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This article examines five poems of different African American poets from 1900 to 1999. Its main objective is to explore how each poet tackles African Americans' – and sometimes other minorities'- marginalization and persecution in the US, highlighting the eco-injustice practices conducted by the white authority. It also traces the established bond between African Americans and nature in the twentieth century through an ecocritical analysis of the selected poems. The article includes an examination of the reaction of African American schools developing from racial romanticism to resistance. To achieve this, the article identifies the differences between two basic terms that are usually used interchangeably: ecojustice and environmental justice. Then it identifies and illustrates four types of ecopoetry: nature poetry, environmental poetry, ecological poetry, reclamation ecopoetics/ecojustice poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article witnesses a performance that only happened within the archive: a partial translation of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna created by African American writer Dorothy Peterson during the Harlem Renaissance. She intended for Langston Hughes to take her literal translation and rework it poetically for Harlem Suitcase Theater. The project did not come to fruition because the theater folded in 1926. This performance that never happened lives within Hughes's collected papers, chronicled in the letters Peterson and Hughes exchanged about the project, as well as in Peterson's hand-notated blueprint for Hughes's never-completed adaptation. It crackles with archival potential energy, ready to resituate Lope's play within the context of the Harlem Renaissance. This article examines these archival traces, mining Peterson's nuanced interventions into Lope's text to innervate both the state of suspended animation of Peterson and Hughes's vision and the resonance this potential performative energy carries today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the use of foregrounding that involves deviation and parallelism as a strategy to maintain the identity and disclose racial discrimination in poetry of Langston Hughes, a famous twentieth-century Afro-American poet during Harlem Renaissance. By adopting qualitative approach, researchers selected three different poems from three different volumes of Hughes's poetry by adopting random sampling technique and analyzed them by applying theory of foregrounding presented by Leech (1969). The foregrounding, a stylistic device emphasizing certain linguistic features to create emphasis or deviation from normative language patterns, serves as means for the poets to reclaim agency and articulate their unique experiences, histories, and perspectives. Researchers found that Hughes's poetry presents many foregrounded features upon the different levels, i.e., phonological, graphological, grammatical and semantic. The findings show that these foregrounded features upon different linguistic levels help the poet to maintain his identity and disclose racial discrimination. Therefore, these foregrounding features also help the poet revolt against the racial discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flashes from the Dark was the 1941 debut by Jamaican poet Ferdinand Levy, published in Dublin while he was a medical student. It brought something of the Harlem Renaissance to Lower Baggot Street. Despite favorable reviews by Irish poets such as Austin Clarke and others, Levy has vanished from literary posterity. His many passions—literary, political, musical—situate him at a properly intersectional literary history of mid-century Dublin, and he critiques the particular structure of systemic racism in 1930s and '40s Ireland. Levy's "decolonial cosmopolitanism" mounts a challenge to nationalist tendencies within the mainstay of Irish postcolonial thinking, a factor in his occlusion. His awkward poetics—wavering between a belated signature of the Harlem Renaissance and parodies of English sonnets and ballads—constitutes "mimicry" in Homi Bhabha's sense—destabilizing white discourse with "flashes from the dark." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an interview with Luvada A. Harrison, the granddaughter of Dotts Johnson (1913–86), who was the African American actor and jazz singer cast to portray one of the lead roles in Roberto Rossellini's Paisà(Paisan) (1946), one of the most influential films in the history of cinema. Although Rossellini's film has been thoroughly studied, very little is known about Dotts, not only in Italy but also in the United States. This interview seeks to shed more light on the life and career of Hylan Dotts Johnson, an under-recognized African American actor who was also an accomplished singer and composer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay interprets the poem “Poem” by Langston Hughes drawing both from biographical material about the author (e.g., the biopic Looking for Langston) and from political writing about queer friendship and solidarity, notably Sara Ahmed, José Esteban Muñoz, and Judith Butler. Instead of engaging in a close reading that tries to do justice to the queerness of the “historical” Langston Hughes, the text tries to identify the power of the poem in providing suggestions of how marginalized individuals can challenge societal norms and open spaces for alternative modes of being. Referring to Michel Foucault’s ideas of gay friendship as a disruptive mode of resistance to existing structures of power, the essay develops a more nuanced idea of how Hughes’s poetry subscribes to a poiesis of susceptibility. In other words, the article argues that the poem allows for a shift away from the dominant mode of subject-formation within oppressive norms by presenting utopian speech and new modes of interrelation, namely Black, male, and queer friendship. Hence, it rethinks how those to whom the future does not belong can try to reclaim it by creating spheres where potentiality, difference, and otherness can exist and individuals can make themselves intelligible who were previously unrecognizable. Poetry functions in this process as tool that builds and reconfigures the frames of susceptibility allowing for friendships and softness that found no place before or outside of those.

