Herlarm Renaissance

Harlem was originally an independent village of Dutch settlers, who named it for Harlem. It was founded by Peter Stuyvesant in 1658. Later it became a residential section for whites. Its population become predominently Negro C. 1914-18. Negro harlem contains slims among the worsr in the world, but also had “Sugar Hill”, there eminent and wealthy people live in fine, comfortable houses. This place proved to be a powerful stimulant for the artistic capabilities of its Negro residents as well as of some sympathetiuc whole observers, including Carl Van Vechten, who wrote Nigger Heaven (1926).

The term "Herlarm Renaissance” refers to the efflorescence of creative activity witnessed during the 1920s and inspired by the spirt of self-expression that Harlem, “the greatest negro city in the World” (Langston Hughes), represented. The upsurge extended to a variety of areas including music and poetry. The needs of this new blacj self-expression were served by several magazines and journals like The Crisis. “it is not surprising”, says Nathan Irving Huggins, “that black men’s dream would find in Harlem a capital for the race, a platform from which the new black voice would be heard around the world and an intellectual centre of the new Negro.”

Some critics have avoided the use of the rem “harlem reniassance” to designated the Phenomenon of the release of the black spirit in 1920s. Michal W. Peploo and Arthur p. David have, for example, remarked, “without wishing to deny for the importance of Harlem, we not used the term Herlam renaissance because to implies certains limitations.” They prefer to call it the new negro Renaissance.

The literature of this period showed signs of revolt against the literature of previous decaded as also of rebirth of the literary impetus discernible on the post-Reconstruction period. Harlem, in this way, signified not merelu a black resedential area, but a movement and quest for identity and self determination. It fulfilled the needs of the blacks to find, as Johnson saus in his preface to a Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), “A form that will express the recial spirit.” Dunbar, Johnson, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cullen and Claude Mckay are among the major literary figures of the renaissance.