For Locke and his fellow authors, the function of a cultural renaissance was inherently political: the production of great artworks, by blacks, in sufficient numbers, would lead to the Negro’s “reevaluation by white and black alike.” And this reevaluation would facilitate the Negro’s demand for civil rights and for social and economic equality. Stopped short by the 1929 stock market crash, which hurt the white patrons upon whom the Renaissance was so dependent, the Renaissance writers (a tiny group, numbering perhaps fifty), whom Locke thought of as “the Negro’s cultural adolescence,” were never able to nurture black art to its formal adulthood, nor were they able to usher in the new world of civil rights through art.
The third renaissance was the Black Arts movement, which lasted from 1965 to the early seventies. Defining themselves against the Harlem Renaissance and deeply rooted in black cultural nationalism, the Black Arts writers saw themselves as the artistic wing of the Black Power movement. Writers such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Sonia Sanchez saw black art as fulfilling a function, primarily the political liberation of black people from white racism. Constructed on a fragile foundation of the overtly political, this renaissance was the most short-lived of all. Yet many of the artists who have come of age in the decades since were shaped or deeply influenced by this period. By 1975, with the Black Arts movement dead (Baraka had become a Marxist in 1973), Black Studies departments in peril, and a homogenized disco music on the rise, many of us wondered if black culture were not undergoing some sort of profound identity crisis. A decade later, however, black writers, visual artists, musicians, dancers, and actors would enter a period of creativity unrivaled in American history.
Critics date the current renaissance variously, some tracing its origins to the resurgence of black women’s literature and criticism in the early eighties, especially in the works of Ntozake Shange, Michele Wallace, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. These women and their successors were able, simultaneously, to reach a large, traditionally middle-class, white female readership plus a new black female audience that had been largely untapped. The growth of this community of readers has resulted in an unrivalled number of novels by and about black women since 1980, as well as an unprecedentedly large African American market for books about every aspect of the black experience. While it is always arbitrary to try to date a cultural movement, it seems reasonable to note an upsurge in black creativity in 1987, the year in which August Wilson’s Fences premiered on Broadway and Toni Morrison published her masterpiece, Beloved. Both would receive Pulitzer Prizes. In that same year, PBS aired Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize, the six-part documentary of the civil rights era; Cornell scholar Martin Bernal published Black Athena, a bold revisionist history that locates the origins of classical Greek civilization in Africa. As Nelson George says in his Buppies, B-boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture, T-shirts with slogans such as “Black By Popular Demand” and “It’s A Black Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand” spread across the nation from predominately black colleges. Moreover, the rap revolution was well under way at about this time. Meanwhile, Spike Lee and Wynton Marsalis were establishing themselves as masters of film and jazz. Since that year, the production of cultural artifacts in virtually every field and genre has been astonishing.
The grandchildren of Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth,” those who were able to profit from the affirmative action programs implemented in the late sixties that are facing such a harsh onslaught today, have thus for the past decade been in the midst of a great period of artistic productivity, much of it centered in New York. The signs of cultural vibrancy are unmistakable: in dance, Bill T. Jones and Judith Jamison; in literature, Toni Morrison and Terry McMillan, Walter Mosley and John Edgar Wideman; in drama, August Wilson; in poetry, Rita Dove; in opera, Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis; in jazz, Wynton Marsalis and Cassandra Wilson; public intellectuals such as Cornel West and bell hooks, Greg Tate and Lisa Jones; the visual artists Martin Puryear and Lorna Simpson; the rap musicians Public Enemy and Queen Latifah; the filmmakers Spike Lee, Julie Dash, and John Singleton—the list is stunningly long. From television to op-ed pages, from the academy to hip-hop, never before have so many black artists and intellectuals achieved so much success in so very many fields. Do their efforts amount to a renaissance?
“It depends on how you define ‘renaissance,’” Cornel West has argued. “The rebirth by means of a recovery of classical heritage, I wouldn’t call it that. What we do have, however, is a high-quality ferment, a proliferation of a variety of new voices that are transgressing the boundaries in place. These artists exhibit a certain kind of self-confidence, a refusal to accept the belief that they have to prove themselves. Artists such as Wright and Baldwin clearly wrestled on a different terrain.”
A different terrain, indeed. Since 1968, when the civil rights movement, a century old, ended so abruptly with the murder of Dr. King, affirmative action and entitlement programs have dramatically affected the black community’s collective economic health. Not only has the size of its middle class quadrupled since 1968 but, according to the 1990 census, almost as many blacks between the ages of 25 and 44 are college graduates as are high school dropouts, whereas “just twenty years ago, there were five times as many black high school dropouts as college graduates in the workforce,” as Sam Roberts reported in the New York Times on 18 June 1995. Between 1970 and 1990, moreover, the percentage of blacks who had attended some college increased from 9.1 percent to 33.2 percent, of those graduating from college from 5.1 percent to 11 percent, the highest in history, and of those with some postgraduate work from 1.2 percent to 4.1 percent. By 1989, 1 in 7 black families were middle class (earning $50,000 or more), compared to 1 in 3 white families. “Just a generation ago,” Roberts writes, “only 1 in 17 black families” could claim middle-class status; the increase is clearly the result of governmental “prodding.” For African Americans, however, it is the best of times and the worst of times. While part of the black community has experienced two decades of unprecedented growth, another part lags dramatically behind. Black America has simultaneously the largest middle class and the largest underclass in its history. And the current renaissance of black art and culture—with its inherent schisms and tensions—is unfolding against this conflicted socioeconomic backdrop. Let us pursue this paradox.
