work; and some informal writing—specifically, in-class responses to/analyses of music, videos about visual art and music, and videos about history and dance; etc.): about 20 per cent, total.
Attendance guidelines: Each absence after the third one will start to erode your final grade. Each late arrival after the second one counts as an absence.
Two essays: about 50 per cent
Two tests: about 20 per cent, total
One presentation, with a classmate, on a musician, a composer, and/or a recorded performance related to the Harlem Renaissance and African American music: about 10 per cent.
A couple more items of note: 1) We will work on drafts of essays in class. Please do not think of this work as optional; take due-dates for drafts seriously. 2) I regard electronic mail as useful for answering brief questions about assignments or due dates. In-person discussions during office hours or over coffee in Diversions or the Crystal Palace (a.k.a. Oppenheimer Café) seem better for more complicated questions about essay-drafts, works we’re reading, and so on. Please do not send me written work electronically unless I ask you to do so; thank you.
Schedule of Class Meetings, Assignments, Topics
Wednesday, September 3. To help you decide whether you want to remain in the course, we will look at the syllabus carefully. An overview of the course. Your experience with or notions about Harlem. Music. W.E. B. Du Bois [pronounced doo-boys] and the concept of “double-consciousness.” What do we know about U.S. and world history in the 1920s and 1930s? A few words about terminology, especially with regard to race and ethnicity.
Friday, September 5. In the anthology, please read the introduction, pp. xix-xxviii, and identify important topics, points, names, and dates. Also in the anthology, please read the biographical note for Georgia Douglas Johnson (152-153) and the several poems by her. Write down questions or comments you have concerning the poems.
Monday, September 8. “The New Negro” and other crucial topics. In the anthology, please read “The New Negro,” by Alain Locke, 3-6; Marita O. Bonner, “On Being Young--a Woman—and Colored,” 109-112; James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” 21-26. Please read the biographical notes on Johnson, 139-140 and Bonner, 434. Please read the biographical note on McKay, 271, and his poems, “The Harlem Dancer” and “If We Must Die.”
Wednesday, September 10. For today, please read “The Negro-Art Hokum,” by Schuyler, 36-40, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” by Hughes, 40-44, and Criteria of Negro Art,” by W.E.B. Du Bois, 47-51. List the key points of agreement and disagreement, especially the subtler ones. Testing the variety of criteria: Please read the poems by Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., on pages 381-384.
Friday, September 12. For today, read the rest of the poems by Claude McKay, 273-277, the biographical note on Jean Toomer, 371, and the selections (3 poems and one chapter of fiction) from Cane, 372-381. What are some key works (literary, musical, visual) of Modernism you know, and what are there characteristics? Please makes some notes in response to this question before class.
Monday, September 15. For today, please read the biographical note on Angelina Weld Grimké (171) and her play, Rachel (189-226).
Wednesday, September 17. For today, please read the poems by Grimké, the biographical note on Countee Cullen (554-555), and the poems by Cullen (8 of them). How do you respond to poetry, by the way?
Friday, September 19. For today, please read the biographical note on Langston Hughes (458-460) and the poems by him (460-469).
Monday, September 22. Continue discussing poems by Hughes. Listening to some blues songs and discussing the origins and development of blues.
Wednesday, September 24. For today, please read the biographical notes on Rudolph Fisher (388) and Wallace Thurman (520), and please read Fisher’s story, “The City of Refuge” and Thurman’s story, “Cordelia the Crude.”
Friday, September 26. For today, in The Ways of White Folks, please read “Cora Unashamed,” “Slave on the Block,” “Home,” and “Passing.”
Monday, September 29. Essay assigned and discussed. For today, in The Ways of White Folks, please read “Poor Little Black Fellow,” “The Blues I’m Playing,” and “Father and Son.”
Wednesday, October 1. For today, please read the stories “Tramp Love,” by Johnson (159-162), “Fog,” by Matheus (248-257), and “The Typewriter” and “The Black Dress,” by Dorothy West (591-599).
Friday, October 3. For today, please read the biographical notes for Anne Spencer (227) and Waring Cuney (567) and the poems by both writers.
Monday, October 6. For today, please read the biographical notes on Jessie Redmon Fauset (234), as well as her poems (5 of them), the biographical note on Coleman (314) and her poems (5 of them), and the biographical note on Cowdery (606) and her poems.