This article argues that women poets writing in the Harlem Renaissance marshaled the communal connotations of ballad form and genre to enter covertly into and influence the masculine domain of Black cultural nationalism. The elasticity of the ballad enabled Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, and Gwendolyn Bennett to articulate a subject position wherein Black women could contribute to the effort to cultivate a New Negro consciousness as Black women poets. This reading shows that the respectability politics of their conventional poems overlay demands for racial and gender justice and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that racial fetishism played an important but undertheorized role in much Black modernist literature, especially literature critical of the early twentieth-century politics of racial uplift. It reads two Harlem Renaissance texts, Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), alongside Carl Van Vechten's controversially fetishistic novel Nigger Heaven (1926) in order to complicate received understandings of both Black agency and racial fetishism. More concretely, it suggests that Black modernist authors used the figure of the racial fetish to rethink Black agency not as an all-or-nothing phenomenon but as something more partial, compromised, and graduated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as China emerged as a revolutionary trope in interwar Black internationalist imaginaries, Shanghai- based journals started to introduce African American writing to Chinese readers. This essay traces early translations of Black literature in Republican- era China and unpacks the parallactic visions as the Harlem Renaissance travelled across the Pacific. Literary Blackness built on and expanded the discourse of 'minor nations' and mediated the convergence of transnational left-wing cultures. Chinese translators and critics also reshaped Black literature's political valency through textual practices, revealing situated differences that conditioned early encounters of Black internationalism and the Chinese left wing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to elucidate Langston Hughes’s political concerns as reflected in his most important political play, Scottsboro Limited (1931). Langston Hughes is a distinguished African American writer who tried his hand in almost all literary genres. He epitomized the views and ideals of the African American literary movement known as ‘The Harlem Renaissance’. In this play, he attempts to justify his race’s need to pursue their political rights and fight for the achievement of equality and liberty. This is achieved by illustrating the contaminated political atmosphere and circumstances under which African Americans were leading their life. Furthermore, the reasons that led to Hughes’s political resentment and indignation are all brought to light. In this play, he presents an outrageous example that shows the prevalence of political corruption inside the law system itself. What is noticeable about Langston Hughes is that he does not confine himself to discussing the conditions of African Americans, but he attempts to deal with the absorbed rights of other groups of people worldwide. Consequently, he saw that there was a need for an international revolution against whites’ oppression. These harsh forces were represented by the white imperialists and wealthy persons both in Europe and the USA. In Scottsboro Limited, he encourages these helpless people to get united to be able to strive against their oppressors and attain their full rights. The last point that this article handles is Hughes’s relationship with the communist part. His illustration of how the political rights of poor people internationally are down-trodden was the reason which lurked behind the racially-prejudiced attempts to relate him to the activities of Communism in American society. They accused him of being a communist, though he never was. All these aspects are crystalized in the analysis of the play [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical framework presented in this article makes it possible to understand religions as constantly changing networks of actors and infrastructures that incorporate, modify, discard, and reformulate numerous "elements" in terms of specific conceptualizations often rooted in concrete contexts of application, and "structures," i.e., larger conceptual contexts such as evolution, cosmogonies, or anthropological views of humanity, in a necessary ongoing creative process. Such a process, and the usefulness of the tool, will be illustrated in this article through discussion of the work of Robert T. Browne, particularly his book The Mystery of Space. To date, research has assumed that Browne derives all of his theory from Theosophy. By applying the above theoretical framework and situating Browne's work within a broader network of discourses, the article challenges this conclusion and is able to paint a more complete picture. This illustrates the usefulness of the analytical tool presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Black art" is often understood as being