Connections 375: The Harlem Renaissance
Professor Hans Ostrom
Spring 2010 MWF 1:00-1:50 Jones 206
Welcome to Connections 375. Here is some basic information:
Office: Howarth 328. Office-Hours for Spring 2010: Monday and Wednesday, 2:00-3:30, and by appointment.
English Department’s telephone: x3235 (messages); my telephone: x3434 (voice mail). Electronic mail: ostrom@pugetsound.edu. (I prefer that you don’t send me written assignments via email.) 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
The University of Puget Sound does not discriminate in education or employment on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, religion, creed, age, disability, marital or familial status, sexual orientation, Vietnam-era veteran status, gender identity, or any other basis prohibited by local, state, or federal laws. This policy complies with the spirit and the letter of applicable federal, state and local laws, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Sections 503 and 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Questions about the policy may be referred to the University's Director of Human Resources and Affirmative Action (253-879-3116) or the Office of Civil Rights, Department of Education, Washington, D.C. 20202.
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—and in history 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. Another is to look at our contemporary society through the lens of the Harlem Renaissance and what it produced.
Additional 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.
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 visions; 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, and all are aimed at producing a good atmosphere for learning.
1. Please do attend class unless you are ill or otherwise indisposed, and please do arrive on time. 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.
2. Please do listen while others are talking. Although conversations on the side are usually not intended to be rude or disruptive, they can have that effect. Respect each other and yourselves. To some degree, a college classroom has become an old fashioned, counter-cultural space that now competes with our compulsive needs to communicate electronically, so before class begins, turn off the electronic devices.
3. Please do your best. The more each of us contributes to the course, the more each of us will get out of it.
4. Please turn in work and complete reading-assignments on time. But also please ask me to clarify assignments and guidelines if they are unclear, and please let me know if an illness or an emergency has prevented you from completing your work on time.
5. Please do acquire all of the books required for the course, read them according to the syllabus, and bring them to class on the appropriate days. It’s best if you buy the editions I’ve ordered through the bookstore, even if you do not buy them at the bookstore. If you’re accustomed not to buying all the books for the course, Connections 375 is not a good fit for you.
6. Please don’t eat in class (every professor has his or her pet-peeves); a cup of coffee (for example) is fine, however.
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. The works I’ve published 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
Laban Carrick Hill, Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Little Brown, 2003. The historical and thematic overviews are basic, but the photographs and other archival material are superior.
David Levering Lewis, editor. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Jessie Redmon Fauset. Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Paperback. First published in 1929.
George Schuyler, Black No More. New York: Modern Library, 1999. First published in 1931.
Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Paperback. First published in 1928.
Matt Johnson (writer) and Warren Pleece (art), Incognegro. New York: Vertigo, 2008. A contemporary graphic novel about the period and issues we’re studying; it is set partly in Harlem and is based loosely on the experiences of Walter White and others.
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. Whether you do the reading and contribute discussion matters.
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
Panel presentation: With three or four other students, you will make a 20-minute presentation to the class, sometime in April, about key figures in and/or important aspects of music connected to the Harlem Renaissance. I will provide a list of topics from which to choose, but you may also tailor the topics to your interests. 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
Please read the biographical notes for authors in the back of The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader as we proceed.
Wednesday, January 20. Overview of the course. Please read the syllabus carefully to see if the course seems to be a good fit for you. W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept, “double consciousness.”
Friday, January 22. For today, please read Harlem Stomp, 4-44. Take your time, note topics, events, and issues you’d like to discuss, and examine the photographs and other visual material. A brief tour of the blues, blues lore, blues roots, the vernacular, call-and-response, “primitive,” “jungle,” and “savage,” etc.
Monday, January 25. For today, please read part of the “Introduction” in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, xiii-xxv (top of page). Please also read, in the Reader, “Returning Soldiers,” 3-5, “The Migration of the Talented Tenth,” 6-9, and the selection from Black Manhattan, 34-45, by James Weldon Johnson.
Wednesday, January 27. For today, in the Reader, please read “The New Negro,” 46-51, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 100-105. Please read the poems, “Incident” (243), “Tableau” (248), “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (257), and “Odyssey of Big Boy” 229). Contrast the poems with Du Bois’s criteria, please.
Friday, January 29. Please read the rest of Cullen’s poems in the Reader, except for “Heritage,” which we’ll read later.
Monday, February 1. For today, please read the rest of the introduction in the Reader (xxv-end), and the poems by Claude McKay. To mark the beginning of Black History Month, we will listen to “Lift E’vry Voice,” the African American “national anthem,” written by James Weldon Johnson, a Harlem Renaissance figure.
Wednesday, February 3. For today, please read “Father and Son,” by Langston Hughes. We will discuss McKay’s poems more, too.
Friday, February 5. Please read the poems by Langston Hughes in the Reader. Discussing “the vernacular” in art, literature, and culture.
Monday, February 8. Listening to some music from the Harlem Renaissance. For today, also read “The Blues I’m Playing,” by Langston Hughes. Discussing “exoticism.”
Wednesday, February 10. More discussion of Hughes’s poems.
Friday, February 12. For today, please read Harlem Stomp, pp. 45-90.
Monday, February 15. For today, please read Plum Bun through page 62, including the introduction, as well as Elise Johnson McDougald’s essay, “The Task of Negro Womanhood.” Discussing the notion of “white privilege.”
Wednesday, February 17. Listening to part of Zora Neale Hurston’s, “How It Feels To Be a Colored Me.” Please read Plum Bun, through p. 87.
Friday, February 19. For today, please read “The Harlem Intelligentsia” and “The New Negro in Paris,” by Claude McKay, as well as Domingo’s “Gift of the Black Tropics.”
