1In Global Matters, Paul Jay recalls how “we construct the locations we study,” and that “we make a choice to study literary texts and other cultural forms as national productions” (2010, 73) – or not. In the case of the USA, such a geocultural construction is made ambivalent by the complexities of the country’s history. A former colonial settlement which achieved political and then cultural independence, the USA found themselves increasingly associated with imperialistic practices in the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century; the nation’s positionality as both dominated (by European standards imposed throughout the colonial era) and dominating (as a new centre of both taste and economic power) makes it a “location” connected to contradictory agendas.
- 1 I use “Negro Renaissance” and “Harlem Renaissance” interchangeably (see Mitchell); Langston Hughes (...)
- 2 In his edition of the Survey Graphic, Locke saw Harlem as “the sign and center of the renaissance o (...)
2The voices of African Americans add complexity to tangled US spatial circumscriptions. They have understandably expressed resistance against the discriminations and marginalizations of white hegemony and have been taken as a model for political and artistic claims against neo-colonial oppression. Strikingly, Homi Bhabha discusses Toni Morrison’s Beloved in depth at the end of his introduction to The Location of Culture (1994, 22–27), while the end of the conclusion to the same volume re-assesses W.E.B. Du Bois’s comments on the Sorrow Songs (364–67). On the other hand, the singularity of the United States, which derives from their global domination, tended to isolate African Americans from fellow “Black” artists in Europe, Africa and Latin America, a number of whom were also descended from deported slaves. One example of such isolation is the Negro Renaissance, later known as the Harlem Renaissance.1 Although the aesthetic project was fed by Black Atlantic experiences and influences, it was quickly assigned to national master narratives of United States exceptionalism (see Peake). This is visible in the fact that the phrase “Harlem Renaissance” was later chosen to designate the movement, intricating it onto the map of Manhattan.2
3This discussion of The New Negro anthology is conceived as a renewed attempt to grasp the position of American United States literatures and cultures in the field of postcolonial and transnational studies. I leave aside contemporary debates, which have among others seen a rising number of academics hailing from Latin America (Walter Mignolo, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, e.g.) shaping the field of decolonial studies in their critique of US imperialism, while often writing from the USA themselves. Instead, I turn to analyses of previously minimized influences and symbolic border zones, in keeping with a “shift in the geographical scope of American studies” which “contributed to a dramatic shift in how we historicize the literature and culture of the Americas” (Jay 2010, 75). I take the “Harlem Renaissance” as a case-in-point of a cultural and intellectual project whose remit has been limited to national dimensions, and which is aptly re-considered in the context of the transnational turn. I also analyse how the aestheticism with which Alain Locke was charged by “Black” activists who, like W.E.B. Du Bois believed that all art is de facto politically committed and the expression of social protest, is not to be collapsed with movements promoting art for art’s sake. Instead, I suggest that the European and Caribbean echoes in the movement have been insufficiently considered, and that they tell a story of emancipation in themselves. This is how one must read the alternative he formulated as to whether the New Negro movement were about “a quality of spirit or complexions?” (Locke in Stewart 1983, 21).
- 3 A striking link between this “Renaissance” and the “American Renaissance” appears in an essay writt (...)
4The phrases “American Renaissance” and “Harlem Renaissance” appeared retrospectively and at the same time (1941), at a particular time in the geopolitical position of the United States (see Mitchell; Peake).3 The internal unity suggested by these phrases evens out a range of dissonances within both movements, but highlights the desire for autonomy which animated the various authors seen as belonging to either movement. These “Renaissances” are claimed as models by some of today’s postcolonial movements but also left aside by a number of “area studies” critics who exclude the USA from the realm of the postcolonial (for a recent analysis of these tensions, see Madsen). This paper is an attempt to re-read the facts of an emergent postcolonial African American modernity in order to posit the Harlem Renaissance as a movement “old” enough for us to try to see how newness can possibly be considered as a laboratory for other struggles of Global South emancipation.
