Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (ed.)


THE  HARLEM  RENAISSANCE REVISITED:
Politics,  Arts,  and  Letters

Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 272 pp. paperback

ISBN-10: 0801894611 

Reviewed by Patrick Killough


(1) biblio.com  10/04/2010

Would you recommend this book to other readers?  Yes!  * * * * *

review:

Between the two world wars, something marvelous happened in Harlem, New York City, USA. There were large numbers of blacks in Chicago and Detroit and they had better paying jobs. But New York had the important theaters, publishing houses and a cultural vitality that would not stop.

In his 2010 THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE REVISITED: POLITICS, ARTS AND LETTERS, Editor Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, University of Connecticut Professor of History, has assembled 14 unforgettable essays about black ferment in New York City . For a white  reader like myself, a non-specialist in things African American, each essay is a revelation. Curiously, I also found,  one after another, each contribution even better, in most cases, than the one before it.

What pulled the whole collection together for me personally, however, was Chapter 8. This showcased author James Weldon Johnson's 1927 collection of seven poetic sermons, GOD'S TROMBONES, and the visual interpretations of that seminal book of the Harlem Renaissance by Johnson's illustrator, Aaron Douglas. GOD'S TRUMPETS is a paean by Johnson and Douglas to the previously undersung black preacher. The American slave preacher and his successor, today's black pulpit pastor, are lineal descendants of the West African griot: the man, the minstrel, who told, sang and acted out the tales of famous chiefs and villages.   

A black minstrel converted to Christianity wed the theatrical rhetoric of the griot to the rhythmic English of the King James Bible. The results were explosive: today's American black Protestant church. The black preacher humanized God, made him both powerful and a friend, someone a black sinner could turn to for help and inspiration. As GOD'S TRUMPETS sermon on the Creation put it:
"And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said: 'I'm lonely --
I'll make me a world.'" 

Of the New Testament's Prodigal Son another sermon said:
 "Young man --
 Young man --
Your arm's too short to box with God."

Illustrator Aaron Douglas made Harlem night spots the scene of the Prodigal's descent into "wine and whiskey" and "hot-mouthed women." Like great black preachers, poet Johnson and illustrator Douglas brought God's word straight into the real daily life of American black people.  

James Weldon Johnson and some of the other figures studied in THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE REVISITED were participants in a self-conscious project called NNHR -- the New Negro Harlem Renaissance. They retold the Negro's past in bold new forms: words, music, art. They also pointed the American Negro to a glorious racial future. And, for Johnson and for some others studied in this book, the Negro preacher, inventor and preserver of "the song sermon" was the most original, creative accomplishment of American Negroes to date.  

If nothing else, THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE REVISITED may prove useful to white Americans suddenly and not always pleasantly confronted in the 2008 American Presidential campaign with the rhetoric of candidate Barack Obama's onetime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, Jr., of Trinity United Church of Christ, a Chicago megachurch. After reading the 14 essays about Harlem selected by Professor Ogbar, I find myself much better placed to view Reverend Wright within the vital "Black Church Song Sermon" context."   

This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. 
 
-OOO-

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(2) lunch.com  10/04/2010

name of review: "The  Statue of Liberty was originally conceived ... as a black woman"

rating:  * * * * *

review:

Harlem between the two World Wars! That is the subject of Professor James O. G. Ogbar's collection of 14 scholarly essays collectively called THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE REVISITED: POLITICS, ARTS, AND LETTERS. Every essay is memorable.

Take, for instance, Chapter 11, "Border Crossings: The Diasporic Travels or Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston" by Myriam J. A. Chancy.

There you can read that

"The  Statue of Liberty was originally conceived by it sculptor, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi as a black woman freeing herself from the chains of bondage."

Never mind that this "rumor" is gently debunked by the National Park Service at http://www.nps.gov/stli/historyculture/black-statue-of-liberty.htm/ It nonetheless grabs your attention in an otherwise fascinating essay about two contributors to the Harlem Renaissance literary dimension.

-- Claude McKay was born in the Caribbean and spent much time in France. 

-- Zora Neale Hurston was an American who did anthropological research and some fiction writing in Jamaica and Haiti.

Essayist Myriam Chancy is a Canadian-Haitian, born in Haiti. She notes that both McKay and Hurston, consciously or unconsciously, probed similarities in world conceptions, on the one hand, of American blacks, especially in the southeast USA, including Florida, and, on the other hand, of nearby non-American communities. Myriam Chancy convincingly documents Hurston's "translation" of Haitian Creole French expressions into English. And she reminds us that after the Civil War, plenty of Americans, black and white, visited Haiti, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands with black populations. There was much cross-cultural influencing.