inherently political. In examining two major Black arts movements, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement, many of the works attributed to those periods fit the description of "political art" but not all of them. Black art movements are not defined exclusively by similar styles or methodologies, like Expressionism or Surrealism, either. Instead, Black art movements are complex movements that blend social, political, and aesthetic criteria. In this article, I list seven conditions that I take to be jointly sufficient for a Black art movement to be signified as such. In this assertion, I also argue that this current era, paralleling the Black Lives Matter movement, is worthy of Black art movement signification, if we update the mediums by which the conditions are met in the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ISLE 30.4 is a collection of essays and articles that cover a wide range of topics related to literature and the environment. The articles explore themes such as the material culture of cardboard boxes, the role of gardens in the Harlem Renaissance, the representation of ordinary food in apocalyptic fiction, the impact of extinction stories on attitudes towards endangered species, the connection between feral hog hunting and immigration anxieties, the exploitation of elephants in postcolonial India, the emergence of the environmental grotesque in contemporary literature, the decolonization of Alaskan literature, settler colonial tropes in Australian climate fiction, waste and communal purpose in Thomas Hardy's novel, and the posthumanist poetics of J.H. Prynne. The issue also includes a section of poems and book reviews. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the connection between health and aesthetics during the Harlem Renaissance, with a focus on the film "Looking for Langston" and Anne Spencer's garden. The film uses floral imagery to portray Black queer desire, while Spencer's garden provided a sanctuary from discrimination and racial violence. The article argues that Spencer's garden challenges traditional ideas of home and beauty, and redefines the aestheticization of Black health. It also discusses the National Negro Health Week, which promoted beautification as a means to improve Black health, and highlights the contributions of artists and Black gardeners to the New Negro movement's concept of health and beauty. Anne Spencer's garden was a place of solace and healing for the Black community in Lynchburg during the Harlem Renaissance. Through her poetry, Spencer explored the relationship between aesthetics, the body, and the environment. She used botanical imagery to depict the harm caused by racism to both the Black body and the landscape, while also emphasizing the potential of beauty and aesthetics to restore balance and promote healing. Spencer's poems suggest that the restoration of aesthetic pleasure can have a healing effect and counteract the negative impact of racism and mental distress. This article delves into the connection between beauty, health, and belonging in the work of poet and gardener Anne Spencer during the Harlem Renaissance. Spencer's garden provided a refuge for Black individuals in a hostile Southern environment, and her cultivation of diverse and vibrant plant life reflected her rejection of prescribed notions of beautification. The garden also embodied a balance between openness [Extracted from the article]

This essay reads the work of two major Harlem Renaissance authors as underacknowledged sites of disability politics and aesthetics, situating this moment in African-American artistic innovation as integral to the literary history of disability and illuminating the theories of disability that shaped these authors' experiments in literary form. Specifically, it argues that texts by Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston were attuned to the intertwined vulnerabilities of Black people disabled by early-20th-century labor exploitation and more-than-human ecologies debilitated by the same industries. These works represent a serious challenge to the long-running myth in white disability studies that claims nonwhite authors have historically distanced themselves from disability for fear of racist pathologization. Toomer’s story “Box Seat,” for instance, positions its protagonist's atypical mental state—represented by voiceover-like internal monologues—as both aesthetically generative and materially responsive to the commercialization of racialized, disabled, and nonhuman spectacle. Meanwhile, Their Eyes Were Watching God’s oft-cited “mule of the world” metaphor finds literal representation in the form of a work-disabled mule, whose appearance in the narrative occasions one of Hurston’s most memorable aesthetic innovations: the incorporation of folklore into the realist novel. For both of these authors, disability represents not only vulnerability to the machinations of racial capitalism, but also creative invention and formal resistance to white-dominated narrative norms. They show that a capacious, ecologically oriented disability politics is central to the history of Black cultural production.