- 4 McKay’s Romance in Marseille was only rediscovered, and published, in 2020. Amiable With Big Teeth: (...)
5The recent rediscovery of such authors as Claude McKay4 has shed light on the “foreign,” and more particularly Caribbean, influences on the Harlem Renaissance (see Peake). Its transnational dimension was both initially stated and nuanced: Locke presented it as “a racial awakening on a national and perhaps even a world scale” (1925b, xxvii). Ernest Julius Mitchell, who discusses the movement, mentions the same potentiality but places it between brackets as he describes it as “profoundly national (even international)” (2010, 647). One of the causes for such tentativeness is, I contend, connected to Jay’s realization that literary reception and canon-building remain largely distributed along national borders which are particularly debatable in the case of the African diasporas.
- 5 To a large extent, this issue can be seen as the first version of The New Negro.
6From a methodological point of view, I have focused on one of the prominent manifestoes of the Harlem Renaissance: Alain Locke’s New Negro pluri-generic anthology (poems, short stories, essays), which introduced to the world of letters such names as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, or Zora Neale Hurston: some of the foundational figures of the African American canon. Its transcultural dimension, as well as its ambition with regard to the idea of rebirth, was actually a seed planted as early as the slightly anterior (March 1925) Survey Graphic issue edited by Alain Locke and entitled Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro,5 with titular references to Islam and to the Arabic Peninsula. In The New Negro, Locke suggested in the opening text that Harlem was to play “the same role for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia” (1925b, 7). Locke had been considerably influenced by the Celtic Revival, and especially so by the experience of the Abbey Theatre. His take on what was to become the Harlem Renaissance was that it ought to be a place of dialogism and cross-cultural influences: these did not prevent newness, but on the contrary convoked it.
- 6 In itself, the date of 1492 speaks volumes about shifting tides and reconfigurations of inclusion a (...)
7In opening this reflexion, I bear in mind the “European” Renaissance, which started at a date, 1492, when the Americas became the last addition to what came to be called the Black Atlantic.6 The notion of a cultural rebirth must be understood as provoked by geographical shifts, in the case of the European Renaissance and of the Harlem Renaissance alike. These shifts are inherent in the complexity of the “New Negro” cultural project, as African American intellectuals were able to travel more widely, both from and towards Harlem. An illustration of these increased human and cultural migrations can be found in Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues (1926), a collection of poems bearing the traces of the author’s vagabond years in Mexico, Western Europe and Western Africa, and whose dust jacket was illustrated by Mexican writer and visual artist Miguel Cavarrubias, who had also collaborated with Guyanese-Bahamian-Panamanian artist Eric Walrond in the December 1924 issue of Vanity Fair.
8A Renaissance is a moment of crisis, of uncertainty and cultural disjunction. In the case of the Harlem Renaissance, the crisis rose from a call for visibilisation launched by artists and thinkers, and achieved to a large extent by the publication of Alain Locke’s The New Negro, An Interpretation, in 1925. This collective enterprise, gathering forty-six pieces falling into two main parts, bestowed recognition and status upon African Americans in the world of arts and letters. The texts innovatively play with both the tradition of African American culture, as they record folktales and songs, and with the literary conventions of the early-twentieth-century United States. The multigeneric dimension of the volume is aligned with avant-garde experimentations also carried, for instance, by Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923, a “novel” actually combining prose, poetry and dramatic dialogues) and labelled “Black modernist.”
