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The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. By George Hutchinson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. xiv, 541 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-37262-X.)
Women of the Harlem Renaissance. By Cheryl A. Wall. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. xx, 246 pp. Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-253-32908-6. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-25320980-3.)
The Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of African American cultural expression of the 1920s and 1930s, has drawn as much attention from historians as it has from literary critics. Among the reasons for this have been its political elements (the NAACP-National Association for the Advancement of Colored People-and the Garvey movement), its social processes (migration and urbanization), and its interesting personalities (W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston). Adding to the social histories of Nathan Huggins and David Levering Lewis and numerous biographies, these two books express the concerns of intellectual and women's history.
George Hutchinson, in The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, seeks nothing less than a paradigm shift in our understanding of the period. He argues for a reassessment of the movement's extent and effectiveness and, more fundamentally, for a reconception of the racial dynamics that shaped it. He situates it in the framework of an emergent "native modernism" that, utilizing the insights of pragmatism, Boasian cultural anthropology, and cultural pluralism, developed in contrast to the high modernism of London- and Paris-based writers, artists, and intellectuals. This "low" modernism was culturally nationalist, emphasizing American artists, thinking, materials, and language. At...