Richard J. Powell, 'Re/Birth of a Nation'
In: Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance. Jointly published by the Hayward Gallery, the Institute of International Visual Arts and the University of California Press, 1997, pp. 14-34.
The Harlem Renaissance - proclaimed in a collection of prophetic black tracts and manifestos, and distinguished by the iconic bodies and voices of Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, Josephine Baker and others - was a cultural and psychological watershed, an era in which black people were perceived as having finally liberated themselves from a past fraught with self-doubt and surrendered instead to an unprecedented optimism, a novel pride in all things black and a cultural confidence that stretched beyond the borders of Harlem to other communities in the Western world. The 'Renaissance' artists who immediately come to mind - painter Aaron Douglas, author Langston Hughes, jazz musician Duke Ellington, blues singer Bessie Smith, dancer Josephine Baker and the consummate all-round performer Paul Robeson - had certain attitudes about the black-experience-as-art that, through paintings, writings, musical compositions and performances, explored an assortment of black representational possibilities, from Langston Hughes's and Bessie Smith's images of the rural and folkloric to Aaron Douglas's and Duke Ellington's invocations of the progressive and ultra-modern.
The term 'Harlem Renaissance' (as employed by many historians and critics, especially after the 1950s) usually describes an African-American, New York City-based cultural experience. It not only locates this black creativity in Harlem but situates it between the end of the First World War and the 1929 stock-market crash and ensuing worldwide economic depression. It also refers to a particular type of art (overwhelmingly literary and musical, and occasionally visual) and frequently excludes certain art forms (like film and, curiously, graphic design) and certain artists (particularly African-Americans from places other than New York City, and European-American, European and Caribbean artists). Similarly, the term's association with the 1920s presupposes that the Great Depression (and the related, ideological shift to economic and populist concerns) interrupted this race renewal impulse. Scholarly debate about the Harlem Renaissance has too often concluded that it was no more than a decade-long window of opportunity for black culture: a lone, shooting star in what was otherwise a vast, black void of artistic gloom and inertia. [2]
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The plethora of past exhibitions and publications addressing 'the art of the Harlem Renaissance' has, however, provided little more than a series of introductory art surveys: pictorial 'roll calls' that, in their endeavour to present names and figures accurately, too often omit the artistic motives and implications of the work itself. What are we to make of Aaron Douglas's slit-eyed streamlined silhouettes, for example, or Richmond Barthés's sensuous African nudes in bronze? How can we reconcile the caricatured, grinning 'darky' types in the 1930s paintings of Palmer C. Hayden? And what are we to glean from Harlem Renaissance works if the artists are not from Harlem but, say, from Chicago, San Francisco, the southern United States, London, Paris, or even Kingston, Jamaica? Are these works still the products of the Harlem Renaissance, or are they the fruits of some other, thus far unnamed, concurrent cultural phenomena? And what are we to garner from artists such as Carl Van Vechten, Winold Reiss and Doris Ulmann, who were passionately engaged in black representational discourses and yet not black themselves? Do we dismiss these artists entirely, or do we include them in the larger investigation surrounding the artistic pursuit of an earthy, unapologetically hybrid, subversive modernity?
In addition to focusing on the 'visual' within this black aesthetic frame, what is needed is a reformulation of the Harlem Renaissance concept: a reconceptualisation that, while retrospective, is also revisionist and resourceful, given the creative, mutable presence of the Harlem Renaissance ideal in assorted post-Harlem Renaissance cultural forms (literary and art criticism, exhibitions and contemporary cinema). For the purposes of this exercise the insertion of a virgule (/) into the word Re/Birth (or Re/Naissance) underscores this act of reconceptualisation. By diacritically separating the prefix Re (which in Latin means 'back', 'again', 'anew' and 'over again') from the suffix Naissance (whose Latin root natus refers to 'birth', 'descent', 'beginning', 'dawn' and 'rise') we emphasise the concept's original sense of cultural and intellectual renewal and its visual agenda to rediscover and recreate a modern body (in this case a black one). Furthermore, by isolating Naissance and encouraging aspects of the Latin suffix natio to re-emerge (and, consequently, allude to 'tribe', 'race', 'people' and 'class'), we invite interpretations of the Harlem Re/Naissance that take into consideration the movement's often overlooked objective of establishing a new; spiritual, political, and self-conscious nation.
With these modifications in mind, Harlem Re/Naissance no longer functions as an essentially literary, racialised phenomenon, isolated from assorted art forms and creative forces in the years between the two great World Wars. Rather, Harlem Re/Naissance is a provocative response to a new art era: an aesthetic retort that, like Jean Toomer's anthropomorphic, plum-bearing perennial, transcends time to celebrate identity, creativity, the past, the present and the body politic. With the visual arts of the 1920s and 1930s anchored by black peoples, we can recollect and reimagine this twentieth-century moment when Harlem was not only 'in vogue', or 'on the minds' of a complacent few, but also a geo-political metaphor for modernity and an icon for an increasingly complex black diasporal presence in the world.