The assignment awarded to pioneering Black sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller—to envision an inherited past and future offerings for "Americans of Negro lineage" at the 1921 America's Making Exposition—was daunting. The result, Ethiopia, takes this charge as an opportunity to reclaim an African birthright rooted in a decolonial counter-history of Ethiopia and Egypt. Transported in Fuller's work beyond present conditions of archaeological dispossession and eugenicist anti-Blackness, these territories become the grounds for reestablishing kinship across the Black Atlantic in a symbolic act of repair toward the development of an African American selfhood uniquely capable of imagining a future beyond longstanding regimes of systemic racism. Foreshadowing by several decades the full flourishing of pan-Africanism, Ethiopia takes up the nascent Harlem Renaissance quest for a "New Negro" identity and singles out for particular concern the construction of Black womanhood circa 1921 atop a racialized and gendered foundation of "Egyptian" and "Ethiopian/Nubian" as contested discursive formations. Considering the manifold genealogies of Fuller's sculpture and its politics of diasporic relation, I aim to contextualize this polysemous signifier within the immediate legacy of a tumultuous, preceding half century. These decades saw the rise of a particular fascination with ancient Egyptian "heritage" alongside and as part of the development of racial pseudoscience in the United States, the decisive anticolonial Battle of Adwa in Ethiopia, and the momentary promise of decolonization at the end of World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Memories of Africa: Home and Abroad in the United States" is a book written by Toyin Falola, a distinguished historian and professor of history at the University of Texas-Austin. The book explores African migrant memoirs and memoirists as important contributors to the African Diaspora. Falola analyzes seven memoirs from English-speaking West Africa, discussing themes such as culture, tradition, modernity, and the politics of language. The book also examines the contributions of Black movements in the United States, the Harlem Renaissance, and the ideologies of "double consciousness" and "Negritude." Overall, "Memories of Africa" provides a comprehensive exploration of African migrant experiences and their impact on the African Diaspora. [Extracted from the article]

This essay responds to Countee Cullen’s reputation within Harlem Renaissance studies as an out-of-date poet who had little concern for the “new” by reassessing his career under the sign of an older, nineteenth-century decadence. In so doing, it stages a larger exploration of the intersection between decadence and the Harlem Renaissance. I begin by sketching a genealogy of African American decadence that extends from W. E. B. Du Bois to second-generation Harlem writers like Richard Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman. I highlight Cullen’s place within this lineage by examining the poetry from his 1927 Copper Sun in relationship to Charles Cullen’s decadent illustrations for that volume. I conclude by showing how Cullen distinguishes himself among other Harlem writers in the way he uses decadence’s investments in decay and afterlife to complicate the progressive views of history inherent to both the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the idea that Beethoven had African ancestry became popular in the 1960s during the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, its conception arose during an earlier moment: the global New Negro movement of the 1920s. Appearing in newspaper columns, music journals, and essays, Black American writings on Beethoven challenged white musicians' claims to the canon of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. This article argues that the project of making Beethoven Black belonged to a greater and more ambitious endeavour to rewrite Western music history. Black musicologists sought to globalize the Western canon, and in so doing, critique its grand narratives. Locating Black musical idioms in eighteenth-century piano sonatas or conducting archival research on Black European figures such as George Bridgetower, their music histories challenged readers to re-examine just who, exactly, had contributed to the project of cultural modernity and on what grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is very fascinating that the young Langston Hughes (Poet Laureate of African-Americans and a veritable leader of the Harlem Renaissance Movement) was taught and mentored by a Nigerian, Miss Dieke, in his High School days In Cleveland, Ohio. Tellingly, it is Langston Hughes who would later proceed to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, USA, where he would meet with, impact and rub minds with Nnamdi Azikiwe (the first President of Nigeria), Kwame Nkrumah (the first President of Ghana) and Thurgood Marshall (the first African-American Justice of the United States Supreme Court) who also attended the Lincoln University. Poignantly, Langston Hughes also authored the famous manifesto for African Writing, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." This essay essentially explores the rich influence on Langston Hughes of the teachings and mentorship of Miss Dieke and other teachers who lay the foundation of the education that propelled Hughes to become the veritable scholar and intellectual that he became. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Romance in Marseille marks a significant shift in Claude McKay's approach to primitivism, one that necessitates a reconsideration of his reputation--based on his two novels of the late 1920s--as perhaps the HarlemRenaissance's foremost proponent of "strategic primitivism." Tracing the development ofMcKay's primitivismfrom Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) to his most recently published novel, this essay suggests an evolution along philosophical, political, and stylistic lines. Romance in Marseille deconstructs the primitive/civilized binary, forgoing the antiracist potentialities of primitivism for the utopian possibilities of international Marxism, interracial collaboration and queer love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the queer romances at the margins of Claude McKay's Romance inMarseille operate as sites of possibility for a happy, egalitarian social relation that is longed for but not otherwise accessible in the novel. The essay contends that this novel, read against Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), offers one of the most sustained, nuanced representations of queer life in McKay's archive and in early