Despite their remarkable gains, a certain sense of precariousness haunts the new black middle class and the art that it consumes. Its own economic uplift remains perilously novel. An ambivalent romance with the street and b-boy culture—an intimacy, a freshness, but also a sense that one could go back “there” at any time—haunts much contemporary black literature, film, and hip-hop. The partition between the classes, in the minds of many blacks, is as thin as rice paper.
But because the shtetl memory, as it were, is still so very recent, the romanticization of the ghetto is accompanied by its demonization. The movement to censor gangsta rap, for instance, can be seen as part of the black bourgeoisie’s anxiety, its deep-seated fear that it, too, is just one or two paychecks away from the fate of the underclass. The black middle class defines itself by consumption, but it is never free from the past and presence of racism. In fact, it often defines itself against this very history.
The nature and size of the new black middle class is significant here because of what it implies about patronage and the economics of black art: whereas the Harlem Renaissance writers were almost totally dependent upon the whims of white patrons who marketed their works to a predominately white readership, the sales of some of the most phenomenally successful black authors, such as Terry McMillan, the Delaney sisters, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, are being sustained to an unprecedented degree by black consumers. The same is true, if to a lesser extent, in the other arts. Thelma Golden’s “Black Male” exhibit, for instance, dramatically lifted annual attendance figures at the Whitney Museum by attracting a large number of new black patrons. The rise of the black middle class is, thus, simultaneous with the ri
se of black art, especially the black novel. And black novelists—black women novelists in particular—seem to owe a large part of their appeal to their capacity to express the desires and anxieties of this new middle class more freely from the inside than any previous generation could possibly have done. (In this way, McMillan’s role within black culture is similar to that of Defoe and Richardson in the eighteenth century.) Quite often, too, these black writers have black editors and black agents, and their books are reviewed by other black authors, assigned by black teachers, and sold in black bookstores.
This new presence and authority of blacks in cultural institutions, largely a result of affirmative action programs and the active recruitment of minorities, is unprecedented in American history. And signs of the cultural flowering that define a renaissance are everywhere. On two occasions in the past two years, no less than three black authors appeared simultaneously on the New York Times best seller list (one author, Toni Morrison, appeared in both the fiction and nonfiction categories). “All black books these days are trade books,” commented Erroll McDonald, a Yale graduate and vice president at Pantheon Books. “The ‘one-nigger syndrome’ is dead.” Black authors have won an unprecedented number of prizes in the last decade, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Critics’ Circle Awards, National Book Awards, and PEN/Faulkner Awards. The culmination of these achievements, of course, was Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize.
In addition, traditionally white cultural institutions such as the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Lincoln Center Theater have integrated their boards of directors, and jazz has become a part of the canon of American music as defined by both the Lincoln Center and the Smithsonian Institution. Black Studies departments have never had larger enrollments or a stronger, more solid presence at America’s premier research institutions. Public intellectuals representing a wide array of ideologies, such as Gerald Early, Cornel West, Stephen Carter, Derrick Bell, Lani Guinier, Stanley Crouch, Michele Wallace, bell hooks, Trey Ellis, Shelby Steele, Randall Kennedy, and Patricia Williams, publish their opinions regularly in a variety of national journals. George Wolfe’s appointment as the director of the New York Public Theater is symptomatic of the growing “crossover” authority that blacks increasingly have come to possess within broader American cultural organizations. And, perhaps most dramatically of all, black filmmakers, following the lead of Spike Lee, have never been more numerous or better funded than they are today. If we add television shows such as The Cosby Show, A Different World, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and The Oprah Winfrey Show to the mix, it is clear that the black presence in American society has never been more prevalent and more widely consumed.
One reason for the newest renaissance is that the generation that integrated historically white institutions in the late sixties and early seventies has now, two decades later, returned to those very institutions to occupy positions of power and authority. Never before have so many black creative artists produced so much art, in so many genres, for such a diversified, integrated audience. Case in point: hip-hop, once the marching music of a defiant oppositional culture, is now the music of the white suburbs, the American Bandstand of the 1990s, the premier American music.
