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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

Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013 sheds new light on the hitherto neglected engagements of African American writers and thinkers with various literary, cultural, and artistic traditions of Asia. Starting with a reevaluation of Lewis G. Alexander's transcultural remaking of haiku in 1923, this dissertation interrogates and revises the familiar interracial (read as "black-white") terms of the African American struggle for freedom and equality. While critics have long taken for granted these terms as the sine qua non of the African American literary imagination and practice, this dissertation demonstrates how authors like Alexander defied not only the implicit dichotomy of black-and-white but also the critical bias that represents African American literature as a nationally segregated tradition distinctly cut off from cultural sources beyond the border of the United States and made legible only within its narrowly racialized and racializing contexts. / African and African American Studies

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-195).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [225]-235).

abstract: As an organist, church musician, and educator, Clifford Demarest (1874-1946) was a prominent figure in New York during the first half of the twentieth century. However, prior to this thesis, Demarest's place within the history of American music, like that of many of his contemporaries, was all but neglected. This research reveals Clifford Demarest as an influential figure in American musical history from around 1900 to his retirement in 1937. Led by contemporary accounts, I trace Demarest's musical influence through his three musical careers: professional organist, church musician, and educator. As a prominent figure in the fledgling American Guild of Organists, Demarest was dedicated to the unification of its members and the artistic legitimacy of the organist profession. As the organist and choir director of the Church of the Messiah, later the Community Church of New York (1911-1946, inclusive), Demarest played an integral part in the liberal atmosphere fostered by the congregation's minister, John Haynes Holmes (1879-1964). Together Holmes and Demarest directly influenced the nascent National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and supported luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. Influential figures such as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Augustus Granville Dill (1881-1956), Egbert Ethelred Brown (1875-1956), and Countee Cullen (1903-1946) were inspired by the liberal environment in the Church of the Messiah; however, prior to this research, their connections to the church were unexplored. As the music supervisor of Tenafly High School and later, for the state of New Jersey, Demarest influenced countless students through his passion for music. His compositions for student orchestras are among the earliest to elevate the artistic standards of school music ensembles during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Archival sources such as church records, letters, and newspaper editorials, are synthesized with current research to characterize Demarest's place in these three professional orbits of the early twentieth century. His story also represents those of countless other working musicians from his era that have been forgotten. Therefore, this research opens an important new research field – a window into the dynamic world of the American organist. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Music 2014

This written portion of my thesis will document and codify how I as dramaturg, writer and director adapted and staged the classic Harlem Renaissance novel Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman. I walk the reader through how seeing as a director influenced my creative choices through key aspects of production: script development, design, and building the ensemble. The thesis will conclude with a post-production reflection and summary.

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