“The time has not yet come for the great development of American Negro Literature,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in 1913. “The economic stress is too great and the racial persecution too bitter to allow the leisure and the poise for which literature calls” (“Negro in Literature” 301–302). By all accounts the time did come by the 1920s and 1930s, and many of the authors who would become staples of the African American canon emerged at this time. Most literary histories credit migration as one major factor in this literary efflorescence as African Americans from the southern United States settled in northern centers – Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and New York – to improve their prospects through an expanding work force during the World War I effort. Migrants from the Caribbean and Africa also made homes in the United States. National and transatlantic migrations – whether by agricultural laborers moving to cities, black soldiers in the theatre of war, or by writers and artists – widened interrogations of what constituted blackness. Autobiographies, essays, novels, criticism, and letters captured the ideas of an era that would encompass the New Negro Renaissance. All shared a querying as to whether there were practices that identified black expression, or whether black art was merely “lamp-blacked” American art to paraphrase George Schuyler (“Hokum” 1222). Novels employed themes and aesthetics to hypothesize the distinction between race and culture, where the former describes a commonality formed in contestation and the latter the commonality of indigenous experience.

Manning Marable makes a distinction between race and blackness: