What do we know today about the literary phenomenon called by some the Harlem Renaissance, by others the New Negro movement? Was it a quixotic though noble failure? Was it the triumph of a black modernism paradoxically ignited by a Victorian brown bourgeoisie? Were its authors who plumbed the color line seeking to remake the very notion of race? How salient a category was gender to its creators? Was its literary nationalism part of larger global movements? A long scholarly debate surrounds the Harlem Renaissance – a debate about its meanings, parameters, and, indeed, its very existence. My title, “Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance,” is meant both to invoke the swirling stereotypes and shibboleths of the era, and to indicate the vitality of the literature in our time.

In the early twenty-first century, the scholarly consensus on the Harlem Renaissance runs as follows: the African American intellectual response to historical and social forces in the period immediately following World War I was a cultural construct, a belles-lettristic sleight of hand in which black intellectuals and writers elegantly tossed together a coherent movement that never actually took place. Said another way, the Harlem Renaissance did not really exist – if by a literary movement’s existence we mean to indicate an unselfconscious, spontaneous upwelling of artistic endeavor, one untainted by political ideology or commercial encouragement. This belief in aesthetic purity is a lovely sentiment, but few literary movements are innocent of social and economic factors. Almost universally, critics now acknowledge that the Harlem Renaissance was based on artifice and politically motivated social engineering.

As the coeditor of this volume, my tasks have been fairly specific and predictable: I have provided editorial feedback to the contributors, served as a liaison between scholars and press, and written this introductory essay. As a scholar of African American literature who happens also to be an African American female, however, the questions associated with my tasks have been less specific but perhaps more taxing: Where do I stand in relation to this undertaking? That is to say, has my role in putting together this collection, on the autobiography of a long-deceased, female, ex-slave, been overdetermined? Fellow scholar Ann duCille noted recently that the rapid increase of scholarship about black women has “led me to think of myself as a kind of sacred text. Not me personally, of course, but me black woman object, Other.” What does it mean, she inquired, for “black women academics to stand in the midst of … the traffic jam … that black feminist studies has become?” For to introduce a collection of essays about Harriet Jacobs is not simply to present a body of scholarly works; it is also to comment upon the curious resurrection of one particular “black woman object” and her justly renowned autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Such comments may seen strange indeed, especially within the context of an essay that seeks to situate Harriet Jacobs and her contemporary critics for a heterogeneous leadership.