[MUSIC] Houston A Baker, Jr. considers the Harlem Renaissance's confidence in the transforming power of art as one sign of its modernism. A too optimistic faith in the potential of art may in fact be a signal, a mark of British and American modernism's failure as that of the Harlem Renaissance. He is responding to the critical assessments of the Harlem Renaissance which was essentially a failure because it fostered a cultural rather than a political program and did not bring about significant social change. Skepticism about the value and meaning of the Harlem renaissance began in fact during the 1920s and generated an array of other designations before literary history settled for a time on the epicenter of Harlem and the optimism of a renaissance. The New Negro Renaissance, The Harlem Awakening, The Negro Renaissance, The Harlem School, and even The Episode of the 1920s variously characterized the movement by the race of its participants, their location. And what came to be most debated, whether the artistic activity constituted a birth or a rebirth, a broad literary movement or a mere school of educated elites. Wallace Thurman infamously referred to the Harlem Renaissance writers as the Niggerati in his autobiographical novel Infants of the Spring in 1932. To suggest they have more pretension that artistic accomplishment. And all of these contending terms for black artistic production of the period, reflect the movements own contradictions. It's mixture of hope and discouragement, a leadism and populism. Particularity in abstraction, tradition and revolution. The designation, the Harlem Renaissance is less a strict historical reference than a symbol of African American creative vitality and convergence in the 1920s. Though Langston Hughes himself bandied the term Niggerati and savored its ironies. His skepticism about the Harlem Renaissance can be felt in earnest in his poetry from the beginning of his career. Two poems that span the modern period, the 1926 Harlem Nightclub, and the 1951 Harlem, suggest the deepening complexity of what the Harlem Renaissance symbolized as the century war on and the promises of the 1920s for social justice, equality and the eradication of racism went unfulfilled. Harlem Night Club captures the energy and excitement of Harlem's legendary night life and it's syncopated rhythms even as it sounds in early tone of doubt and warning. [MUSIC] >> Harlem Night Club by Langston Hughes. Sleek black boys in a cabaret, jazz-band, jazz-band, play, play, play. Tomorrow Who knows? Dance today! White girls' eyes call gay black boys. Black boy's lips grin jungle joys. Dark brown girls in blond men's arms, jazz-band, jazz-band, sing Eve's charms! White ones, brown ones. What do you know about tomorrow? Where all paths go? Jazz-boys, jazz-boys, play, play, play. Tomorrow is darkness. Joy today! [MUSIC] >> The poem's uncertainty about the future, expressed in stanza one as tomorrow who knows? Turns to outright cynicism at the end, where tomorrow is darkness. And though Hughes could represent Harlem darkness, both it's night life and it's black people, as a respite from daytime servitude and racism as in his Negro servant palm where the speaker calls out, dreams, songs, saxophones at night, sweet relief from faces that are white. He more frequently registered the the double edge of darkness. Dark Harlem might provide a haven from the glare of work days and whites. But darkness also expressed his foreboding that the worst possibilities for the sleek black boys and the dark brown girls with out. There may be joy and relief, but who knows what tomorrow will bring. A quarter of a century later that cautionary note will be even stronger in one of Hughes' most famous poems, Harlem. >> What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotted meat? Or crust and sugar over like syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? >> Once again, the interrogatives convey a warning that the poem expects to go unheeded. What happens to a dream deferred, the poem famously asks. But now the vague misgivings of 1926 are specified in a series of similes for delayed dreams, in grim juxtapositions of decaying food and festering wounds maybe the poem proposes, the dream deferred just sags like a heavy load. More likely the last line warns, it will explode. Hughes pointedly retitled this poem Dream Deferred when he extracted it from Montage and included it in his 1967 volume The Panther and The Lash, Poems of Our Time. Confirming his earlier suspicion that the renaissance in Harlem would not complete the work of social justice that Johnson, Curlin, and Cullen had anticipated. Indeed the Harlem's Renaissance deferred dream of full citizenship for blacks in the United States becomes a crucial metaphor for Hughes during the 1950s and after. It generates not only the title but the very structure of the 1951 book Montage of A Dream Deferred. Perhaps best demonstrated in the poem deferred where the voices of the dispossessed displace and thus defer each other in a Montage of unfilled desires that concludes with yet one more skeptical question. Montage of a dream deferred. Buddy, have you heard? Have you heard like who knows is a rhetorical question that assumes no one is listening. Harlem follows deferred in the montage volume, tracing an inevitable sequence from unfulfilled dreams to violent unrest. The italicized or does it explode, presages a future, even now shaping itself. A future that will fulfill the Harlem dreams by force if they cannot be realized by art. In 1951, Hughes was presiant about the social turbulence that would shortly ensue from the on going denial of African American Civil Rights and the systematic destruction of black dreams. In 1971, 20 years after Hughes wrote Harlem, Nathan Huggins invokes Hughes's prediction and concurs with a judgement of many cultural critics in the years following the 1920s that the artists of the Harlem renaissance failed to explode as 1960s radical Black Arts Movement would. In 1971, 20 years after Hughes wrote Harlem, Nathan Huggins invokes Hughes prediction and concurs with the judgement of many cultural critics in the years following the 1920s that the Harlem Renaissance failed to explode as the 1960s radical black art movement would. Writers as different as Melvin Tolsen and Eldridge Cleaver have exploded in the american mind. They shape thought, image, and language. That is something that the Harlem literati could not have dared. His phrase, Harlem Literati once more demotes the Renaissance to a mere coterie of seats. And calls up Thurman's criticism of the Niggerati. The Black Arts Movement, the cultural arm of the black power movement certainly realized Jesus' warning, that the dream deferred would explode. Their revolutionary poetics remade Africa American poetry during the 1960s and 70s. But the self determination and cultural consciousness necessary for such transformation the reshaping of thought, image, language began in the 1920s. Indeed Jabulani Kamau Makalani would look back the Harlem Renaissance, from the perspective of the Black Arts Movement and maintain its symbolic importance. The Renaissance symbolized the fact that black people in America, freed from the constraints of chattel slavery, were now able to seriously grapple with the question of culture and a collective direction for themselves. Though the two artistic movements have been sharply contrasted, the Harlem Renaissance as merely aesthetic, the Black Arts movement is exceedingly political. The collective direction of the Harlem Renaissance inexorably led later African American poets to the Black Arts Movement, whose collective direction in turn led another generation to the New Black Aesthetic poetry of the late 20th and 21st centuries. By the 1980s, Black Poets were again growing interested in the wide spectrum of poetic means. The black aesthetic, jazz poetry, hip-hop, spoken word and also the conventional verse forms that had served Harlem renaissance poets so well. Today, African American poets exercise freely their rights to build a tradition as hybrid as that which the jazz masters created, as Henry. Start that over. >> Sure. >> Today, African American poets exercise freely their rights to build a tradition as hybrid as that which the jazz masters created. As Charles Henry role observes, a tradition that ignores the imposed boundaries of race, class, nation and even poetic form that do violence to human beings in the west. To win those rights, it took both a renaissance and a revolution. [MUSIC]
