The Harlem Renaissance: Suggested Paper Topics
Paper Topics on the The Harlem Renaissance
Questions that can serve as the starting point for an essay.
- Select several Harlem Renaissance authors’ works to consider the question of black authenticity and the role of the movement as an expression of distinctly African American culture.
- Identify similarities of theme, imagery, tone, and style across the anthology’s selection of poems by Gwendolyn E. Bennett. With what other African American poet that you have studied does she best compare?
- Compare Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl” with other depictions of African American mulatta women in Harlem Renaissance literary works. To what extent does Bennett use her poem to subvert white aestheticism?
- Compare and contrast the representation of black female identity in Marita Bonner’s “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” with Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” What do the two texts together reveal about black women’s experiences during the Harlem Renaissance?
- Compare and contrast Langston Hughes’s and Sterling A. Brown’s dialectic poetry to articulate divergent approaches to black vernacular dialect that some writers took during the Harlem Renaissance.
- Although the literature of the Harlem Renaissance typically invokes urban themes, Sterling A. Brown situates his poetry in rural settings of the U.S. South. Analyze Brown’s use of geography and movement in his poetry. Are there commonalities between the themes of Brown’s texts and his more urban compeers, in spite of the former’s focus on rural locations?
- Compare Countee Cullen’s controlled, restrained poetic style with the various poetic styles deployed by Hughes. In what ways does each poet’s style correspond to his particular anti-racist ideology?
- Read Cullen’s “Heritage” alongside Garvey’s “Africa for the Africans.” How do these texts similarly address the issue of forced displacement?
- Identify comparable themes of the black urban experience in Rudolph Fisher’s “The City of Refuge” and “The Caucasian Storms Harlem.” What do these similarities reveal about Fisher’s vision of urban life and mores?
- Evaluate Garvey’s arguments and rhetorical style. To what degree do the rhetorical features of his prose work to support his platform for African American colonization in Africa? Do any of his rhetorical strategies undermine his overall political platform, rendering it convincing?
- What do Garvey’s “Africa for the Africans,” Hughes’s “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” and Cullen’s “Heritage” reveal about different ways that Harlem Renaissance writers conceptualized notions of the African diaspora?
- Listen to the jazz music recordings and the blues music recordings on the Audio Companion CD to the anthology. Pay attention to their respective rhythms, tones, moods, and so on. Then read aloud the Hughes selections in the Norton Anthology. Discuss the ways that Hughes applies these vernacular music traditions to his poems.
- Analyze Harlem Renaissance debates about the idea of art and the artist by contrasting “The Negro-Art Hokum,” by George Samuel Schuyler, and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” by Hughes.
- Review the folktales of the Vernacular Tradition section of the anthology, then compare and contrast the tropes and conventions of Hurston’s folklore in the early twentieth century to the major rhetorical characteristics of black vernacular folktales created and collected in the nineteenth century.
- Define sentimental discourse. What conventions of sentimentalism do you find in the poetry of Georgia Douglas Johnson? How do these conventions contrast with different conventions used by Harlem Renaissance poets? Do they render her poetry alien in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, or can one make a case for Johnson’s similarity to other poets of her era?
- Compare the characteristics of the Old Negro and the New Negro as detailed in Alain Locke’s famous essay. Are you persuaded by his prose that substantial differences between the Old and the New marked a change toward being black at the beginning of the twentieth century?
- What ideas of race pride are developed in the anthology selections by Arthur Schomburg and Garvey? Are these ideas similar or different?
- Discuss variations denotations and connotations of culture; then examine Jean Toomer’s interpretation of the term in Cane.
- Read Toomer’s “Portrait in Georgia” in comparison with Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl.” How do the tones differ? What differences in diction do you find in the poets’ respective poems? What conflicts of aestheticism do these poems reveal about larger contexts of the Harlem Renaissance?
Research Paper Topics on the The Harlem Renaissance
Paper topics that require research.
