The decade of the 1930s reflects transitions in African American literary and photographic texts because of an emphasis on topics such as marriage, courtship, migration, childhood, as well as home in relationship to impoverishment and affluence. Discourse on aesthetics in African American literature also serves as a context for exploring representations of Black people in the 1930s. The chapter examines writings by authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Marita Bonner, as well as other Black writers. Photographers James Van Der Zee and Carl Van Vechten depict Black people as prosperous, while Work Projects Administration and Farm Security Administration photographers portray Black people facing deprivation. Additionally, the chapter analyzes excess and deprivation in 1800s African American literature by Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass and post-1950 twentieth-century African American literature by Lorraine Hansberry as well as Toni Cade Bambara.

As one of the most significant literary movements of the twentieth century, the Harlem Renaissance (1900-40) reflects the significance of African-American cultural expression during the modernist period. Nonetheless, critical discussions of African-American literature typically treat modernism as a movement separate and distinct from the Harlem Renaissance. As Houston Baker notes, 'Traditionally in discussions of Afro-American literature and culture, “modernism” implies the work of British, Irish, and Anglo-American writers and artists of the early twentieth century.' While this may stem from a tendency among critics to view African-American literature as separate and distinct from Anglo-American, British and Irish literature, the Harlem Renaissance's relationship and connection with the modernist movement reflects the conceptualisation of racial identity and consciousness during the early to mid twentieth century. Consequently, poetry of the Harlem Renaissance attempts to capture the perspective of African-American writers within the context of the modern world. African-American poets of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Helene Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Angelina Weld Grimkè explored central themes such as history, identity, community, race, class, gender and heritage, which continue to influence contemporary African-American poetry and its rendering of the human experience.