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WHEN THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE BECAME VOGUE: PERIODIZATION AND THE ORGANIZATION OF POSTWAR AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2014

ANDREW M. FEARNLEY
ANDREW M. FEARNLEY*
Affiliation:
Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing, University of Manchester E-mail: andrew.fearnley-2@manchester.ac.uk
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Abstract

In the years around mid-century a number of periodizing terms entered Western historiography. These included the “Weimar Republic” and Frühneuzeit in Germany, “the age of Wilberforce” in Britain, and “the age of Jackson” in the United States, to name just a few. The appearance of these terms attested to the popularity that periodization, or the deliberate creation of historical periods, had within historical practice, and they were embraced variously as heuristics, as means of organizing the historical record, and as the root of synthesis. In this essay I trace the coinage of one term, “Harlem Renaissance,” from its emergence in the 1940s, through to the sharper profile it earned in the postwar years, and its institutionalization in the late twentieth century. In doing so I argue that Harlem Renaissance was neither a term nor a concept used by those who lived during the years it is now said to describe, and illuminate the alternative ways in which contemporaries apprehended their historical position. The context for the coinage and popularization of this term was the displacement of these earlier modes of interpretation by temporal ones, and the emergence of a mode of historical practice that stressed synthetic interpretation. By tracing the fluctuating ways in which a core analytical concept like periodization was handled between the mid- and the late twentieth century we might better grasp how historiographical orientations changed in these years.

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 59 - 87
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This essay has benefitted considerably from the suggestions and comments of Charles Capper, Will Jackson, Frank Kelderman, Daniel Matlin, Michael O'Brien, and the journal's three anonymous reviewers, and I am most grateful to them all.

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86 Huggins taught the class in 1970–71 and 1974–75; see “Columbia College,” Columbia Course Bulletins, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, NY; “Tentative Course Descriptions,” c.1969, Folder 1, Box 4, Vassar, College 1969 Black Studies Sit-in Records, 1966–74, Vassar College Archive and Special Collections, Poughkeepsie, NY.

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104 Hortense Thornton quoted in “Wins Study Grant for Black Rebirth,” New York Amsterdam News, 17 July 1971, B4.

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113 Fashion remains one of the few creative fields not to have embraced this term. See May Delaney, “Harlem's Vogues: Style, Influence, and ‘Knowingness’ in the Harlem Renaissance” (University of Leeds, BA dissertation, 2011).

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