Ironic laughter Mixed with Tears: The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was “the flowering of African American literature, art, and drama during the 1920s and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York City, USA, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States.”

I’d like to discuss the problems of reading approaches to the art of the Harlem Renaissance. If we view the art of the Harlem Renaissance within the larger framework of “mainstream America”, the Harlem Renaissance would reinforce rather than challenge racial stereotypes and appear to be the depiction of a culture in disarray. “Me & My Chauffeur Blues” throws up the stereotype of the sexually avaricious male “Yes he drives so easy, I can’t turn him down” and also hints at a violent streak “I’m gonna steal a pistol, shoot my chauffeur down”. “Morning After” alludes to alcoholism and bad bootleg alcohol. In this we see that rather than lifting the community, it could simply naturalize the community to certain traits and create a culture of resignation rather than a push for change.

If we adopt an alternate reading approach, reading the work of the Harlem Renaissance by closing an eye to “mainstream America”, we can see “Black literature” by legitimizing a language of difference, opens up a space where artists are free to reconstruct Black identity free from the interventions of political and economic structures. In “Me & My Chauffeur Blues”, we see hints of autonomy, initiative. “Well I must buy him”, “I don’t want him” – which points to a kind of triumph in spirit. But a reading approach that ignores that Black identity in the 1920s-30s was constructed by political and economic structures is a naïve reading. By claiming that the work of the Harlem Renaissance exist as separate categories on its own is to cause it to become an excluded and pigeonholed category of its own. This would reinforce binaries of “black” versus “white”, “us” versus “others”.

Wikipedia’s characterization of the Harlem Renaissance brings out the contradictory impulses of African Americans in the 1920-30s:

Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro who through intellect, the production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes of that era to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration.

On one hand, there is an “overt racial pride” and the desire to assert one as a “New Negro” – this awareness and recognition of one’s own diversity is a reflection of the resistance to dominant discourses dictating what defines an American. Yet on another hand, there is the desire for “integration” and assimilation – a word that implies the desire for erasure of differences. The tension within the word “Harlem Renaissance” reflects the dilemma of the African American.

The diversity of African American culture and the art of the Harlem Renaissance makes a single unifying term “Harlem Renaissance” misleading:

There would be no set style or uniting form singularly characterizing art coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, there would be a mix of celebrating a wide variety of cultural elements, including a Pan-Africanist perspective, "high-culture" and the "low-culture or low-life," from the traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in literature like modernism, and in poetry, for example, the new form of jazz poetry. This duality would eventually result in a number of African American artists of the Harlem Renaissance coming into conflict with conservatives in the black intelligentsia who would take issue with certain depictions of black life in whatever medium of the arts.

Even within styles, there are variants. Steven C. Tracy says that it is important to note that blues is a diverse form and varies based on location, thus “one must consider the type of blues Hughes encountered in the various environments in which he lived, keeping in mind that none of the blues environments had absolutely and exclusively one style”. According to Norton, Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois and Ohio. He attended Columbia University then traveled extensively in South America and Europe before moving to Washington. The blues styles in his pieces vary.

The “intellectual” quality of much of the art of the Harlem Renaissance is not about intellect in the conservative form of the word, i.e., erudition or analytical rigor. Rather, the intellect is an emotional intellect that is closely intertwined with the realm of desire, the body, memory and the visceral. Because this intellect is an “emotional intellect”, it has a greater outreach to the majority within the community and does not exclude non-intellectuals. In this way we see how art, by making itself accessible, ensures its ability to reconstruct identity.

In “Morning After”, we see a blues form that is more characteristic of the “classic” blues style – highly arranged, stage-influenced, and almost vaudeville-like. The blues form is accessible. The repetitiveness and easy sound of the words reflect Hughes desire to reach out to the lowest common denominator. According to literary critic, Steven C. Tracy, his use of the blues form was also a means of celebrating what he considered one of “the two great Negro gifts to American music”, the other which was spirituals, an earlier precedent of the blues.

“Ironic humor mixed with tears” is how Hughes characterizes the blues. “Morning After” provokes laughter without overshadowing the bleakness of the piece. Yet to laugh at the ugliness in life – in this case, as symbolized by the grotesque open mouth of the sleeper – is cathartic. It also indicates a kind of strength in the ability to look beyond immediate circumstance. The admonition not to “snore so loud” is seems a response to the strain of self-victimization and melodrama that is sometimes present in minority representations in literature.


Sources: Wikipedia, "To the Tune of Those Weary Blues: The Influence of the Blues Tradition in Langston Hughes's Blues Poems", Tracy, Steven C., MELUS, Vol. 8, No. 3, Ethnic Literature and Cultural Consciousness. (Autumn, 1981), pp. 73-98.

