Alain Locke, in his “Foreword” to The New Negro (1925), observes, “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 objections” (xvi). Within this statement, he underscores the complex relationships that exist within national literary space, such as the one between “American literature” and “Negro-American culture,” where the latter has to deal with cultural double-consciousness. Furthermore, Locke connects what would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance to the larger global movement of actively reframing racial and national identity: “Yet the New Negro must be seen in the perspective
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Writers of the Harlem Renaissance occupied a peripheral position with respect to American literature, yet they produced some of the period’s most innovative social literature; in a way, they were the original late modernists by bringing political and social issues into art without jettisoning aesthetic concerns or (always) veering into propaganda. Theorists of this movement, or more accurately moment, such as Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and George Schuyler, present competing strategies for African-American artists to negotiate themselves and their works within American literature from a peripheral position. Overall, they show that African art plays an innovative role in the Harlem Renaissance, and by extension, in American literature, which goes against traditional histories that posit that African art is a passive tool used by Western modernists. Thus, both a global periphery (African art) and a national periphery (African-American art) are influencing a center (the United States) via diasporic innovation that is transmitted by African-American writers. Similarly, Jewish writers pose an interesting dilemma to national, and ultimately, world literature. Baal-Makhshoves, a theorist of Jewish literature, argues that it comes to be defined by its ex-territoriality, which allows a person to live in a foreign land as if he or she were entirely at home within the confines of his or her own nation. In terms of literature, it allows authors to participate in building a national literature within the confines of a foreign nation or in exile. Albert Cohen, throughout his novel sequence of Solal of the Solals,
Writers of the Harlem Renaissance occupied a peripheral position with respect to American literature, yet they produced some of the period’s most innovative social literature; in a way, they were the original late modernists by bringing political and social issues into art without jettisoning aesthetic concerns or (always) veering into propaganda. Theorists of this movement, or more accurately moment, such as Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and George Schuyler, present competing strategies for African-American artists to negotiate themselves and their works within American literature from a peripheral position. Overall, they show that African art plays an innovative role in the Harlem Renaissance, and by extension, in American literature, which goes against traditional histories that posit that African art is a passive tool used by Western modernists. Thus, both a global periphery (African art) and a national periphery (African-American art) are influencing a center (the United States) via diasporic innovation that is transmitted by African-American writers. Similarly, Jewish writers pose an interesting dilemma to national, and ultimately, world literature. Baal-Makhshoves, a theorist of Jewish literature, argues that it comes to be defined by its ex-territoriality, which allows a person to live in a foreign land as if he or she were entirely at home within the confines of his or her own nation. In terms of literature, it allows authors to participate in building a national literature within the confines of a foreign nation or in exile. Albert Cohen, throughout his novel sequence of Solal of the Solals,