Reading the Harlem Renaissance one hundred years later: context, names, and influence

Abstract

The Harlem Renaissance was a modernist movement of self-affirmation of black identity in the arts that, in dialogue with anticolonial articulations, reached its peak in the 1920s, in the United States. Many of its authors, such as Langston Hughes (1901-1964), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987) and Nella Larsen (1891-1964) currently have their names linked to the movement, but, despite this, they took different paths, marked by the intersections between class, race, gender and sexuality, present in their lives and works. It is our goal, therefore, to study some of these authors main works, and we do so by paying attention to the dialogues and idiosyncrasies between the works of these authors who are fundamental to the movement. In order to do so, we take support on the contributions of Walker (1975), Neal (1985), Gates and Lemke (1995), Hutchinson (2007), among others. We observed, with this study, the way in which the perceptions about these authors and their respective literary works reverberated throughout the decades following the decline of the movement and until the present day.

Keywords

• Harlem Renaissance
• African-American literature
• Modernism