The First Blog Entry: Fictions and Facts

I’m from Singapore. I left the country for Manhattan a year ago, studied in New York University through fall and spring, before coming to Ithaca.

I feel that so much has been written on and romanticized about Manhattan that when one arrives there, it is almost impossible to distinguish between fact and myth when looking at Manhattan. Different faces of New York inspire different feelings, from Harlem to Greenwich Village to midtown Manhattan. It is impossible to be partial about the city and every New Yorker has a love-hate relationship with his city.

When people ask me about Singapore, I often find it difficult to describe a country that is changing its face to swiftly, a country where utopian ideal is confused with reality by the press and policymakers. Surrounded by developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, the government has ambitions to set apart the country Singapore as a first-world nation. While money is being pumped in to develop the country as a biomedical research hub, the country is in the midst of a huge casino development project. The drive for modernity in Singapore has caused it to lose its street side hawkers and various Chinese dialects, emblems of history and culture. The liberal trade policy has caused Singapore’s bookshops to be flooded by foreign literature, and the local literary scene has suffered. The literary publishing scene is unprofitable, causing publishers to say they are carrying out “community service” when they publish local writers. Artists struggle to articulate a Singapore identity, and often fail because of the diversity of a multiracial society, the pace of change and the increasingly mobile nature of the Singaporean. In school, I was exposed to little local poetry, studied Shakespeare and Chaucer for my British 'A' levels. One of the first poems I read was Blake’s "Daffodils", although I had never ever seen one in that equatorial, humid city-state.

I am studying English literature here. As a discipline, English satisfies my desire to apply scientific analyses and exercise my skills at dissection while allowing me appreciate writing as an aesthetic object and the voice of the heart. But beyond that, literature lies at the intersection of disciplines like politics, history, religion and economics, playing a crucial role in the building of a cultural identity. I hope to study literature through the lens of critical theory – examining how code words of power and signs operate in texts to buttress political and cultural structures in the real world. Literature through a critical gaze forces us to look at how mechanics of how a literary work operates to condition us to certain realities. I like literature because it forces me to live an examined life.

My rather various interests include cooking, modern dance, digital photography and jogging. I try, when I can, to spread the love of the word to others. I enjoy teaching and reading to children and have done this as a volunteer in China, Manhattan and Singapore. I want to do photojournalism and work in the print-publishing industry. I write poetry, was part of a student poetry circle in Singapore, and hope to eventually become more active in its small, but expanding, literary scene.

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Good writing on literature has a central angle or focus. It is not composed of a shopping list of scattered ideas. It should be able to reconcile different layers of meaning and conflicting viewpoints. It should be able to recognize complexity, but make the complexity simple. Stylistically, it is marked by precision and an economy of words. However, memorable writing is able to captures the writer’s intuitive and visceral response to a piece of work. If writing can be both impart the writer’s sense of surprise, wonder or rage, while retaining an intellectual complexity, academic writing can be almost beautiful too.

My paper on Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning” was titled “The Limits of Writing”. It zoomed in on line ten: “(Still the dead one lay moaning)”. I wrote about how that line captured the speaker’s attempt to reverse the plight of the voiceless subject by giving him a voice in his writing. One can sense the insistence on the dead man to speak in that line, and “moaning” could suggest him speaking in an individual language free from conventional codes. However, that line simultaneously undermined the poem because it drew out the distance between the writer and the dead man by reverting from first person point-of-view back to a third person point-of-view. I said that line revealed that that the speaker’s poetic project to give the voiceless a voice was undermined because the line pointed to the fact that writing that occurs in the subject’s absence is merely an artificial representation of individual speech.

I liked how I was able to move beyond the poem to illustrate a broader concept. I also liked how its analysis was quite meticulous. However, I felt that the introductory paragraph could have better outlined the essay’s structure and better summarized the paper’s thesis. It did not bear specific reference to the poem. I also felt I could have better compared the line to the rest of the poem in order to show the contrast. I also felt that I could have broken up the longer paragraphs to distinguish different ideas. I think the paper was too much in love with the concept I wanted it to illustrate, rather than an analysis of the line in itself. It was too theoretical and not sufficiently analytical. This is probably the largest criticism I have of the piece, and my writing in general.

Coming from New York University, where the literature department’s academic style emphasized style, the visceral response and personal voice, I hope this writing seminar frees me from the trappings of the writing culture there and gets me into the more academic writing culture in Cornell. I am also taking this class in tandem with a “Literature and Theory” class. I hope to have a chance sometimes to play with and bring the critical theory concepts of that class into this class. I hope to be more aware of the weaknesses and strengths in my writing style, so I may draw on strengths and brush up on my weaknesses.