The New Negro Movement, also referred to as the New Negro Renaissance or Harlem Renaissance, was a blossoming of literature, music, and visual art that took place in northern urban African American communities circa 1925 through the mid-1930s. To date, scholars examining this historical period have largely focused on the Harlem area in New York, hence the popular catchphrase used to describe the times, "the Harlem Renaissance." Certainly, Harlem artists were prolific and the work they produced was significant in the ways in which it conveyed to the public the message of racial uplift and pride in African heritage embedded within the New Negro Movement. Nevertheless, African Americans residing in other major cities, such as Chicago, also were demonstrating significant developments in all aspects of the arts. In my dissertation, "Chicago and the Visual Art of the New Negro Movement, 1920s-1940," I undertake an in-depth examination of the African American visual arts scene in Chicago during this period, and analyze the manner in which the work of Chicago artists fit into the national discourse of the New Negro Movement. The many and varied accomplishments of these artists, coupled with their roles as agents for social change, make them attractive and significant research interests, well deserving of a place in the art history canon. My dissertation will help fill an important gap in the history of American art and of the African American ‘New Negro’ period.

The New Negro Movement (often called the Harlem Renaissance) made black creative production visible to an extent unprecedented in American History. Complex representations of African Americans started to infiltrate a popular culture previously dominated by stereotypes; people from all walks of life were confronted for the first time with art made by African Americans that asked them to think in new ways about the meaning of race in America. The term Harlem Renaissance conjures up images of urban America, but the creative energies of many New Negro figures were actually focused elsewhere—on rural America. Urbanite Jean Toomer spent time teaching in an agricultural college in the rural South, and wrote award-winning poetry and prose about that experience. Langston Hughes wrote blues lyrics about the struggles of rural migrants in New York that highlighted the complex interconnections of rural and urban experience. And the pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux incorporated numerous fictionalized accounts of his own experiences as a homesteader in South Dakota into his race movies and novels. New Negro writers asserted that their art shaped how people understood themselves and were understood by others. Accordingly, this project examines both literary representations, and how literary works related to the real lives and struggles of rural African Americans. My research combines archival, literary, and biographical materials to analyze the aesthetic choices of three New Negro authors (Hughes, Micheaux, and Toomer), and explain the interrelated literary and cultural contexts that shaped their depictions of African American rural life. Houston Baker, in his influential 1987 book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, defined black modernism as an awareness of radical uncertainty in human life. My central contention is that one of the most radical uncertainties in interwar-period America was the changing rural landscape. I revisit the largely-forgotten (though large-scale) social movement to fight rural outmigration by modernizing rural life. And I argue that, rather than accepting the simple binary that took the urban to be modern and the rural backward, African Americans in the 1920s created and experienced complicated formulations of the rural and its connections to modern blackness. / text

abstract: Mapping Intersectionality in Harlem Renaissance Women's Poetry comprises the first book-length study devoted to examining the role women's poetry played in the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and sociopolitical movement that reached its zenith in the 1920s. This study is situated in a theoretical interdisciplinarity that complicates critical approaches to Black women's subjectivities with respect to resistance and representation. It combines literary, race and gender theory to perform close readings of New Negro Women's poetry. Central chapters of the text theorize the poets' overshadowed engagement with the political movement via the tropes of interiority, motherhood, and sexuality; a closing chapter puts New Negro women's poetry in conversation with the Black Arts Movement. Building on the feminist sociological framework of Intersectionality, which considers the lived experience of individuals who embody multiple layers of marginalization, this dissertation works to identify and unpack sources of racialized gendered disparity in Harlem Renaissance studies. In acknowledging that self–actualization and self–articulation are central to this identity–based movement — a presupposition that informs this study's thesis — it becomes necessary to consider the gendered aspects of the writing for a more comprehensive review of the period. The analytical framework of Intersectionality provides a means to acknowledge New Negro women poets' perspectives regarding their racialized and gendered selves. In essence, Mapping Intersectionality is a concentrated effort toward unearthing evidence of their significant push against race and gender oppression. The motivation driving this study is revision and reclamation: revisionist in its concern for redefining the parameters in which the movement is traditionally perceived; a reclamation in its objective to underscore the influential, but nearly forgotten voices of the women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2013

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