9While some critics saw the Harlem Renaissance as starting in the 1910s (Baker), the anthology has often been read as initiating the Harlem Renaissance, with Nathan Huggins writing for instance that “it is fair to say that the Harlem Renaissance began with the publication of this volume” (Huggins 1995, 45). I suggest re-reading the dialectics between newness and oldness in the light of Locke’s own belief that cultural rebirths were all about circulation and borrowings. In a short essay commenting on what the Harlem Renaissance meant, Locke insists on a necessarily transnational understanding of the movement, in line with what the “first” Renaissance had been: “According to that [political standard], the Grand Renaissance should have stopped at the Alps and ought to have effected the unification of Italy instead of the revival of Humanism” (Locke in Stewart 1983, 21). His vision of the movement is a far cry from racialized criteria and from the “primitivism” that also traversed the Harlem Renaissance through authors who emphasized “folk values” (Hurston, for instance, who wrote about the Caribbean from the point of view of an outsider, under the influence of Franz Boas, see Lemke; about the numerous misunderstandings in the movement, see Mitchell 647–48).
10The New Negro, as its very title suggests and epitomizes, combines old and new. This tension was prefigured by Jean Toomer’s essay, “The Negro Emergent,” written in 1924, a year before The New Negro: Toomer’s title prolongs racialized discourse inherited from slavery and suggests the emergence of renewed cultural forms of expression. This manner of looking at the volume of The New Negro echoes a tension which agitates the whole spectrum of postcolonial studies, regardless of any geographical specificities. It combines newness and oldness because it is widely considered as a manifesto. As such, it brings to mind one of the most quoted passages in all of a much-quoted Rushdie, “how does newness come into the world? How is it born?” (1988, 8). This is echoed in turn by a number of postcolonial theoretical texts, including Elleke Boehmer’s recent volume, Postcolonial Poetics, 21st Century Critical Readings:
Especially where our attention is directed at one and the same time to different contiguous items (images, themes, figures), and to their interstices between them or the spaces through which they relate, we are invited to work between and across, and to read in differential ways. That is to say, we imagine otherness and otherwise, both at once. In the words of Paul Gilroy, the perception of relation allows us to “[repudiate]… dualistic pairings” and to conceive “complex, tangled, profane and sometimes inconvenient forms of interdependency;” So, too, for Dipesh Chakrabarty, the “new names” that rise out of colonial contexts stretch and displace the terms of analysis bequeathed by Europe: a certain rhetorical imprecision allows newness to come into the world. (2018, 53)
- 7 The “American Renaissance” was a phrase coined by F.O. Matthiessen in order to lend coherence to mi (...)
11Boehmer allows us to read the European, the American, the Harlem but also the Native American7 Renaissances as dialectical reconfigurations of the relations between the self and the other, between the individual and the community, or communities, with the advent of Renaissance humanism. Renaissance colonial encounters opened a “new” era which also relied heavily on former structures of power and domination – thereby proving to what extent there is no newness in absolute terms.
12Newness is, without surprise, one of the concepts which the introduction to the volume addresses:
No one who understandingly faces the situation with its substantial accomplishment or views the new scene with its still more abundant promise can be entirely without hope. And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the warrant of these things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age. (Locke 1925b, 16; this is the end of ‘The New Negro’ introduction)
One of the main arguments in the volume is that of the originality of African American culture, in relation to the main, or mainstream, American culture. Resolutely composed as an “initiation,” geared towards a cultural future, Locke’s essays chime with the ambition expressed in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) or Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) to open new paths for American literature, away from hackneyed models that are not representative of the way life is actually lived, the way language is used, on the streets of New England towns – or Harlem.
The projected abolition of the old world and order, the ambition of starting anew, can explain the journeying of the term “Renaissance” from the late fifteenth century, in Europe, to the 1920s in Harlem. In this respect, there is paradoxically much mimicry in Locke’s enterprise. A parallel is clearly, if not explicitly, drawn with the (yet unlabelled) American Renaissance authors in the preface: “America seeking a new spiritual expansion and artistic maturity, trying to found an American literature, a national art, and national music implies a Negro-American culture seeking the same satisfactions and objectives” (1925b, x). The dialectics of sameness and difference plays itself out as the Harlem Renaissance offers promises of newness, while iterating an American gesture of emancipation. Such an ambivalence can markedly be spotted in the pages of the anthology written by West Indian contributors.
