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EDITED BY
CHERENE SHERRARD-JOHNSON
This edition first published 2015
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to the Harlem Renaissance / edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-49406-6 (cloth)
1. Harlem Renaissance. 2. American literature–African American authors–History and criticism. 3. African American arts–New York (State)–New York–20th century. 4. African Americans in popular culture. 5. African Americans in literature. 6. Literature and society–United States–History–20th century. 7. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)–Intellectual life–20th century. I. Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene, 1973– editor.
PS153.N5C577 2015
810.9′896073–dc23
2015007882
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: The salon at Villa Lewaro, Irvington, New York. Photo © Elizabeth Dooley / VHT Studios
Jayna Brown is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside. Her book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008) won both the Errol Hill Best Book Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and the George Freedley Award from the Theater Library Association.
Kirsten Pai Buick is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico. Her research interests include representations of American Landscape, British Colonial and US art to 1945, and African American art. She is the author of Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (2010).
andré m. carrington, PhD, is Assistant Professor of African American Literature in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, is forthcoming (2015)
Bryan Carter is an Assistant Professor in Africana Studies at the University of Arizona specializing in African American literature of the twentieth century with an emphasis on the Harlem Renaissance and digital culture. He is the creator of the Virtual Harlem Project and the author of Digital Humanities: Current Perspectives, Practice and Research (2014).
Jennifer Chang is the author of a book of poems, The History of Anonymity; and an Assistant Professor in English and Creative Writing at George Washington University. Her project, “Pastoral Modernism: An American Poetics,” studies how American modernists used pastoral to investigate the politics and topographies of race.
Erin D. Chapman is Associate Professor of History at George Washington University and the author of Prove it On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (2012). A cultural historian of African American gender politics and U.S racial discourses, she is currently researching the life and politics of playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
Soyica Diggs Colbert is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. She is the author of The African American Theatrical Body (2011) and editor of the “Black Performance” special issue of African American Review (2012). Colbert is currently working on a second book project entitled Black Movements and an edited volume entitled Do You Want to Be Well: The Psychic Hold of Slavery.
Margo Natalie Crawford is Associate Professor of African American literature and culture in the Department of English at Cornell University. She is the author of Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (2008) and the co-editor of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006).
Cynthia Davis is a Professor of English and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida. She is the author (with Verner Mitchell) of Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, a Biography of the Harlem Renaissance, and editor of three other books on the Harlem Renaissance.
Rynetta Davis is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Singled Out: Unmarried Black Women and African American Literary History. Her work has appeared in Arizona Quarterly and the prestigious Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature, edited by Dale M. Bauer.
Michele Elam, Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and Martin Luther King, Jr Centennial Professor of English, is the author of The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (2011), Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860–1930 (2003), and editor of the Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (2015).
J. Martin Favor is the author of Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (1999). He is Associate Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College.
Kathy L. Glass is Associate Professor of English at Duquesne University. She has published a book on nineteenth-century black women’s writings, Courting Communities: Black Female Nationalism and Syncre-Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century North (2006); a journal article on Anna Julia Cooper; and three book chapters on race studies and pedagogy.
Gary Edward Holcomb is Professor of African American Literature, Department of African American Studies, Ohio University. He is the author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (2007) and co-editor of Hemingway and the Black Renaissance (2012).
Lisa Hollenbach is a PhD candidate in English Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her dissertation studies the commercial recording and radio broadcasting of American poetry during the Cold War period.
Maureen Honey is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she teaches seminars on women of the Harlem Renaissance. She is the editor of Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (1989; 2006) and co-editor (with Venetria Patton) of Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (2001).
Carla Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University and the Chair of the Board of Associate Editors of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2015–19). Her books include Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters and Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, both New York Times Notable Books, as well as such edited volumes as Hurston’s Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States and Nella Larsen’s Passing. A Norton Critical edition of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and a biography of Jessica Mitford are forthcoming.
Verner D. Mitchell is a Dunavant Professor of English at the University of Memphis. He is the editor of This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance and author or editor (with Cynthia Davis) of four subsequent books on women writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Nadia Nurhussein is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (2013) and is currently at work on a book about Ethiopia and African American literature.
Carla L. Peterson is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She specializes in nineteenth-century African American literature, culture, and history and has published numerous essays in this field. She is the author of “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (1995), and, more recently, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2011).
Sonya Posmentier is an Assistant Professor of English at New York University. She is at work on a book, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature, and is the author of essays on Claude McKay and Derek Walcott.
Vaughn Rasberry is Assistant Professor of English and affiliate in the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. He has published articles in American Literary History, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and James Baldwin: America and Beyond, and is currently completing his first book, Race and the Totalitarian Century: World War and the Geopolitics of African American Culture.
Elizabeth M. Sheehan is Assistant Professor of English at Oregon State University. She is co-editor of Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion and is completing a book entitled Modernism ála Mode: Fashion, Form, and the Ends of Literature.
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (2012) and Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (2007).
Michael Soto is Associate Professor of English and Director of the McNair Scholars Program at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, where he teaches courses on American literature and cultural history. He is the author of The Modernist Nation (2004) and a forthcoming social history of the Harlem Renaissance, and editor of Teaching the Harlem Renaissance (2008).
Shane Vogel is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Cultural Studies Program at Indiana University. He is the author of The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (2009).
Belinda Wheeler is an Assistant Professor of English at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her articles on Gwendolyn Bennett have appeared in PMLA and the Modern American Poetry Site (MAPS). She is currently completing a book on Bennett entitled Gwendolyn Bennett: The Harlem Renaissance’s Quintessential Poet, Artist, Editor, Columnist, and Educator.
Andreá N. Williams is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, where she specializes in African American literature and nineteenth-century American literature. She is the author of Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction (2013). She also contributed to the Blackwell Companion to African American Literature (2010).
Ivy G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Northwestern University. He studies the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and US literary studies, and especially African American culture. He is the author is Specters of Democracy (2011).