DEMYSTIFICATION OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PRIMITIVIST REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGY OF THE MOVEMENT

The Harlem Renaissance is often simplistically defined as a ten-year literary activity of African-Americans in 1920s New York which ended with the advent of the Great Depression. However, a thorough survey of the movement introduces us to a complex and conflicted phenomenon which critics still struggle to define. Far from being a purely monolithic, black community-oriented entity, the Harlem Renaissance was strongly influenced by white America’s sociological and literary climate in 1920s. White American intellectuals of the Jazz Age, disillusioned with the traumatic experience of World War I and tired of the country’s puritan background, showed a strong proclivity for “Other” cultures that could satiate their yearning for exoticism and hedonism; and the handiest option for them was the African-American community that had been subalternized for centuries. This faddist interest of white intelligentsia led to a primitivist vogue among young black writers of the Harlem Renaissance who decided to make use of the unprecedented opportunity and thus succumbed to the exoticist whims of white publishers and patrons. Considering the sociological and literary climate of the Jazz Age white America and its huge impact on black writers of the day, this paper aims to analyze the primitivist representational strategy of the Harlem Renaissance and its detrimental drawbacks.