The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic

This course offers an overview of twentieth-century literary modernism through the lens of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of Black artistic and intellectual flourishing loosely concentrated in New York City. Formal innovation, explorations of interiority, the autonomy of the artist, and political radicalism were all hallmarks of the works of Black Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, as they similarly came to define those of artists across the U.K. and Europe. We will begin by foregrounding the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, reading manifestos, retrospective overviews, and signal texts of the period. In what ways—either complementary or competing—did Black artists conceptualize cultural modernity and political legibility? How did Black women understand themselves within these fraught, often masculine frameworks? We will then turn our attention abroad to consider surprising resonances between such authors as Nella Larsen and Virginia Woolf; Langston Hughes and T.S. Eliot; Wallace Thurman and James Joyce. In the final third of the semester, we will discuss continuities and departures between the Harlem Renaissance and the Négritude movement in Paris, a city sometimes referred to as the capital of the Black Atlantic. The course ultimately invites students to think about modernist literatures from a transatlantic, multiracial, and diasporic perspective, appreciating similarities without glossing over important points of tension and conflict.