Shortly after Rachel was written in 1916, the New Negro Movement began to gain traction in the African American community. This broad cultural movement focused on promoting a public image of African Americans as industrious, urban, independent, and distinct from the subservient and illiterate “Old Negro” of the rural South. Unlike his predecessor, the New Negro was self-sufficient, intellectually sophisticated, creative, knowledgeable and proud of his racial heritage (Krasner, Beautiful Pageant 140). While these concepts had been promoted since the turn of the century, it was not until 1917-1918 that they began to crystalize as a concerted effort among African American intellectuals. These men actively supported the creation of black drama because they recognized that “At a time when African Americans had virtually no political recourse, their voice could best be heard through…a creative and humanistic effort to achieve the goal of civil rights by producing positive images of African Americans and promoting activism through art” (“New Negro Movement” 926). The New Negros therefore shared the same overall goal as black intellectuals such as DuBois, but believed that black artists should focus on presenting the reality and beauty of the “black human experience” instead of an idealized vision of what life should be. Ultimately, the transition from “political” art to that which held creativity in high esteem was complex and divisive. Fortunately, just as Dubois emerged as the primary advocate of the former Political Theatre, so too would Alain Locke help guide the New Negros to support the idea of Art Theatre.
Alain Locke’s support of the New Negro Movement helped convince African Americans to move away from the propagandistic ph...
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...vid. A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Print.
Krasner, David. Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre: 1895-1910. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1997. Print.
Mackay, Constance D'Arcy. The Little Theatre in the United States. New York: H. Holt, 1917. Print.
McKay, Nellie. "Black Theater and Drama in the 1920s: Years of Growing Pains." The Massachusetts Review 28.4 (1987): 615-626. JSTOR. Web. 31 Mar. 2014
Saxon, Theresa. American Theatre: History, Context, Form. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ, 2011. Print.
Scott, Freda L. "Black Drama and the Harlem Renaissance." Theatre Journal 37.4 (1985): 426-439. Print.
Wheeler, Kip. "Literary Terms and Definitions M." Literary Terms and Definitions "M" Carson-Newman University, n.d. Web. 12 May 2014.
Harlem soon became known as the “capital of black America” as the amount of blacks in this community was very substantial. Many of the inhabitants of this area were artists, entrepreneurs and black advocates with the urge to showcase their abilities and talents. The ...
Gill, Glenda Eloise. No Surrender! No Retreat! : African American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater. New York: St. Martin's, 2000. Print.
Lewis’s viewpoint is not without it’s truths. The Harlem renaissance was overseen by a number of intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Dubois. Booker T. Washington‘s, a highly influential speaker of the age, words appealed to both Caucasians and African-Americans. Washington forged an interracial bridge of communication through his unique tactics in the quest for equality. He believed in more subtle ways of gaining equality through hard work, cunning, and humility. He stated, “The wisest among my race understands that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”(Salley, 15) With this statement, Washington himself denies that this new awakening in equality and arts could be forced,...
“The New Negro” as described by Alain Locke is seeking social justice, however he is doing so in a way different from the various forms of resistance that preceded him. Locke describes a shift from radicalism in the fight for social justice to a need to build a relationship between races. The “New Negro” has come to the realization that assimilation into American culture is not a viable answer; therefore he has decided to build his own culture in collaboration with American culture. The construction of this culture became known as The New Negro Movement or The Harlem Renaissance. This was the attempt of the black community to birth for themselves a status quo in which they were no longer defined by their oppressors’ views. It was with in
This essay will examine what was new about the new negro from 1920-1936. During the years 1920-1936 African Americans began to rebrand themselves and change their image. African Americans wanted to create an image of themselves that was more positive, educated, and cultured, with an emphasis on African culture, hence began the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement.
