314 Making It New: 1900–1945names, their land, their place in an ancient community, their predicament
encouraged writers to socialism too, sometimes, but also to forms that mixed folk
and native materials with other traditions. Wandering between cultures, like other
ethnic groups and notably Hispanics and Asian-Americans, they often inspired
works that wandered between cultures too – that pursued the question of mixed
identity, a conflicted history through a mixture of languages and literary forms. That
was also the case with many African-American writers of the period. W. E. B. Du
Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), suggested that the black person in America
was burdened with “a double-consciousness ... two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body.” The African-American
is, after all, American and African; and the question was and is, which is the more
important? Should the primary impulse be toward absorption into the dominant
culture or assertion of a separate national identity? Is assimilationism the priority, or
black nationalism? To that, at the time, were added further traumas, other forms of
exile or strangeness demanding writerly recognition. For this was the era of the
Great Migration, when thousands of African-Americans left the rural South for
such urban centers as Detroit, Chicago, and New York. And it was also an era of
intensified racial violence: in 1900, for instance, at the dawn of the new century,
there were 115 recorded lynchings, all but nine of them of blacks.
Caught between the pulse of the new and the rhythms of the old, as well as
experiencing a “double consciousness,” African-American writers of this period are
usually included under the heading of the Harlem Renaissance. Many wrote in
Harlem, but not all; there were other centers of writing activity for African-Americans
located around the country; and another term sometimes used to describe these
writers is less topographically specific, the New Negro movement. It is taken from
the work of Alain Locke, an influential black critic, whose essay on the New Negro
and anthology of that title were both published in 1925. Whatever the preferred title
for this new generation of black writers, what is notable about them is how they
explored different literary forms to express the condition of African-Americans in
their times. Confronting a racial experience the determining feature of which was
that it was mixed and conflicted, they were prepared individually to confront and
collectively to debate the question of just how their experience should be turned into
literature. There were three particularly pressing aspects to that question. First, there
was the matter of the balance between politics and art, the bargain to be struck
between political message and aesthetic form. Second was the issue of the relative
claims of literary experiment and verisimilitude: whether the black experience could
best be caught in innovative structures, traditional forms, or more socially conscious,
strictly realist ones. Third, there was the problem of the racial inheritance, its
relevance or otherwise. There was a rich vein of African and African-American
cultural tradition available for the writer to tap. In the African-American traditions
of the past, for instance, there were the conventions of folktale, slave narrative, and
spiritual; and in those of the present there were, say, the rhythmic forms of blues,
gospel, and jazz. The issue here was how, if at all, to use these resources to register the
shape and meaning of the contemporary experience, to transform African-AmericanGGray_c04.indd 314ray_c 04 .indd 314 8 8/1/2011 7:53:45 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 45 AM