Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Vicious Modernism
- I The Legendary Capital: The 1920s and 1930s
- II The Emerging Ghetto: The 1940s and 1950s
- 5 The Emerging Ghetto
- 6 Go Tell It on the Mountain
- 7 Montage of a Dream Deferred
- 8 Negro de todo o mundo
- III The Inner City: The 1960s and 1970s
- Epilogue: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination
- Appendix 1 A Checklist of Black Harlem in Poetry
- Appendix 2 A Checklist of Black Harlem in Novels
- Notes
- Index
6 - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Vicious Modernism
- I The Legendary Capital: The 1920s and 1930s
- II The Emerging Ghetto: The 1940s and 1950s
- 5 The Emerging Ghetto
- 6 Go Tell It on the Mountain
- 7 Montage of a Dream Deferred
- 8 Negro de todo o mundo
- III The Inner City: The 1960s and 1970s
- Epilogue: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination
- Appendix 1 A Checklist of Black Harlem in Poetry
- Appendix 2 A Checklist of Black Harlem in Novels
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In the 1930s and 1940s, Harlem's deterioration created a crisis for the black cultural awakening represented by the literary trope of the 1920s. The trope was rooted in a popular reading of Harlem's rapid transformation into a vital black community as scriptural and prophetic, so fundamental alterations in the enclave's social and historical circumstances were regarded as signs of change to be deciphered and accommodated by the motif's meaning and authority. If Harlem were to survive as an emblem of racial renewal in the spiritual geography of the black world, a process of reinterpretation and revision would have to occur. In contrast to the writers of the Renaissance generation, who had initiated the theme of Harlem in poetry, novelists were the first writers of the new generation to turn their attention in imaginative literature to the decline of Afro-America's cultural capital, for the emerging Harlem ghetto offered rich material for the naturalistic impulse exemplified with such authority by Richard Wright in Native Son.
David Dortort's Post of Honor (1937) and Carl Offord's White Face (1943), by a white and a black writer respectively, are early representative expressions of dozens of naturalistic novels, ranging from forgettable potboilers to compelling popular fiction, set in whole or in part in a Harlem very different from the locale of the novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Both Dortort and Offord locate oppressive conditions of the emerging Harlem ghetto within the political context of global events.
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- Vicious ModernismBlack Harlem and the Literary Imagination, pp. 82 - 99Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990