Beginning with a subtle and persuasive analysis of the cultural context, Farebrother examines collage in modernist and Harlem Renaissance figurative art and unearths the collage sensibility attendant in Franz Boas's anthropology. This strategy makes explicit the formal choices of Harlem Renaissance writers by examining them in light of African American vernacular culture and early twentieth-century discourses of anthropology, cultural nationalism and international modernism. At the same time, attention to the politics of form in such texts as Toomer's Cane, Locke's The New Negro and selected works by Hurston reveals that the production of analogies, juxtapositions, frictions and distinctions on the page has aesthetic, historical and political implications. Why did these African American writers adopt collage form during the Harlem Renaissance? What did it allow them to articulate? These are among the questions Farebrother poses as she strives for a middle ground between critics who view the Harlem Renaissance as a distinctive, and necessarily subversive, kind of modernism and those who foreground the cooperative nature of interracial creative work during the period. A key feature of her project is her exploration of neglected connections between Euro-American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, a journey she negotiates while never losing sight of the particularity of African American experience. Ambitious and wide-ranging, Rachel Farebrother's book offers us a fresh lens through which to view this crucial moment in American culture.

The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms - from the roman a clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations - this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.

African American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930 presents original essays that map ideological, historical, and cultural shifts in the 1920s. Complicating the familiar reading of the 1920s as a decade that began with a spectacular boom and ended with disillusionment and bust, the collection explores the range and diversity of Black cultural production. Emphasizing a generative contrast between the ephemeral qualities of periodicals, clothes, and decor and the relative fixity of canonical texts, this volume captures in its dynamics a cultural movement that was fluid and expansive. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped into four sections: 'Habitus, Sound, Fashion'; 'Spaces: Chronicles of Harlem and Beyond'; 'Uplift Renewed: Religion, Protest, and Education,' and 'Serial Reading: Magazines and Periodical Culture.'