Is Another Harlem Renaissance Possible?
The Harlem Renaissance is one of the high watermarks of American culture. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, black writers, musicians, and artists based in New York produced a remarkable body of work that fused black vernacular forms with traditional and avant-garde American and European techniques. Some of the major Harlem Renaissance figures, like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, are still regularly taught and read. These were serious thinkers engaged in representing and reimagining what it meant to be black in America at a time when African Americans faced real, often brutal...