Book contents
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Revising a Renaissance
- Part I Re-reading the New Negro
- Part II Experimenting with the New Negro
- Part III Re-mapping the New Negro
- Chapter 11 London, New York, and the Black Bolshevik Renaissance: Radical Black Internationalism during the New Negro Renaissance
- Chapter 12 Island Relations, Continental Visions, and Graphic Networks
- Chapter 13 “Symbols from Within”: Charting the Nation’s Regions in James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones
- Chapter 14 Rudolph Fisher: Renaissance Man and Harlem’s Interpreter
- Part IV Performing the New Negro
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 14 - Rudolph Fisher: Renaissance Man and Harlem’s Interpreter
from Part III - Re-mapping the New Negro
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2021
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Revising a Renaissance
- Part I Re-reading the New Negro
- Part II Experimenting with the New Negro
- Part III Re-mapping the New Negro
- Chapter 11 London, New York, and the Black Bolshevik Renaissance: Radical Black Internationalism during the New Negro Renaissance
- Chapter 12 Island Relations, Continental Visions, and Graphic Networks
- Chapter 13 “Symbols from Within”: Charting the Nation’s Regions in James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones
- Chapter 14 Rudolph Fisher: Renaissance Man and Harlem’s Interpreter
- Part IV Performing the New Negro
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Rudolph Fisher was unique among Harlem Renaissance authors in making Harlem itself the exclusive focus of his writing. Across a rich body of work (of short stories and novels), he demonstrated keen powers of social observation in revealing how class, regional, phenotypical, and generational distinctions defined Harlem and shaped an appropriate literary aesthetic. Fisher’s satirical yet loving eye is matched by a musical ear in stories about African Americans becoming modern in the black metropolis. Southern greenhorns are vulnerable to being fleeced by urbane northern hustlers. Grandmothers bearing the memory of the South fear and admire in equal measure the way Harlem shapes their grandchildren. Blues and jazz underscore vernacular speech, as street talk engages rural accents and bourgeois tongues. And such sensitivity to the city’s quotidian features informs Fisher’s ultimate understanding of Harlem as the space of encounter between logic and faith, science and superstition for African Americans.
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- A History of the Harlem Renaissance , pp. 252 - 268Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021