The Harlem Renaissance
August 2nd, 2010
Daniel A. Holder: ‘Old’ vs. ‘New Negro’: The Harlem Renaissance as a Key Topic in American Studies
Alain Locke’s concept of the ‘New Negro’ came to epitomise what is commonly referred to as the ‘Harlem’ or ‘New Negro Renaissance’, a flowering of African American cultural production during the 1920s in New York City’s Harlem, which was at the time the so-called ‘mecca’ of the Afro-diasporic world. This lecture will give students a broad overview of the phenomenon and will look at different fields of African American cultural production. It will provide the historical reasons for such a ‘Renaissance’ and will investigate artists, intellectuals and political figures central to the Harlem Renaissance, focusing on differing and conflicting notions of African American identity. Moreover, this lecture will put forth a broader and more inclusive cultural history of the phenomenon, re-reading it as a postcolonial, Afro-diasporic ‘New Negro Renaissance’ covering not only New York City but large parts of what Paul Gilroy termed the ‘Black Atlantic’.
Daniel A. Holder, geboren 1980 in Köln, studierte Regionalwissenschaften Nordamerika, Politische Wissenschaft und Anglo-Amerikanische Geschichte an den Universitäten Bonn und Köln sowie African American Studies an der University of Florida in Gainesville/USA. Seit Herbst 2009 promoviert er als Stipendiat am InternationalGraduateCenter for the Study of Culture (GCSC) zu dem Thema “Rewriting-Un-Americaness: African American Intellectuals, Post World War II Political Radicalism and McCarthyism“. Zusammen mit Marie Lottmann ist er Sprecher der GGK-Sektion 2: Literatur- und Kulturtheorien.