13The almost immediate acceptance of the Harlem Renaissance as a landmark movement in the United States was nevertheless accompanied by a certain number of distortions. The crucial role played by women artists was partly overlooked until the 1990s (Reynolds). An artist such as Florida-born Augusta Savage, for instance, has only recently been recognized as a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance (see Hull). Another silenced presence is what this section concerns itself with: the marginalised, dissonant, but constitutive voices of West Indian intellectuals in the anthology. Bhabha, for instance, explains how the Harlem Renaissance has been identified by Houston Baker as both resulting from “marooning” (a historical practice of escape and resistance associated with slavery in the West Indies) and a “national project” (1994, 207). The latter has been foregrounded in the reception of The New Negro, but was also fostered by its contributors. Jamaican author Claude McKay, whose contribution is commented on later in this article, recalls receiving a letter from James Weldon Johnson asking him to “return” to the United States in order to support the Negro Renaissance (McKay 2007, 235).
14True enough, in the case of the Harlem Renaissance, “newness” came primarily from a strictly North American context. The Great Migration and the cultural influences stemming from the Old South fed the anthology and lent it a large part of its distinctiveness, formally and thematically. Figures easily corroborate such a statement, with 90% of African Americans living in the American South in 1900 compared with 77% in 1940: the descendants of slaves fled Jim Crow legislation and unemployment and migrated massively to Northern urban centres, starting with New York (mostly Harlem). Yet, the migratory flux also brought West Indians to the United States: this is a case-in-point of overlooked pivotal transnational tendencies which scholars have recently started to examine. The “Southerners” whose creative and intellectual capacities contributed to the Harlem Renaissance were not solely from the South of the USA. Between 1900 and 1930, around 40,000 Caribbean immigrants are estimated to have settled in New York City (see Watkins Owens; for a sense of scale, it can be noted here that there were around 340,000 black residents in Upper Manhattan in 1930). They sometimes arrived in Harlem through the Southern states, as was the case with Claude McKay, who studied at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before moving North to escape a segregation which came as a great shock to him.
15While no less than seven authors are from that part of the Black Atlantic, nothing is said in the introductory essay to address such a specificity. This must be read in relation with the effects of the “backyard policy” in the Caribbean: in 1924, American soldiers had only just started withdrawing from the Dominican Republic, which had been militarily occupied in 1916, one year after Haiti – still under the domination of the US army in 1925, and for another span of nine years. Economic and diplomatic control of Cuba was unofficial, but real, as is attested by Nicolas Guillen’s poem “West Indies Ltd.,” published in 1934. Puerto Rico had been ceded to the United States in 1899. To speak of one’s existence as a “new Negro” in Harlem in 1925, when one’s roots were West Indian, involved tensions and ambiguities. There is an “exceptionalist” attitude in the Harlem Renaissance which has silenced some dissonant voices – starting with Caribbean ones.
16This Caribbean component to the Negro Renaissance carried in its wake a concern for the emancipatory struggles and political demands formulated after WWI by colonized territories, which included the West Indies but excluded the United States. Locke had himself been exposed to anticolonial agitation through his membership in the Cosmopolitan Club, at Oxford, where he had been the first black Rhodes scholar and where he had been shunned by his fellow countrymen, all white. Locke’s biographer writes how
these overly sophisticated British colonials also educated Locke about the contradictions of the Victorian rule, that no matter how dressed up they were, they were still emissaries of inferior cultures according to the British […]. But because of their successful assimilation of European culture, colonial members of the Oxford cosmopolitan club disagreed and used the club to advance a counterargument for a cultural renaissance emerging from Indian and Arabian traditions. (Stewart 2018, 152)
17As recent scholarship has shown, a sizable number of authors of Caribbean descent have contributed to writing the history of the Harlem Renaissance. One can quote here Nella Larsen (whose presumed father was an immigrant from the Danish West Indies), Marcus Garvey (who was from Jamaica), and perhaps most prominently, W.E.B. Du Bois, whose father was from Haiti. Just as West Indian origins have been overshadowed by the cultural domination of the “American” model, no less than six authors who have seen their work included in The New Negro (1925) belong to a larger Black Atlantic background. These are: Arthur A. Schomburg (who arrived in the US in 1891 from Puerto Rico); Joel Augustus (who arrived in the US in 1906 from Jamaica); Eric Walrond (whose parents were respectively from Guyana and Barbados, and who mostly grew up in Panama; he arrived in the US in 1918); Claude McKay (who arrived in the US in 1912 from Jamaica); James Weldon Johnson (born in Florida to a Bahamian mother whose roots went back to Haiti); and W.A. Domingo (who arrived in the US in 1910 from Jamaica). To borrow and adapt Hamlet’s expression, the Harlem Renaissance was certainly looking “South by Southeast,” both in The New Negro anthology, and generally speaking.
