Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance

Largely noted for its unparalleled production of art and literature from the African-American community, the period of cultural rebirth known as the Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement, has been a consistent source of interest for both readers and scholars alike. With the rise of key authors from Langston Hughes to Claude McKay, among others, the Harlem Renaissance gave birth to creative endeavors by Black artists and writers eager to celebrate those many unique characteristics of Black life and to challenge the institutionalized racial hierarchy pervasive within the twentieth-century United States. These creative thinkers, certainly intellectuals in their own right, used their poetry, short stories, novels, and plays as a vehicle to critique the longstanding issues within society that limited socioeconomic mobility for Blacks and perpetuated startling stereotypes about a community far too long oppressed. Because of its undeniable impacts in shaping the U.S. cultural imagination, the Harlem Renaissance has since been heavily studied as one of the most vital periods of artistic as well as cultural explosion the African-American community has ever experienced. Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance, edited by Dr. Christopher Allen Varlack in 2015, includes nineteen critical essays on authors and themes of this important era as well as an extensive chronology and selection of works for additional reading. It is now listed as a bestseller within the Critical Insights series at Salem Press.

Publication Date: October 2015

ISBN: 978-1-61925-822-8