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Home in Harlem, New York: Lessons from the Harlem Renaissance Writers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sidney H. Bremer
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Abstract

While other New York writers despaired of finding home in America's wasteland after World War i as War I, African American writers like Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay, Nella Larsen, and Rudolph Fisher created a powerful urban image of home in Harlem. Their Harlem home was at once place, community, and aspiration. As collectively articulated in their various writings, its vitality was most palpable, least constricted, in Harlem's well-peopled streets. It was evoked wherever—albeit only where—African Americans could come together. It was expressed by their art's profound yet deceptive masquerades. The Harlem Renaissance thus challenged America's established association of home with rural permanency. We ignore a fitting image of home for mobile, urban America when we fail to recognize these civic dimensions of Harlem Renaissance art—as Greater New York also failed to accept a public statue of James Weldon Johnson, memorialized by a literary archive at Yale instead.

Type
Special Topic: African and African American Literature
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 1: Special Millennium issue , January 1990 , pp. 47 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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