- Consider the effectiveness of the term "Harlem Renaissance." Does locating the aesthetic movement in Harlem detract from the significant work done elsewhere in the country during this period? Identify other terms that have been devised to refer to this movement. Why do you suppose those terms have not survived as has "Harlem Renaissance"? What accounts for the staying power of "Harlem Renaissance"?
- What do the texts in the Harlem Renaissance section of the anthology convey about definitions of the "New Negro" as a combatant against racial prejudice? To what extent does the figure of the New Negro not fight against racial prejudice? If not resistance to race prejudice, what are the major preoccupations of the New Negro?
- Which aspects of the Harlem Renaissance seem relevant to readers today? Is contemporary African America experiencing a new literary renaissance? On what do you base your response?
- David Levering Lewis writes in When Harlem Was In Vogue that the Harlem Renaissance was not a cohesive movement, but a constructed and "forced phenomenon." To what extent to you support this contention? What Harlem Renaissance authors help you to construct your response?
- Consider black self-identification during the Harlem Renaissance. What names have African Americans used for themselves to self-identify historically in America? What work do such names do to circumvent racist stereotypes of blacks set in place by the white hegemony over time?
- Discuss several Harlem Renaissance writers' uses of religious verse and imagery, both individually and as a group. Are their symbolic representations of these tropes different from treatments you find in other eras of African American literature? In Anglo-American literary contexts? If so, how are they different?
- Read Bonner's "On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored" in conjunction with Mary Wollstonecraft's feminist manifesto, "A Vindication for the Rights of Woman" (1792) to gain a sense of female struggle across time and racial boundaries.
- As the Norton Anthology tells us, Jessie Redmon Fauset published her first novel, There Is Confusion, to "set the record straight" about middle-class African Americans as depicted in Birthright, a 1922 book by a white writer named T. S. Stribling ( p. 975). Keep this aim in mind as you read Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral. What struggles against stereotypes, assimilation, and white ideology does the novel depict? What can we conclude about the "straight record," if Fauset succeeded in reaching her goal?
- Visit the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Web site to see how Garvey's original ideas and plans are being implemented almost one hundred years later. Are the goals the same? The issues?
- Although the Norton Anthology includes only Georgia Douglas Johnson's "romantic" poetry, Johnson was a very prolific playwright of antilynching drama. According to scholar Judith Stephens, the critical neglect of Johnson's antilynching plays reveals an American denial of this genre and, in turn, of lynching as a national shame. Do you think Johnson's poems provide any insight into her antilynching activism? Can we read a political subtext in her "romantic" poems?
- Read Helene Johnson's "Remember Not" in comparison with Andrew Marvell's carpe diem poem, "To His Coy Mistress" to analyze how Johnson utilizes the concept of Time and Love.
- In Quicksand, Larsen's protagonist accuses her employer of plagiarism. Incidentally, Larsen herself was accused of the same thing. Research the details of the alleged plagiarism, and then reread the scene in Quicksand to draw your own conclusions as to whether Larsen also plagiarized her fiction. On what do you base your conclusions?
- Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926 with an expatriate war veteran protagonist named Jake. Read The Sun Also Rises alongside McKay's Home to Harlem, which was published in 1928. Do the two novels with similar themes share similarities in style as well?
- Read McKay's "If We Must Die" out loud in conjunction with Sir Thomas Wyatt's sixteenth-century sonnet, "Whoso List to Hunt." How is the hunt scene described in both, and who is the implied narrator?
- Compare Anne Spencer's deployment of Modernist features in her poetry with the Modernist poetry of Anglo-American poets Gertrude Stein and H. D.
- In "Before the Feast of Shushan," Spencer focuses on a woman character generally considered the more minor female character in the story. Read the biblical Book of Esther to determine whether Spencer's portrayal is ironic. Is it subversive?
- Read Spencer's "Before the Feast of Shushan" in conjunction with Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess." How does each poem utilize the first-person (royal) male dramatic voice? To what effect?