Other essays in THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE REVISITED probe Harlem's economics (most of its black residents in the 1920s and 1930s were downright poor, notably more so than in cities like Chicago and Detroit, rich in well paying factory jobs}.

The central, creative role of the black preacher is wonderfully sketched by McKinley Melton (Ch. 8). Today's classic black Protestant "song sermon" is the offspring, Melton argues, of the wedding of descendants of West African minstrels who sang and narrated mighty deeds of kings and heroes and the sonorous English of the King James Bible --  heard and sometimes read by slaves converted to Christianity.

The black preacher was hymned in the seven poetic sermons crafted for the 1927 collection GOD'S TRUMPETS by  James Weldon Johnson. His great illustrator Aaron Douglas sent the Prodigal Son to the low-life but exciting dives of Harlem to "waste his substance." Both Johnson and Douglas also underlined the blackness of Simon of Cyrene who took the cross from an exhausted Jesus. And Douglas was a pioneer in depicting a range of BIblical figures as black.

As for the notion that a black woman was to model the Statue of Liberty: that still resonates with many black American Protestants. That is the way God speaks to them in Scripture. God is powerful, loving, approachable and he has a special place in his heart for oppressed black people.

This is one of the best, most informative scholarly books I have read in a long time. I commend it unconditionally to readers who want to understand not only Harlem in its black heyday but also black pulpit orators like Chicago's Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. The bibliographies are ample and will keep you reading for many a contented month.

-OOO-


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(3) bn.com  10/04/2010

title of review:  Duke Ellington believed "in his musical vocation as a calling from God

rating: * * * * *

review:

There are 14 unforgettable recent scholarly essays about black Americans in Professor Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar's 2010 THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE REVISITED: POLITICS, ARTS AND LETTERS. Each deserves it own review. Space prevents justice being done to any. I will review in two parts

(I) a close look at Duke Ellington and black music and

(II) a random sampling of five other essays.

     (I) Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899 – 1974) is the barely black subject of an 11-page essay, Chapter 3, "It's All Sacred Music: Duke Ellington, from the Cotton Club to the Cathedral" by Frank A Salamone, much published Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Iona College, New Rochelle, New York.

Very light-skinned shades of complexion were hugely important in Harlem high "society" 1919 -1935 and even later. Ellington was a talented, well-trained musician. He was a superior pianist, orchestra leader and composer of jazz. Professor Salamone is at pains throughout to find natural linkage between Ellington's 1951 Harlem suite and his later Sacred concert materials.

"Ellington took the (Harlem) Cotton Club concepts of elaborate ideas and precision pacing into church." His three sacred concerts (1965, 1968, 1973) were sublime show business, with "dancing, instrumental and vocal solos, luscious ensemble work (and) choirs."

Did the Duke take secular Harlem night club jazz and simply baptize it? On the contrary, argues Salamone, the Duke saw all of his music as equally sacred. Ellington famously said: "Every man prays in his own language and there is no language that God does not understand." Ellington's language was music. Duke Ellington believed "in his musical vocation as a calling from God."

(II) Here, to tantalize you, are snatches from five other essays of the 14 in THE HARLEM RENSAISSANCE REVISITED.

-- (A) Marc Connelly's THE GREEN PASTURES (1930 play, 1936 film) "offered a white vision of Afro-American religion and the black vernacular" (Ch. 1).

-- (B) Black literary critic Hubert H. Harrison "challenged the notion that the white literary establishment's newfound fascination with Harlem should warrent a new conceptualization of the achievements of the era" (Ch.2)

-- (C) Black American physician and writer Rudolph Fisher created an old preacher named Ezekiel Taylor. "Ezekiel sees Harlem as a 'city of the devil -- outpost of hell'" (Ch 5).

-- (D) Everyday life in Harlem was filled with few good jobs and many very poor black people (Ch. 6) 

-- (E) Chapter 9: "Border Crossings" is about two globe-trotting black writers Claude McKay (he met Trotsky and Bernard Shaw) and francophone Zora Neale Hurston (she did anthropological research in Jamaica and Haiti).