18West Indian contributors to the anthology strike a note of diasporic cultures which runs against the grain of any strictly national conception of the Negro Renaissance. Their distinctly transnational perspective can be felt, for instance, in their attachment to historicity. In a contribution entitled “The Negro Digs up his Past,” Arthur (or Arturo) Schomburg writes that
The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. Though it is unorthodox to think of America as the one country where it is necessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. […] History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset. (Locke 1925b, 231)
19The distance taken from American characteristics of self-fashioning, the distrust of a nation-building premised on a clean slate, are opposed to the past of slavery: one which is partly European but also partly American. In a double perspectival reversal, Schomburg mentions the fascination exerted by African artefacts upon interwar, modernist Western Europe:
The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture. But a new notion of the cultural attainment and potentialities of the African stocks has recently come about, partly through the corrective influence of the more scientific study of African institutions and early cultural history, partly through growing appreciation of the skill and beauty and in many cases the historical priority of the African native crafts, and finally through the signal recognition which first in France and Germany, but now very generally, the astonishing art of the African sculptures has received. (237)
- 8 For the interweaving of past, present and future in this paper, see Holton.
Not only is America tied to its European past,8 but Europe is re-introduced as an arbiter of taste and a place where legitimacy might be granted. This is, however, aligned to a certain extent with Locke’s own choice of German artists as the illustrators of the volume, starting with Winold Reiss (Schneck 2010, 75–80; about his interest in Emile Verhaeren: “Verhaeren,” Locke 1917 in Stewart 1983, 35–36). These European influences are, yet again, the object of quite recent academic interest.
20Such a centrifugal posture is asserted by Rogers’s text on jazz:
In its elementals, jazz has always existed. It is in the Indian war-dance, the Highland fling, the Irish jig, the Cossack dance, the Spanish fandango, the Brazilian maxixe, the dance of whirling dervish, the hula hula of the South Seas, the danse du ventre of the Orient, the carmagnole of the French Revolution, the strains of Gipsy music, and the ragtime of the Negro. Jazz proper, however, is something more than all these. It is a release of all the suppressed emotions at once, a blowing off of the lid, as it were. It is hilarity expressing itself through pandemonium; musical fireworks. (217)
21This contradicts the notion whereby jazz was born sui generis on American soil. The list of influences coming together in the new musical genre is vertiginous; it associates world forms of dance and music whose proximity is puzzling, but it also recalls Whitman’s democratic ideal as it nestles itself in a paratactic grammar. Such a comparative method is practiced by W.A. Domingo when he intervenes in the discussion about “the battleground of intra-racial antagonisms between American Negro Nativism and West Indians” (Osofsky 1971, 134). In his contribution to The New Negro, he distinguishes between the attitudes of West Indians, and of citizens of the United States, when confronted to discrimination:
In facing the problem of race prejudice, foreign-born Negroes, and West Indians in particular, are forced to undergo considerable adjustment. Forming a racial majority in their own countries and not being accustomed to discrimination expressly felt as racial, they rebel against the “color line,” as they find it in America. For while color and caste lines tend to converge in the islands, it is nevertheless true that because of the ratio of population, historical background and traditions of rebellions before and since their emancipation, West Indians of color do not have their activities, social, occupational and otherwise, determined by their race. (347)
22The multi-scalar perspective of West Indian authors remains to be further integrated in the immediate critical tradition around The New Negro, a volume whose legacy is associated with such all-American artists as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer.