Wednesday, October 8. For today, please read the biographical note on Sterling A. Brown and his poems (450-458) and the biographical note on Georgia Douglas Johnson and her poems (152-159).
Friday, October 10. For today, in the anthology, please read the biographical note on Zora Neale Hurston (322-324), her poem, “Passion,” and her two stories, “Spunk” and “Sweat.”
Monday, October 13. Rough draft of essay due. Review for test.
Wednesday, October 15. Test.
Friday, October 17. For today, please read the first four chapters of Black No More, by George Schuyler.
Monday, October 20. No class-meeting. Fall Break. Please read Eulalie Spence’s play by Friday. Thanks.
Wednesday, October 22. For today, please read through Chapter Nine of Black No More.
Friday, October 24. Essay due in class at noon. For today, please read the biographical note on Eulalie Spence (358) and her play, Undertow. Field trip.
Monday, October 27. For today, please finish reading Black No More, and in the anthology, please read the essays by Amy Jacques Garvey (45-46) and Marcus Garvey (83-89).
Wednesday, October 29. For today, oral-presentation assignment discussed. Please read the biographical note on Helene Johnson (599) and her poems (7 of them). How do you define “jazz” as a musical genre? What different kinds of jazz are there, and which, if any, do you listen to? What are the differences between blues, rock-and-roll, Hip Hop, jazz, classical, electronic/techno, and classical music, in your judgment? Please make some notes in response to this question for Friday. Thanks.
Friday, October 31. For today, please read “Jazz at home,” by Joel A. Rogers, 127-133 in the anthology. Listening to and discussing jazz from the Harlem Renaissance.
Monday, November 3. For today, please read the first 59 pages of The Conjure-Man Dies and take notes on the novel, both as a novel and as a detective novel.
Wednesday, November 5.For today, please read through page 211 of The Conjure-Man Dies. (By now, you should have joined with a classmate in class to select an oral-presentation topic and begun to work on the presentation.)
Friday, November 7. For today, please read, in the anthology, “The American Negro Paints,” by Gwendolyn B. Bennett, 134. We will meet in Room 002 of the library’s basement at (or slightly before) the beginning of class. Please bring your syllabus. Examining work by visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
Monday, November 10. For today, please finish reading The Conjure-Man Dies. Sign up for presentations.
Wednesday, November 12. . For today, please read the first part of Plum Bun (through page 83), by Jessie Redmon Fauset. Compare and contrast this novel with Schuyler’s and Fisher’s novels.
Friday, November 14. . For today, please read the second part of Plum Bun (through p. 172), and
Monday, November 17. Three presentations.
Wednesday, November 19. For today, please finish reading Plum Bun. Second essay assigned.
Friday, November 21. Three presentations.
Monday, November 24. Three presentations.
Wednesday, November 26. . Remaining presentations. For today, view, on Youtube, the videos of “The Lindy Hop” and “The Charleston” and interpret what you see through the lenses of the Harlem Renaissance.
Monday, December 1. For today, please read the biographical note on Gwendolyn Bennett (506), her 5 poems, and her story, “Wedding Day.” Distribute Fisher’s lexicon of “Harlemese.”
Wednesday, December 3. For today, please read “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” by Zora Neale Hurston (61-74) and Fisher’s lexicon. Relate these two pieces to slang you hear today.
Friday, December 5. Draft of second essay due.
Monday, December 8. In the anthology, please read “Women’s Most Serious Problem,” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 113-115, and “Problems Facing Negro Young Women,” by Marion Vera Cuthbert, 116-120. Review for test.
Wednesday, December 10. Test.
Monday, December 15, noon: Essay due. Room TBA.
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Harlem: a borough of New York City. Boundaries: South: 110th Street; North: 155th Street; East: East River; West: Hudson River. Population in 2008: @ 250,000.
Chronology:
1526: Spanish ships bring African slaves to North America.
1619: A Dutch ship brings the first Africans to Jamestown, Virginia.
1626: Holland acquires Manhattan Island from the indigenous inhabitants, and the area is named Nieuw Haarlem, after Haarlem, a Dutch city. Among the population in 1626 are 11 African slaves. Free Blacks begin inhabiting the island as early as 1630, and some freed slaves move to what is now Greenwich Village in 1644.