The current renaissance is characterized by a specific awareness of previous black traditions, which these artists echo, imitate, parody, and revise, self-consciously, in acts of riffing or signifying or sampling. As the jazz and opera composer Anthony Davis puts it, “There are three different strains in the black music revolution today—classical jazz (such as Wynton Marsalis), avant jazz (such as Anthony Braxton), and the fusion of hip-hop and jazz (such as the compositions of Steve Coleman). What each shares, however,” he continues, “is a common attempt to rediscover the past.” Davis’s opera X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986) is a prime example. “What this is, is a renaissance of postmodernism, and postmodernism, in America, is quintessentially black,” he concludes.
This concern with the black cultural past and the self-conscious grounding of a black postmodernism in a black nationalist tradition are accompanied by a kind of nostalgia for the Black Power cultural politics of the sixties and the blaxploitation films of the early seventies. Unlike the earlier periods, however, the current movement defines itself by a certain openness, a belated glasnost that allows for parodies such as George Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum (1986); Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987); Keenen Ivory Wayans’s blaxploitation parody, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988); and, more recently, Rusty Cundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat (1994), a satire about the hip-hop generation.
The art of this period is also characterized by its deep self-confidence in the range and depth of the black experience as a source for art. Richard Wright once predicted that if “the Negro merges into the mainstream of American life, there might result actually a disappearance of Negro literature—as such.” As a Negro, he continued, he was “a rootless man.” Few black writers today would agree with Wright on either point. In fact, the opposite seems to have occurred: black writers and artists seem to have become more conscious of the specificities of their cultural traditions rather than less conscious. Toni Morrison has frequently stated that she is a black writer first, a writer second, effectively reversing decades of attempts by black writers to make their work “universal” by writing about whites. These artists presume that black experiences are universal experiences. If, as Wright once put it, “the Negro is America’s metaphor,” this generation seems to maintain that the experiences of African Americans are metaphors for the entire human condition, with America itself standing as a metaphor for much that has been liberating as well as horrendous in black and human history.
“What defines this renaissance, unlike the others,” says the novelist Jamaica Kincaid, “is that people like us are just getting started. Somebody told me recently that literature is dead. But it’s not that literature is dead; it is that English literature is dead. It is as if someone has removed the hands from over our mouths, and you hear this long, piercing scream. There really isn’t much that is new to say about being a white person.” This art, she continues, is appealing not just because of its content but because of its forms, “its ways of looking at the world, the way the world has forced us to look at it. And what we, as artists, are saying is: ‘this is what it looks like.’”
Traditionally, black art has fallen into two large schools of representation. One we might think of as a lyrical, quasi-autobiographical modernism (as found, say, in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man), in which a questing protagonist succeeds against oppressive racist odds. The other we can call realism or naturalism (as found, for instance, in Richard Wright’s Native Son or Ann Petry’s The Street), in which a protagonist’s life choices, and hence fate, are determined by forces, such as racism or capitalism, which are insurmountable—that is, unless the entire system is transformed by violent and dramatic revolution.
In black postmodernist writing, much of the fiction being created by black women in particular consists of coming-of-age tales in which racial politics takes a secondary role to the unfolding of a sensitive, gendered consciousness. Today, a politicized naturalism is more likely to be found in black film, such as John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood, and, of course, in gangsta rap, such as the dada vorticism of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, or in the rap-meets-poetry movement. The most subtle and sophisticated of this art, however, such as Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Beloved, or Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, brings both tendencies together, creating a new form, which we might think of as a lyrical super-naturalism.
All renaissances are acts of cultural construction, attempting to satisfy larger social and political needs. And the African American postmodern renaissance is no exception. In their openness, their variety, their playfulness with forms, their refusal to follow preordained ideological lines, their sustained engagements with the black artistic past,
the artists of this renaissance seem as determined to define their work freely within a black tradition as they are to consolidate a black presence within America’s corporate cultural institutions. “There are many neighborhoods in what we might think of as a larger cultural community,” Anthony Davis muses. Given the sophistication of so much of this art, and given its demonstrated power to turn a profit, it is highly likely that the achievements of this renaissance will be the deepest, the longest-lasting, and the most appreciated by the larger American society. “Today the white people want to be colored,” Jamaica Kincaid asserts. “There is no longer such a thing as an ‘American’ culture. It’s all black culture.”
What lessons from the Harlem Renaissance can we draw upon to critique our own?
Many critiques have been made of the Harlem Renaissance’s putative faults and purported limitations, which range from overdependence on white patronage to pandering to debased white taste in the form of primitivistic depictions of black sensuality and hedonism in the literature, art, music, and dance of the period. We can debate these claims and even accept some, with enormous qualifications, as true, despite the fact that all artists are dependent upon patronage (and all renaissances especially so) and despite the fact that the literature created during the Harlem Renaissance—especially the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown, and the fictions of Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston—drew upon African American vernacular musical and oral traditions to create sui generis African American modernist forms that today, three-quarters of a century later, are judged to be canonical even by the most conservative keepers of the American canon. What’s more, the literature created by these fifty-odd brave souls, black inscriptions on a near tabula rasa, proved to be the fertile ground out of which emerged writers such as Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, to list just a few artists who use the Renaissance writers as their silent second texts.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 62