-- McKay thought that bright Afro-Americans should read less Homer and more of First Century black Arabian writer Antara Ibn Shaddid al'Absi. For Antara's courtly poems inspired later white European romances of chivalry. Blacks and whites had been in cross-cultural symbiotic relationships for centuries.

It is hard to stop reviewing this rich book. Yet another chapter (# 8) may help you understand the 2008 Presidential campaign and the "song sermons" of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. of Barack Obama's Chicago Church. The bibliographies of each chapter will tempt you to months of further reading. The index is one of the most helpful I have ever seen. -OOO-

recommended reading:

-- Roark Bradford: OL' MAN ADAM AN' HIS CHILLUN

-- Mark Connelly: THE GREEN PASTURES

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-Revisited/Jeffrey-O-G-Ogbar/e/9780801894619/?itm=1&USRI
=jeffrey+o.g.+ogbar++-+the+harlem+renaissance
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(4) amazon.com  10/05/2005

title of review:  Boxer Jack Johnson "represented black power in its fullest form: intelligent, ... jet black and able to crush white hegemony"

rating: * * * * *

review:

Open at random any one of the 14 essays in THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE REVISITED: POLITICS, ARTS, AND LETTERS. Read that essay and see you don't then hunger for 13 more. They are all good, all provocative, all about "The New Negro," the Harlem Renaissance (1919 - 1935).

They showcase black men and women who made both previously "supreme" whites and downtrodden blacks take a second, more admiring look at black men and women -- their art, their language, their corporate culture, their physical attributes and their politics. Connecticut Professor of History  Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, has carefully selected 14 different writers, each with much worth reading and pondering.

I took my own advice offered above and opened five of the 14 essays at random. I chose one to review a bit more fully and four others for you to sip a drop or two from.

 (I.) Chapter Eleven: "Jack Johnson, Paul Robeson, and the Hypermasculine African American Uebermensch" by Paula Marie Seniors. Of the 21 pages of this essay, fully five-plus pages are footnotes. All 14 essays are scholarly. This one has the largest academic addenda. The essay is very, very good and convincing. But it might be nearly a page shorter if the author, a young prize-winning scholar teaching at Virginia Tech, had not exuberantly repeated a score of times "Hypermasculine African American Uebermensch."

Her prototypical black heroes of masculinity are

-- the heavyweight boxer John Arthur "Jack" Johnson (1878 - 1946)

-- and Renaissance man and all around athlete Paul Robeson (1898 - 1976).

Johnson, "the Galveston Giant," was flamboyant. He had three white wives, he rubbed his blackness in white men's faces. When Johnson won the heavy weight boxing title in 1908, no less than Jack London called for a "great white hope" to emerge and restore the honor of white males. One did arise. Former undefeated world champ James J. Jeffries came out of retirement and was worn down to a TKO. Boxer Jack Johnson "represented black power in its fullest form: intelligent, strong, muscled, impenetrable, jet black and able to crush white hegemony uncompromisingly."


                                        * * *

Who has not heard of Paul Robeson. As singer of "Old Man River," sure. But as polyglot linguist? As All American footballer? As general Renaissance man? He was big. He was black. He was cosmopolitan. He was fearless of fascists American and elsewhere. And he showed white people everywhere what talents they could expect coming generations of black males to reveal.
(II) Snatches from four other essays selected at random:

-- (A) Chapter Ten. Wallace Thurman's 1929 novel THE BLACKER THE BERRY immortalized the folk saying, "The blacker the berry, / the sweeter the juice." Its heroine is Emma Lou Morgan. She did not mind being black, but Emma Lou, mistakenly, saw herself as TOO black, and that ruined her life till she came to terms with it.

--(B) "So the Girl Marries" is Chapter Four's theme: the 1928 Harlem high society wedding between soon to be revealed bisexual poet Countee Cullen and Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of the legendary black genius Dr W. E. B. Du Bois. The marriage lasted only a few months. But it inspired a stage play, YOLANDE, KNOCK ME A KISS. You can't understand the Harlem Renaissance without grasping the good and bad sides of Mr and Mrs Countee Cullen.

-- (C) Chapter Eight is all about the American Protestant "song sermon." When enslaved and transported African minstrels were converted to Christianity, they started retelling Bible stories in a Mandingo way: with acting, singing, dancing and active audience/congregation action and reaction. Their lineal discendants, the Spirit-filled black Protestant preachers, constitute perhaps black America's greatest contribution to culture.

