Claude McKay,

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Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928)
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The Harlem Renaissance

• Harlem as white neighbourhood ? Great Migration
  and black movement to Northern cities
• New Negro Movement, 1920s and 30s
• Racial pride
• Progressivist/socialist politics
• Cross cultural (literature, art, music, theatre,
  intellectual life)
• Black gentility v. Africanist primitivism

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Archibald Motley, The Jockey Club (1929)
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Archibald Motley, Saturday Night (1935)
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William H. Johnson, Harlem Street (c.1939)
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• Harlem as refuge
• The race capital
• Movement away from a Southern past
• Publishing and black consumers The Crisis
• Intellectual and artistic value based on
  self-determined criteria

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• Harlem as ghetto
• Betrayal of community/family
• Space to be inhabited but not claimed
• Responsibilities of black culture?
• W.E.B. Du Bois on Home to Harlem
• For the most part it nauseates me, and after
  the dirtier parts of its filth I feel like taking
  a bath.... He has used every art and emphasis to
  paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual
  promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as
  bold and as bright colors as he can.

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Aaron Douglas, Song of the Towers (1934)