23I will now turn to issues of methodology, for us as researchers and teachers in the fields of postcolonial studies. How are we to address or accept the canonization of postcolonial authors? Do we wish to reactivate the surprise, the transgressions, the shock of the voices which have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century? Clarification can be sought in the examination of such early emancipatory examples as the Harlem Renaissance.
24The dedication of The New Negro is to “the younger generation” and the implicit reader is described in the foreword in the following terms: “[w]hoever wishes to see the Negro in his essential traits, in the full perspective of his achievements and possibilities” (Locke 1925b, ix). I take here Locke at his own word and consider the “new Negro” today, after critical methods have evolved considerably. Claude McKay might be one direction in which to look. He was rediscovered after a cultural, or de facto, censorship. One of his texts, My Green Hills of Jamaica, published in 1979, remains out of print while two texts (Romance in Marseille and Amiable with Big Teeth) have only recently been issued or re-issued. McKay’s long forgotten manuscript of Romance in Marseille testifies to a critical inability to see how the Harlem Renaissance had continued until World War Two at least – far from being interrupted by the economic crash of 1929. There are two dimensions to the text which might have explained its going unnoticed for eight decades: one, its transnational element, with McKay being Jamaican, and then a migrant in Europe and the USSR; two, its exposing the tensions between Communists, on the one hand, and African Americans, on the other.
25Another way of re-assessing the Harlem Renaissance is to pay attention to writerly revisitings of the Harlem Renaissance, from the point of view of diasporic authors. This includes Caryl Phillips, as he gave a voice to blackface performer Bert Williams (1874-1922) in Dancing in the Dark (2005). An artist who had been active on Broadway since 1910, Williams is the subject of one of the most famous papers in The New Negro anthology: Jessie Fauset’s “The Gift of Laughter.” Born in the Bahamas, he had migrated to the USA and made a name for himself as the most famous “blackface” actor of all times. Caryl Phillips’s own positionality is as complex as that of Bert Williams, at least: he was born in St Kitts and taken by his parents to Great Britain when three months old. He grew up in Leeds, studied at Oxford and moved to the United States, where he now teaches creative writing at Yale University. He has practiced historical fiction in a wide range of innovative ways and written two novelized biographies: one of Bert Williams (Dancing in the Dark), the other of Jean Rhys (A View of the Empire at Sunset, 2018). Dancing in the Dark performs a re-activation of the voice of Williams, who is ventriloquized in The New Negro anthology and remains famous for performing a puzzling act of black-on-black minstrelsy. One need only compare the opening and the closing strategies of the novel:
If you walk down this broad Harlem avenue today it will soon become clear that old-fashioned dignity and civic pride have long fled the scene, and this would have broken his stout heart. Back then he dressed well, he walked tall, and the bright glare from his shoes could pick a man’s eyes clean out of his knobby head. (Phillips 2005, 3; emphasis added)
As I look all around I realize that I can see nothing. In fact, I can no longer even see myself, but I truly lost sight of myself many years ago when my tightly shod young feet touched the shore of the powerful country to the north. (Phillips 2005, 208; emphasis added)
- 9 Kathie Birat convincingly writes: “It is not a question of discussing the novel as a performance in (...)