-- (D) Chapter Three is about the spirituality behind the music -- all the music, secular and religious -- of Duke Ellington. Duke took the jazz that made him and his band famous in Harlem's Cotton Club into the cathedral.

"Ellington took the Cotton Club concepts of elaborate ideas and precision pacing into church."

His three sacred concerts (1965, 1968, 1973) were sublime show business, with "dancing, instrumental and vocal solos, luscious ensemble work (and) choirs." 

Essayist Frank A. Salamone does not mention another link to a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance (1919 - 1935), boxer Jack Johnson. A nightclub that Johnson opened in Harlem in 1920 was sold in 1923 and renamed The Cotton Club. What goes around, comes around.

This is an almost perfect book. A great editor. Pretty fair writing. Important history of black Americans who made a difference. Much of the scholarship is derivative, but the originals selected are cited and the selecting was mighty fine.

-OOO-

TAGS: harlem renaissance, "nnhr" - new negro harlem renaissance,  duke ellington, jack johnson, paul robeson, claude mckay, Zora Neale Hurston

http://www.amazon.com/Harlem-Renaissance-Revisited
-Politics-Letters/dp/0801894611/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie
=UTF8&qid=1285350712&sr=1-1


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(5) epinions.com  10/06/2010

review title:  "you got tuh go there tuh know there"

product rating:  * * * * *

Pros: Up-to-date scholarship on America's Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement. 14 different slants.

Cons: A couple of essays are mildly overloaded with in-house scholastic jargon. A packed text.

The Bottom Line: Everything you ever wanted to know about Harlem and black American creativity and physical prowess in the '20s and '30s. Boxers. Poets. Novelists. World Travelers. Not a fast read.


aohcapablanca's Full Review: Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar - The Harlem Renaissance Revisited.

Epinions reviewer texas-swede (Thomas Wikman) fears the coming demise of the HOTEL-TRAVEL category for epinions.com reviewing. Me personally Thomas has inspired to look this month at every fresh book that I read for insights into the importance of travel.

Travel is a treasure out in the open in the 14 essays in Connecticut U. History Professor and Dean Jeffrey Ogbar (ed.), THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE REVISITED: POLITICS, ARTS, AND LETTERS (2010).

The book's showcases Harlem between the national race riots of 1919 and the Harlem riots of 1935. Or rather, it is not so much bricks and mortar Harlem, but instead the creative men and women who moved in and out of that neighborhood within the borough of Manhattan.
In two parts I shall
 -- First, give you some snippets from the eleven essays in which travel is less prominent;

-- Second, give a bit more detail about three chapters all about travel.
REVIEW PART ONE: the eleven non-travel essays

-- Both white and black authors were fascinated by American black culture and language. White Eugene O'Neill's THE EMPEROR JONES (1920) is to some scholars one of many  "demeaning pieces by white playwrights" (Ch. 1).

-- Some scholars think that the Harlem Renaissance was a fiction created by white authors, by white Harlem night club owners and their white patrons. (But note: the forerunner of the Cotton Club was made by the first black heavyweight boxing champion!) (Ch. 2)

-- Duke Ellington transformed jazz hammered out in Harlem's Cotton Club into sacred concerts fit for Cathedrals (Ch. 3).

-- The Harlem high society wedding of 1928 joined Yolanda,  daughter of the great Dr W. E. B. Du Bois, with poet Countee Cullen (Ch 4).

--African American physician writer Rudolph Fisher explored hush-hush black prejudices against other blacks (Ch. 5).

-- In the "real" Harlem the black population frose from 22,000 in 1910 to 190,000 in 1930. Two-thirds of the  males did manual labor. Work was hard, long and poorly paid (Ch. 6)

-- Bilingual (English/French) black, much traveled writer Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote evocative feminist stories of black women under social pressures (Ch. 7)

-- My personal favorite of all 14 essays is Chapter 8 by McKinley Melton of U. Massachusetts Amherst. Melton focuses on the black Protestant preacher of "song sermons" as black America's most powerful, original creation. 

West African griots (minstrels of the tales of kings and peoples) were captured and sent to America as slaves. If converted to Christianity, the griots came to know God through the sonorous words of the King James Bible. They  imagined God anthropomorphically as a kindly protector of the poor. The new "slave preachers" told God's story the old Mandingo way: in song, with musical instruments and dance and with audience participation.

-- Ch. 11, by a young prize-winning  academician has the curious title, "Jack Johnson, Paul Robeson, and the Hypermasculine African American Uebermensch."