Monday, February 22. For today, please read Plum Bun through p. 175.
Wednesday, February 24. Essay assigned, discussed. For today, please read “The Negro-Art Hokum,” by George Schuyler, and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” by Langston Hughes, as well as the “Critiques of Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven.” More discussion of “the vernacular,” and of “authority,” “authenticity,” and “exploitation.” Youtube videos suggested.
Friday, February 26. Please read Harlem Stomp, through page 114. Discussing the blues, jazz, and popular dances. Discussion questions for the remainder of Plum Bun.
Monday, March 1. For today, please finish reading Plum Bun.
Wednesday, March 3. For today, please read the selections by Marcus Garvey, 17-29, in the Reader, as well as Cullen’s poem, “Heritage” and “On Marcus Garvey,” by Mary White Ovington.
Friday, March 5. For today, please read Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” Claude McKay, “Harlem Runs Wild,” and Patterson, “With Langston Hughes in the USSR,” all in the Reader.
Monday, March 8. Draft of essay due in class at 1:00. Field trip.
Wednesday, March 10. For today, please the poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson and Helene Johnson in the Reader. Review for test. Topics for panel presentations distributed.
Friday, March 12. Test.
Monday, March 22. For today, please read “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” by Richard Bruce Nugent, in the Reader.
Wednesday, March 24. Essay due at 1:00 in class. Please bring the Reader to class. Revisiting a poem or two.
Friday, March 26. For today, please read The Walls of Jericho through p. 55.
Monday, March 29. For today, please read The Walls of Jericho through p. 140.
Wednesday, March 31. For today, please read The Walls of Jericho, through p. 198.
Friday, April 2. Two panel presentations.
Monday, April 5. For today, please finish reading The Walls of Jericho.
Wednesday, April 7. Two panel-presentations.
Friday, April 9. For today, please read Black No More through p. 41.
Monday, April 12. For today, please read Black No More through p. 90.
Wednesday, April 14. For today, please read Harlem Stomp, pp. 103-125, as well as the short pieces “Negro Art in America” (128-133), “The Negro Takes His Place in American Art” (134-137), and “The Negro Artist and Modern Art” (138-141) in the Reader.
Friday, April 15. For today, please read Black No More through p. 136.
Monday, April 18. View visual art from the Harlem Renaissance. Please meet in the basement of the library at 1:00.
Wednesday, April 20. Discussing the visual art. Also for today, please finish Black No More.
Friday, April 22. For today, please finish reading Harlem Stomp. Two panel presentations.
Monday, April 26. For today, please read Incognegro, Part I.
Wednesday, April 28. For today, please read Incognegro, Part II.
Friday, April 30. Please finish Incognegro. Essay assigned, discussed. Review for test.
Monday, May 3. Bring in your ideas for the essay. Field trip.
Friday, May 5. Test.
Essay due at noon on May 12 in the room scheduled for the final examination.
Selected Terminology Useful to the Study of the Harlem Renaissance
African American English/Black English
Back to Africa Movement
Backlash
Black
Black Nationalism
Blue Note
Call and Response
Caucasian
Dialect
Difference
Double-Consciousness
Dozens, The
Essentialism
Ethnic/Ethnicity
Exoticism
Folk/Folks
Ideology
Improvisation
Jim Crow
Master Narrative
Migration, the Great Northern
Miscegenation
Mulatto (now considered a degrading, insulting term)
Nadir
Negro (origins of this term)
New Negro, The
One Drop Rule
Passing
Paternalism
Primitivism
Propaganda
Race
Race Men
Reconstruction, Era of
Red Summer
Segregation (v. Integration v. Desegregation)
Separatism
Slave Trade, History of the
Social Construction
Talented Tenth
Vernacular
White
White Privilege
For Further Reading
For additional material connected to these topics, visit the course-resource page and consult the libraries databases.
History
Mary Francis Berry. Black Resistance, White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in
America. New York. Penguin, 1994.
E. Franklin Frazier. From Slavery to Freedom. With Evelyn Higginbotham. 9th edition. New
York. McGraw Hill, 2009.
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea. New York. Hill and Wang. 1993. First published in 1940.
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue. New York. Penguin, 1997.
Marcus Rediker. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York. Penguin, 1997.
Quintard Taylor. Black Facts: The Timelines of African American History, 1601-2008. New
York. Smiley Books. 2009.
Race
Joan Ferrante and Prince Brown. The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the
United States. New Jersey. Prentice Hall, 2000.
Michael Omi & Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the
1990s. London. Routledge, 1994.
Spencer Wells. Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project. National Geographic. 2007.
The N-Word
Jabari Asim. The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t Say It, and Why. Boston. Houghton
Mifflin, 2007.
Randall Kennedy. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. New York. Vintage,
2003.
Criticism
Gordon, Dexter. Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology, and 19th Century Black
Nationalism. Southern Illinois U. Press, 2006.
Baker, Houston, Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory.
Chicago. U. of Chicago Press, 1987.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford. Oxford U. Press, 1989.
Music
Bradley, Lloyd. This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica’s Music. New York.
Grove Press. 2003.
Francis Davis. The History of the Blues: The Roots, The Music, The People. Da Capo Press,
Ted Gioia. The History of Jazz. New York. Oxford U. Press, 1997.
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York:
Harper Perennial. 1999. First published in 1963.
Roger St. Pierre. Best of Blues (Essential CD Guide). Orion. 1993.
Art
Mary Schmidt Campbell. Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. New York.
Abrams. 1994.
Richard J. Powell, David A. Bailey, Hayward Gallery. Rhapsodies In Black: Art of the Harlem
Renaissance. South Bank Centre, 1997.
Robert Farris Thompson. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy. New
York. Vintage. 1984.