twentieth-century LGBT literature more generally, one in which same-sex-oriented characters are rendered as normal, integral figures in urban life rather than as outré characters whose primary function is to add spice to the narrative. As the novel demonstrates the continuing appeal of queerness as a site for imagining a more liberated, loving form of social organization--one that relishes the pleasure-in-difference that is a hallmark of McKay's writing--it also anticipates formations within the queer liberationist politics of the decades that followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille through two emerging fields of study: "Afropessimism" and anthropological theories of the "liminal hotspot." It suggests that McKay's novel functions as a critique of positive Harlem Renaissance images of diasporic movement by highlighting how racial "Blackness" functionsasa system for rejecting people of color from the benefits of modernity and sovereign rights-bearing status in an expanded temporal and spatial frame. To explore this hypothesis, the article turns to new anthropological work on the liminal hotspot as a site of sustained, unresolved transition, reading the affectivity of diaspora as a negative one in McKay's work that places an unsustainable pressure on ritual and performative stylizations and renders them untenable as forms for cultivating a sovereign condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Claude McKay's 1928 journey to Africa under colonial occupation and uncovers how these true events partly inspired his late work of expatriate fiction, Romance inMarseille. By bringing togethermigration studies with literary history, the article challenges and expands existing research that suggests thatMcKay'swritings register the impulse for a nomadic wandering away from oppressive forms of identity control set up in the wake of World War I. The article contends that Claude McKay's renegade cast of "bad nationalist" characters registers a generative tension between the imperial national forms the author encountered in North Africa and the Black nationalist vision of Marcus Garvey's Back-to-Africa campaign. Reading the dialectics of bad nationalisms and Black internationalisms, the article explores how the utopian promise for Black liberation by returning back to Africa, central to the New Negro project of Black advancement, frequently becomes entangled in McKay's transnational stowaway fiction with conflicting calls for reparations, liabilities, and shipping damages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an analysis of the novel Infants of the Spring (1932), this article explores the circulation and metamorphoses of Black and queer cultural identities in the urban space of Harlem (New York) during the 1920s. In this roman à clef, Black American writer and editor Wallace Thurman revisited the experience of the Black bohemia. He did so focusing on the so-called “Niggeratti Manor,” a residence where some of the young Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance lived. At the time, New York was still organized along racially segregated lines and various factors were shaping the uptown neighborhood: the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North of the United States; the urban reforms that aimed to organize this migration; and the political, intellectual, and artistic production that accompanied the Black emancipation struggles. In addition, during this period, which was also that of Prohibition, white queer men and women patronized the neighborhood. On the one hand, Harlem was a fairly welcoming area for gay and lesbian people. On the other hand, it provided access to an entertainment world in which performance and camp were central. This article discusses how, using the metaphor of theater, and specifically the highly racially codified genre of the minstrel show, Infants of the Spring depicts male, Black, and queer identities in the modern urban landscape. Thurman’s novel interrogates the formation and circulation of these identities through the lens of the multiple relationships that Black artists had with white men, artists, and lovers, as well as with Black artists, intellectuals, and reformers.

Several contemporary scholars have embraced the aesthetic resources in the Black Radical Tradition for the purpose of revitalizing the democratic project. Ironically, however, many drawn to the radical potential of fugitive escape are concerned about flight or exodus from the democratic project itself resulting in a defense of politics that constricts the possible benefits of fugitive aesthetics for democratic life. This article draws on the work of Alain Locke, a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, to suggest another way in which we might follow Black fugitive aesthetics. Through an engagement with Locke, I theorize the notion of a fugitive bearing associated with a set of sensibilities that we might cultivate in order to approach the task of democratic transformation as a "reverent vandalism." This article also challenges dismissive readings of Locke's aestheticism by closely reexamining his commitment to expressive autonomy in connection with his theory of democracy. His "New Negro" avant-garde, like the fugitive, remains tethered to political life even while seeking a freedom that is unavailable within the strictures of the standing normative order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mexican composers Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez each wrote one song that execrates the lynching-murder of Black persons in the United States. In them, the composers pit a Mexican aesthetics of death against violent spectacle and social inequities to assert a universal dignity of life and to situate an antiracist position within the context of a broader international class struggle. In the process of airing fresh interpretations of the songs, I imply that the composers' divergent experiences in the United States--Chávez's relative proximity to establishment structures of power and Revueltas's intimacy with working-class struggle and race-based discrimination--informed their translation of Black suffering into the (differently historically colonized) context of Mexico. Both composers effected an artful indirection: a displaced deictic center from which to mediate their social thought concerning Mexico's own problems of penal excess and extrajudicial lynching. Bracha Ettinger's aesthetically activated Matrixial dimension sets a theoretical and analytical stage for an exploration of these anti-lynching songs and offers a way of understanding aesthetic expressions of allyship in a transhistorical mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]