Over the course of approximately one-hundred years there has been a discernible metamorphosis within the realm of African-American cinema. African-Americans have overcome the heavy weight of oppression in forms such as of politics, citizenship and most importantly equal human rights. One of the most evident forms that were withheld from African-Americans came in the structure of the performing arts; specifically film. The common population did not allow blacks to drink from the same water fountain let alone share the same television waves or stage. But over time the strength of the expectant black actors and actresses overwhelmed the majority force to stop blacks from appearing on film. For the longest time the performing arts were the only way for African-Americans to express the deep pain that the white population placed in front of them. Singing, dancing and acting took many African-Americans to a place that no oppressor could reach; considering the exploitation of their character during the 1930's-1960's acting' was an essential technique to African American survival.
Alexander Hamilton, One of Americas founding fathers, author of “The Federalist Papers,” and the gentleman on the ten-dollar bill, has a riveting Broadway musical biography on his life by the great Lin-Manuel Miranda. What makes this show absolutely unique is that it not just white men dressed up in powdered white wigs, it’s a contemporary piece with scores of music in pop, hip-hop, R&B and only uses Black and Latino actors. In theatre, the concept of colorblind casting has been used for a long time but it is still a debate whether or not it’s an effective practice. Even the celebrated Black playwright August Wilson, in his speech addressed to the Theatre Communications Group National Conference “The Ground on Which I Stand” states that, “colorblind casting is an aberrant idea that has never had any validity other than as a tool of Cultural Imperialists who view American culture, rooted in the icons of European culture, as beyond reproach in its perfection … to mount an all-black production of a Death of a Salesman or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigation from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans.” Nevertheless, Hamilton does the exact opposite, it opens the audience to understanding that talent can transcend the characters and still tell the stories of our cultures history using both a serious, comedic, and musical approach.
3. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Gale Group, 1987. pp. 133-145.
The Harlem Renaissance refers to a prolific period of unique works of African-American expression from about the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Although it is most commonly associated with the literary works produced during those years, the Harlem Renaissance was much more than a literary movement; similarly, it was not simply a reaction against and criticism of racism. The Harlem Renaissance inspired, cultivated, and, most importantly, legitimated the very idea of an African-American cultural consciousness. Concerned with a wide range of issues and possessing different interpretations and solutions of these issues affecting the Black population, the writers, artists, performers and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance had one important commonality: "they dealt with Black life from a Black perspective." This included the use of Black folklore in fiction, the use of African-inspired iconography in visual arts, and the introduction of jazz to the North.[i] In order to fully understand the lasting legacies of the Harlem Renaissance, it is important to examine the key events that led to its beginnings as well as the diversity of influences that flourished during its time.
As one can see, Washington and DuBois played a tremendous role in creating the atmosphere which took African Americans into the Harlem Renaissance era. Without them, particularly DuBois, the movement for cultural identity would have lacked essential inspiration and foundation. We hope that we have provided our readers with information that shows this.
Both Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were great writers but their attitudes towards their personal experience as an African American differed in many ways. These differences can be attributed to various reasons that range from gender to life experience but even though they had different perceptions regarding the African American experience, they both shared one common goal, racial equality through art. To accurately delve into the minds of the writers’ one must first consider authors background such as their childhood experience, education, as well their early adulthood to truly understand how it affected their writing in terms the similarities and differences of the voice and themes used with the works “How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Hurston and Hughes’ “The Negro Mother”. The importance of these factors directly correlate to how each author came to find their literary inspiration and voice that attributed to their works.
Lawrence, W.J. Old Theatre Days and Ways. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1935. Annotated
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
Brockett, Oscar G., and Oscar G. Brockett. The Essential Theatre. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. Print.
William Garrison’s “The Liberator” demonstrated Aldridge, “renowned negro tragedian” was one of the several black Americans who “disprove the inherent lack of capacity in black America.” Although, on the other hand, in another edition of “The Liberator”, they described Aldridge 's success and “most excellent representation of Othello” are used as evidence that “European nations do not seem to entertain these prejudices by any means so deeply as we do here in the United States.”