Harlem Renaissance

New York Times, July 28,1919, p. 4 David Levering Lewis, ed., The Harlem Renaissance Reader (New York Penguin, 1991), pp. 110-117 Kelly Miller, Radicals and Conservatives and Other Essays on the Negro in America [1908] (New York Schocken, 1968), p. 165. 

Greek Tragedy edited by P. E. Easterling The Harlem Renaissance edited by George Hutchinson... 

For African-American writers seeking in the 1920s to affirm the lives and culture of rural and poor black Americans, the Irish Literary Renaissance served as an inspiration for what has now became known as the Harlem Renaissance. In the Prefaces to his 1922 and 1931 anthologies. The Book of American Negro Poetry, the poet and academic James Weldon Johnson cited the example of Synge with particular reference to the creation of a language which moved away from the limitations and connotations of the kind of minstrel dialect which had in the past been used to represent African-American speech, a dialect which in his view had only two main stops, humor and pathos ... 

Just as Bunting s poetry shows there need be no contradiction between local allegiances and transnational awareness, the ambition to unite the regional and the continental was also characteristic of the writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance - a movement coterminous with high modernism, but not often read alongside it. Like more widely known political modernisms such as the Irish Literary Revival and, across the Atlantic, the Harlem Renaissance, the Scottish Renaissance took as its premise that cultural regeneration is the necessary precursor to political regeneration. 

I ve never heard of it, my waitress said with a smile when asked how to get to Jimmy s Uptown, the most conspicuous of the Harlem re-Renaissance night spots.The bartender talked over us on her cell phone. It was too cold, and too Wednesday, for that. 

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