In both passages time is out of joint, with a future (“will soon become”) belied by a present perfect (“have long fled”); with a present enunciation (“today”) contradicted by an unreal conditionality (“would have broken”); or with an impossible present (“can no longer”) finding its source in a vaguely measured past (“many years ago”), even though youth (“young”) is being foregrounded. The sense of motion imbues both incipit and excipit, with Harlem, or “the powerful country to the north,” mapped out in true Whitmanian fashion, through walking. Most importantly, the novel clearly performs9 a gesture of emancipation, with Williams being seen from the second- and third-person points of view at the beginning, and having reclaimed his agency on the last page.
26Ten years later, Raphaël Confiant proceeded to a similar instantiation as he wrote the fictional biography of Stephanie “Queenie” St(e)-Clair in Madame St-Clair, Reine de Harlem (2015). This historical figure, a Guadeloupean by birth, ran an illegal numbers game and befriended both W.E.B. Du Bois and Countee Cullen, as well as Aron Douglas, all of whom were her neighbours in the leafy and well-to-do part of Harlem called Sugar Hill. The (non-fictional) characters are brought together by their sharing French as a language, and their having spent time in France in various moments of the early twentieth century (see March and Sweeney). Both novels attest to the fluidity of the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and to the reconfiguration of some voices over others, generations after a first critical sedimentation. It also re-asserts the West Indian influences of the Harlem Renaissance, since Bert Williams had migrated from his native Bahamas at the end of the nineteenth century, and Madame St-Clair had reached Harlem, from Guadeloupe to Montreal, Canada, in 1912 (in Confiant’s novel, she is made to grow up in Fort-de-France, a competing version for the fate of this woman whose trajectory has not been recorded by sufficiently consistent archives; she also travels to Marseilles before landing in North America). Phillips and Confiant both write in multiscalar spaces which seem to corroborate Peake’s conclusion:
If fifty years ago the Harlem Renaissance was moulded in a national image, its once convenient fictions may now be unravelling to reveal a more internationalist and plural history – one in which representations of blackness were certainly shaped by Harlem, but also Chicago, Kingston, Washington, Havana, Pittsburgh, Mexico City, Colón, Limón, Berlin, Paris and London. (Peake, n/p)
- 10 A similar conundrum beset Harlem Renaissance authors; see Brown.
- 11 See Rosenberg on how Caribbean literatures had started being written in the course of the second ha (...)
- 12 Walcott did collaborate with one of the most prominent “heirs” to the movement, Romare Bearden. See (...)
27Both novels, Dancing in the Dark and Madame St-Clair, are written by Caribbean authors who address a mostly North American and European audience.10 They revisit figures which had been largely overlooked by the nationalist historiography of the Harlem Renaissance. This allows a few concluding remarks. How can we, as readers, teachers, and researchers, challenge labels and descriptors which have been adopted by our predecessors? How do we Caribbeanists, because this is the positionality from which I speak, address the fact that some of the main voices of the “first”11 generation, Walcott,12 Brathwaite, Naipaul, have recently passed away? What tradition, if any, do we contribute to building? Is this issue solved by the “make it new” attitude propelling us towards such renewed buzzwords as diasporic literatures, transnational arts, decolonial practices? Can we use the example of African American literature as a case-in-point of “new” literatures which have become “old”? What can this instance teach us in terms of stabilizing a canon, or reinventing interpretations? How is writing back outdated, and how, along what lines of investigation, can we read forward? Is normalization on the horizon for the texts we are all, in our respective and different fields, looking at? These reflexions on a necessary redefining of boundaries are meant to grasp what Derek Walcott had formulated as the “claim” to fluid creativity in the following quote from the essay entitled “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?”:
There was no line in the sea which said, this is new, this is the frontier, the boundary of endeavor, and henceforth everything can only be mimicry. But there was such a moment for every individual American, and that moment was both surrender and claim, both possession and dispossession. The issue is the claim. (Walcott 1974, 8).
28The forms of newness experimented by the contributors to The New Negro anthology are diverse and even contradictory due to a multi-scalar and transcultural dimension which has, I contend, been insufficiently grasped and measured.
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