This 2007 Companion is a comprehensive guide to the key authors and works of the African American literary movement.

This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time.

From the music of Louis Armstrong to the portraits by Beauford Delaney, the writings of Langston Hughes to the debut of the musical Show Boat, the Harlem Renaissance is one of the most significant developments in African-American history in the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, in two-volumes and over 635 entries, is the first comprehensive compilation of information on all aspects of this creative, dynamic period. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Encyclopedi a of Harlem Renaissance website.

This book explores a rich cultural hybridity at the heart of transatlantic modernism. Focusing on cubism, jazz, and Josephine Baker's performance in the Danse Sauvage, Sieglinde Lemke uncovers a crucial history of white and black intercultural exchange, a phenomenon until now greatly obscured by a cloak of whiteness. Considering artists and critics such as Picasso, Alain Locke, Nancy Cunard, and Paul Whiteman, in addition to Baker, Lemke documents a potent cultural dialectic in which black artistic expression fertilized white modernism, just as white art forms helped shape the black modernism of Harlem and Paris. Coining the term primitivist modernism to designate the multicultural heritage of this century's artistic production, Lemke reveals the generative and germinating black cultural Other in the arts. She examines this neglected dimension in full, fascinating detail, blending literary theory, social history, and cultural analysis to document modernism's complex absorption of African culture and art. She details numerous ways in which African and African American forms (visual styles, musical idioms, black dialects) and fantasies (Baker's costume and dance, say) permeated high and mass culture on both sides of the Atlantic. So-called primitive art and high modernism; savage rhythms and European music hall culture; European and African American expressions in jazz; European primitivism and the racial awakenings of African American culture: paired and freshly examined by Lemke, these subjects stand revealed in their true interrelatedness. Insisting on modernism's two-way cultural flow, Lemke demonstrates not only that white modernism owes much of its symbolic capital to the black Other, but that black modernism built itself in part on white Euro-American models. Through superbly nuanced readings of individual texts and images (fifteen striking examples of which are reproduced in this handsome volume), Lemke reforms our understanding of modernism. She shows us, in clear, invigorating fashion, that transatlantic modernism in both its high and popular modes was significantly more diverse than commonly supposed. Students and scholars of modernism, African American studies, and cultural studies, and those with interests in twentieth-century art, dance, music, or literature, will find this book richly rewarding.

Teach your readers the quintessential elements of a renaissance, through the details of this inspirational event. During the Harlem Renaissance, African American culture blossomed thanks in part to the Great Migration, an increase in African Americans receiving formal educations, and national organizations being created to champion African Americans' rights. Some historians argue the movement wasn't a true Renaissance, but rather represented a weakening of traditional African American culture. Regardless, this movement uplifted African American musicians, authors, actors, artists, and other individuals. Without this turning point, it is possible that African American culture might not have had an opportunity to flourish until much later. This movement reached well beyond Harlem and has influenced the modern American literary and artistic culture, and will inspire your readers in profound ways.

"Heretofore scholars have not been willing—perhaps, even been unable for many reasons both academic and personal—to identify much of the Harlem Renaissance work as same-sex oriented. . . . An important book." —Jim Elledge This groundbreaking study explores the Harlem Renaissance as a literary phenomenon fundamentally shaped by same-sex-interested men. Christa Schwarz focuses on Countée Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugent and explores these writers' sexually dissident or gay literary voices. The portrayals of men-loving men in these writers' works vary significantly. Schwarz locates in the poetry of Cullen, Hughes, and McKay the employment of contemporary gay code words, deriving from the Greek discourse of homosexuality and from Walt Whitman. By contrast, Nugent—the only "out" gay Harlem Renaissance artist—portrayed men-loving men without reference to racial concepts or Whitmanesque codes. Schwarz argues for contemporary readings attuned to the complex relation between race, gender, and sexual orientation in Harlem Renaissance writing.

A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that address the literature and culture of the Harlem Renaissance from the end of World War I to the middle of the 1930s. Represents the most comprehensive coverage of themes and unique new perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance available Features original contributions from both emerging scholars of the Harlem Renaissance and established academic “stars” in the field Offers a variety of interdisciplinary features, such as the section on visual and expressive arts, that emphasize the collaborative nature of the era Includes “Spotlight Readings” featuring lesser known figures of the Harlem Renaissance and newly discovered or undervalued writings by canonical figures

This book evaluates Carl Van Vechten's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance by presenting hitherto unexamined documentary evidence. The author draws on correspondence, manuscripts, personal memorabilia, and published materials to examine the origins and development of the period in the 1920s which was termed the New Negro Renaissance. In the later years of the 1920s, as a result of the success of his novel, Nigger Heaven, Carl Van Vechten received extensive publicity associating him with Harlem and with the Harlem Renaissance. The vehement controversy which the book aroused among African American critics and the black press, who attacked it, and the African American authors and friends of Van Vechten who defended it, obscured the true extent of Van Vechten's role in the Harlem Renaissance. This study sheds light on the Van Vechten controversy which has continued to the present day. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1969; revised with new preface)

Although primitivism has received renewed attention in recent years, studies linking it with Latin America have been rare. This volume examines primitivism and its implications for contemporary debates on Latin American culture, literature, and arts, showing how Latin American subjects employ a Western construct to "return the gaze" of the outside world and redefine themselves in relation to modernity. Examining such subjects as Julio Cortázar and Frida Kahlo and such topics as folk art and cinema, the volume brings together for the first time the views of scholars who are currently engaging the task of cultural studies from the standpoint of primitivism. These varied contributions include analyses of Latin American art in relation to social issues, popular culture, and official cultural policy; essays in cultural criticism touching on ethnic identity, racial politics, women's issues, and conflictive modernity; and analytical studies of primitivism's impact on narrative theory and practice, film, theater, and poetry. This collection contributes offers a new perspective on a variety of significant debates in Latin American cultural studies and shows that the term primitive does not apply to these cultures as much as to our understanding of them. CONTENTS Paradise Subverted: The Invention of the Mexican Character / Roger Bartra Between Sade and the Savage: Octavio Paz’s Aztecs / Amaryll Chanady Under the Shadow of God: Roots of Primitivism in Early Colonial Mexico / Delia Annunziata Cosentino Of Alebrijes and Ocumichos: Some Myths about Folk Art and Mexican Identity / Eli Bartra Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic / Fernando Valerio-Holguín Dialectics of Archaism and Modernity: Technique and Primitivism in Angel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en América Latina / José Eduardo González Narrative Primitivism: Theory and Practice in Latin America / Erik Camayd-Freixas Narrating the Other: Julio Cortázar’s "Axolotl" as Ethnographic Allegory / R. Lane Kauffmann Jungle Fever: Primitivism in Environmentalism; Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima and the Romance of the Jungle / Jorge Marcone Primitivism and Cultural Production: Future’s Memory; Native Peoples’ Voices in Latin American Society / Ivete Lara Camargos Walty Primitive Bodies in Latin American Cinema: Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca / Luis Fernando Restrepo Subliminal Body: Shamanism, Ancient Theater, and Ethnodrama / Gabriel Weisz Primitivist Construction of Identity in the Work of Frida Kahlo / Wendy B. Faris Mi andina y dulce Rita: Women, Indigenism, and the Avant-Garde in César Vallejo / Tace Megan Hedrick