Alain Locke

At the time of his death in 1989, Nathan Irvin Huggins ranked among the most influential and important historians in America, a scholar who was universally hailed as the leading chronicler and critic of the Harlem Renaissance. Now, in Revelations, readers will find a celebration of Huggins' many contributions to American history. It offers a superb collection of his finest articles, reviews, and essays, works that span the entire spectrum of his thought on the African-American experience. Whether he is discussing the literary style of Langston Hughes, the leadership roles of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King, Jr., or the African-American contribution to the "common culture" of America, Huggins is at his eloquent best, by turns passionate and poignant, witty and reflective. Among the many moving pieces, readers will find a tour of the slave castles of the West African coast in which Huggins describes places like Goree Island and Elmina as a collective and horrific Plymouth Rock of the African-American past. There is a powerful new introduction to his seminal book Black Odyssey, which assesses the major writings on slavery over the past two decades, and an illuminating look at the experience of free blacks in a slave society, whose rights were continually challenged or taken away. And, of course, Huggins' discussion of the Harlem Renaissance reveals the life of the city, the vibrancy that set the tempo and style for the decade that F. Scott Fitzgerald called "The Jazz Age." Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, "Jelly Roll" Morton, Duke Ellington--all were changing American culture in profound and permanent ways, transforming it into something fresh and new and forever different--something uniquely American. Prepared by his widow, Brenda Smith Huggins, Revelations also features an insightful appreciation by Lawrence Levine that appraises Huggins's unique contribution to American history, and an envoi by Leon Litwack that paints a moving portrait of Huggins the man. Framed between is the fruit of a lifetime of reflection on topics as diverse as the art of Alain Locke, jazz, Paul Robeson, the Civil Rights Era, and the nature of history itself.

Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism-with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth-lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. Since the 1960s, however, pragmatism in many guises has again gained prominence, finding congenial places to flourish within growing intellectual movements. This volume of new essays brings together leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, social thinkers, and literary critics to examine the far-reaching effects of this revival.As the twenty-five intellectuals who take part in this discussion show, pragmatism has become a complex terrain on which a rich variety of contemporary debates have been played out. Contributors such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Nancy Fraser, Robert Westbrook, Hilary Putnam, and Morris Dickstein trace pragmatism's cultural and intellectual evolution, consider its connection to democracy, and discuss its complex relationship to the work of Emerson, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. They show the influence of pragmatism on black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, explore its view of poetic language, and debate its effects on social science, history, and jurisprudence. Also including essays by critics of the revival such as Alan Wolfe and John Patrick Diggins, the volume concludes with a response to the whole collection from Stanley Fish.Including an extensive bibliography, this interdisciplinary work provides an in-depth and broadly gauged introduction to pragmatism, one that will be crucial for understanding the shape of the transformations taking place in the American social and philosophical scene at the end of the twentieth century.Contributors: Richard Bernstein, David Bromwich, Ray Carney, Stanley Cavell, Morris Dickstein, John Patrick Diggins, Stanley Fish, Nancy Fraser, Thomas C. Grey, Giles Gunn, Hans Joas, James T. Kloppenberg, David Luban, Louis Menand, Sidney Morgenbesser, Richard Poirier, Richard A. Posner, Ross Posnock, Hilary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, Richard Rorty, Michel Rosenfeld, Richard H. Weisberg, Robert B. Westbrook, Alan Wolfe

During the Harlem Renaissance, African-American culture flourished. The period gave birth to numerous significant and enduring creative works that were at once American and emblematic of the black experience in particular. Even though those who contributed to the Harlem Renaissance recognized that they had much in common, they also distinguished themselves from one another. This book approaches the Harlem Renaissance from the perspective of the conflict between individual and group identity. Central to the imaginative effort of the era was an unresolved tension to construct an individual as well as a collective identity; this tension continues to characterize contemporary African-American culture.

This book explores a rich cultural hybridity at the heart of transatlantic modernism. Focusing on cubism, jazz, and Josephine Baker's performance in the Danse Sauvage, Sieglinde Lemke uncovers a crucial history of white and black intercultural exchange, a phenomenon until now greatly obscured by a cloak of whiteness. Considering artists and critics such as Picasso, Alain Locke, Nancy Cunard, and Paul Whiteman, in addition to Baker, Lemke documents a potent cultural dialectic in which black artistic expression fertilized white modernism, just as white art forms helped shape the black modernism of Harlem and Paris. Coining the term primitivist modernism to designate the multicultural heritage of this century's artistic production, Lemke reveals the generative and germinating black cultural Other in the arts. She examines this neglected dimension in full, fascinating detail, blending literary theory, social history, and cultural analysis to document modernism's complex absorption of African culture and art. She details numerous ways in which African and African American forms (visual styles, musical idioms, black dialects) and fantasies (Baker's costume and dance, say) permeated high and mass culture on both sides of the Atlantic. So-called primitive art and high modernism; savage rhythms and European music hall culture; European and African American expressions in jazz; European primitivism and the racial awakenings of African American culture: paired and freshly examined by Lemke, these subjects stand revealed in their true interrelatedness. Insisting on modernism's two-way cultural flow, Lemke demonstrates not only that white modernism owes much of its symbolic capital to the black Other, but that black modernism built itself in part on white Euro-American models. Through superbly nuanced readings of individual texts and images (fifteen striking examples of which are reproduced in this handsome volume), Lemke reforms our understanding of modernism. She shows us, in clear, invigorating fashion, that transatlantic modernism in both its high and popular modes was significantly more diverse than commonly supposed. Students and scholars of modernism, African American studies, and cultural studies, and those with interests in twentieth-century art, dance, music, or literature, will find this book richly rewarding.

There has been a dramatic resurgence of interest in early African American writing. The works of dozens of 18th and early 20th century black writers have been recovered and reprinted; there has been a significant revival of interest in the Harlem Renaissance; and several major assessments of 18th and 19th century African American literature have recently been published. This reference book provides alphabetically arranged entries for 78 African American writers active between 1745 and 1945. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a biography, a discussion of major works and themes, a summary of the critical response to the author, and primary and secondary bibliographies. A selected, general bibliography concludes the volume.