-- Black Jack Johnson, "the Galveston Giant" demolished two white world heavyweight boxing champions of the world, including Jack London's called for "Great White Hope, James Jeffries. Johnson made many whites reluctantly admit the formidability of the black male body. He married three white women.

-- Paul Robeson spoke even more languages than cosmopolitan Jack Johnson, including several African tongues. An All American football player, Robeson played the lead film role in THE EMPEROR JONES, is remembered for singing Old Man River and received the Stalin Peace Prize. Robeson joined the pantheon of Negro intellectuals which included W. E. B. Du Bois.

The 2004 film BROTHER TO BROTHER explored man-man relationships of the Harlem Renaissance: both homo-erotic and homo-social (e.g. non-sexual male bonding). (Ch. 12)

-- Chapter 13 revises the revisionist views of most of the other chapters. Their authors had focused on individual black writers, actors, teachers, athletes. University of NC Chapel Hill Professor Perry A. Hall provides a wider perspective of American white-black interaction, even co-operation or "comity" in the years between the two world wars.

REVIEW PART TWO: Three "travel" essays: Chs. 9, 10 and 14.

-- Ch 9. "Border Crossings" studies the travels of Caribbean poet Claude McKay and Harlem writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. They made American blacks better understood and respected abroad.

Zora Hurston did serious research in Jamaica and Haiti. She captured the flavor of island patois in her fictional works. As one black woman says to another in Hurston's 1937 novel, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD,

"you got tuh go there tuh know there."

This is another way of putting the moral of the next chapter: that the most important journeys are not from one place to another but deeper into one's own soul.

-- Ch 10. In his 1929 novel THE BLACKER THE BERRY, Wallace Thurman explored the paradoxical truth of the jingle:
"The blacker the berry,
The sweeter the juice."

Thurman's black American protagonist Emma Lou Morgan is young and good looking. Being black is all right, she thinks. But being "too" black is a tragedy. And she is too black.

Born in Boise, Idaho, Emma Lou believes that if she flees hundreds of miles to any big city she will find more sympathetic communities that will tell her who she is. The University of Southern California and Los Angeles let her down. She runs away again.

After a brief return to Boise, Emma Lou runs away to Harlem and wears too much makeup -- to lighten her skin color. Finally, a white male friend convinces her simply to be herself. The only traveling that works is not geographical but into one's soul. "Her life's journey must continue within herself."

-- Ch. 14 is entitled "Harlem Globe-Trotters: Black Sojourners in Stalin's Soviet Union." It contains nary a word about the legendary black basketball team!

In the early days of the new USSR, before Stalin's purges, many hundreds of American blacks visited the Russian Workers Paradise. For years hundreds lived, worked and studied in Moscow, in Central Asia and elsewhere. Almost all were profoundly impressed by a society that professed to be class-based, not race-based and whose men and women in the streets happily embraced (figuratively and literally) American minor poets, technical workers and postal workers.

An absolutely fascinating treasure trove are the reports sent back to the State Department from the American Legation in still independent Riga, Latvia of interviews with American blacks, some quite famous. The State Department interviewers were often Southern white men who regularly described an interviewee as "a negro and an American." Black women were regularly styled "negresses."

W. E. B. Du Bois traveled the whole USSR on assignment for the NAACP. Paul Robeson was regularly lionized.

***
  IN CONCLUSION:

This book is not far from perfect. It is not a fast read. It is at times profound and always informative. 

Find out, for instance, which black writer wrote seven poetic song sermons and said of the Creation
 "And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said: 'I'm lonely --
I'll make me a world.'" 

Of the New Testament's Prodigal Son another sermon said:
 "Young man --
 Young man --
Your arm's too short to box with God." 

The bibliographies in the 14 essays of  THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE REVISITED are up to date and offer readers many months of happy exploratory reading into new worlds. The index is excellent.

Remember that book of seven black preacher sermons?

They were illustrated by black Harlemite Aaron Douglas. Simon of Cyrene is drawn as a black man. Without a black man to lift up his cross, Jesus would never have made it to Calvary.And we would not have been saved! Douglas made the prodigal son waste his substance in a faraway place that looked mighty like the Cotton Club and among the fast, lipsticked women of Harlem.


-OOO-

P S. I thank amazon.com VINE program for sending me the book and epinions.com category lead pestyside/Patsy Side for making it possible to review.

Recommended:  Yes

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