1641: The Colony of Massachusetts legally recognizes slavery
1664: The British take control of the colony.
1741: The so-called “Great Negro Plot”—an alleged plan for a slave revolt in the Five Points area of Manhattan. The English burn 13 Blacks at the stake. Four Whites—two men and two women—are tried and hanged for taking part in the killing.
1743: Birth of Thomas Jefferson.
1746: “Bars Fight” written by Lucy Terry.
1770: Crispus Attucks, an African American, is killed in the Boston Massacre.
1773: Poems on Various Subjects, by Phillis Wheatley, is published.
1775-1783: Revolutionary War
1802: Alexander Hamilton builds a mansion in Harlem.
1827: New York abolishes slavery.
1829: The Hope of Liberty, by George Moses Horton, is published.
1833: the Anti-Slavery Society is established in New York.
1845: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is published.
1851: Sojourner Truth delivers her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in Ohio.
1857: The Dred Scott decision is published by the Supreme Court.
1861: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, is published.
1863: Emancipation Proclamation.
1867: Reconstruction begins.
1877: Reconstructions ends.
19th century: Harlem is populated by different immigrant groups: European Jews, Germans, Irish, and Italians.
1903: W.E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is published.
1905: The Niagra Movement.
1909: NAACP founded.
1904: Housing values in Harlem collapse because of real estate speculation. The Afro-American Realty Company (Philip Payton) begins to encourage Blacks to move into Harlem. By 1920, two thirds of New York’s African Americans live in Harlem.
1912: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is published.
1917 “Silent Parade” in New York City.
February 1919: the all-Black 369th Infantry marches up Fifth Avenue to Harlem. The unit (@1,300 men) served 191 days in the trenches during the Great War, were awarded the Croix de Guerre, and were nick-named the “Hell Fighters.” More than 365,000 African Americans were drafted into military service during the war. “Red Summer.”
1919: the Volstead Act.
1922: The Book of American Negro Poetry is published.
1924: Opportunity banquet.
1925: Special Survey Graphic issue.
1926: “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” published. The Weary Blues published.
1928: 200,000 Black residents in Harlem. 1929: Stock Market Crash.
Sources: “Chronology,” by Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey; “Harlem,” by Cheryl D. Bohde (Vol. 2: 713-718); “Harlem Renaissance,” by Emily Bernard (Vol. 2: 718-725), all from The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature, ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, 5 volumes (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 200
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Some Visual Artists of the Harlem Renaissance (Information Compiled by Peggy A. Burge, Library, University of Puget Sound, 2007)
Aaron Douglas (1898-1979). Painter, illustrator; later a professor at Fisk University for many years. Provided illustrations for FIRE!! Earned a B.A. at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Archibald Motley (1891-1981). Painter. Born in New Orleans and spent most of his life in Chicago but was influenced by the HR. Studied at the Art Institute in Chicago.
Augusta Savage (1892-1962). Sculptor. Born in Florida. Moved to Harlem in the 1920s and later established a studio on 143rd Street.
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). Painter. Born just before the Harlem Renaissance began. But he was influenced by the HR and studied art early on in Harlem (he was born in New Jersey). He may be the most widely known African American visual artist. He was a professor at the University of Washington.
Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998). Painter. She was part of the Washington, D.C., “wing” of the Harlem Renaissance, and she also studied in Paris. Taught at Howard University in D.C.
Palmer Hayden (1890-1973). Painter. Born in West Virginia. Studied in New York City. His original name was Peyton Hedgeman, but an officer in the army gave him the name Palmer Hayden when Hayden served in World War I.
Romare Bearden (1911-1988). Painter, cartoonist, and collage-artist. Born in North Carolina, studied at NYU. Served in the army in World War I. Highly innovative, influential artist. His collages and Langston Hughes’s poem were combined in a recent children’s book, The Block.
Sargent Johnson (1888-1967). Scultpor. A San Francisco artist, he was nonetheless influenced by the HR.
William H. Johnson (1901-1970). Painter. Born in South Carolina, studied at the National Academy of Design in NYC. Lived in Europe for a long time and is known in part for Scandinavian landscapes but also painted African American subjects.