"Watching the Waters": The Harlem Renaissance, Black Internationalism and Other Currents

The ‘Harlem Renaissance’ is now a dominant term for what is commonly used to describe a cultural movement that emerged between the First and Second World Wars. The term became the hegemonic around the early 1970s, displacing similar, yet distinct, alternatives including the New Negro, the New Negro movement and the Negro/Black Renaissance. This essay traces a genealogy of such terms, metanarratives and historiographical currents. The aim here is to demonstrate how the hegemony of the term Harlem Renaissance is linked to its institutionalization as a subject and the rise of Black studies in the United States. The weighting of Harlem as a geographical reference point both localized and nationalized the subject area which resulted in a selective historiography and diminished the transnational dimensions of the New Negro and the Negro Renaissance. The framework is trans-American and the scope transnational, while the chronology covers an inner 1890s–1940s period, and a broad outer period which begins in 1701 and spans post-WWII writing. In marking these flows, this essay problematizes the notion of distinct political or cultural channels of the ‘movement’ or ‘movements’. Recent scholarship attentive to some of the limitations of earlier Harlem Renaissance studies has illustrated the intertwined relationship of political, often radical, and artistic-aesthetic aspects of early twentieth-century black cultural activity and the key role played by Caribbeans. Drawing on these insights, this essay outlines that the transnational aspects of a black-centred cultural phenomenon have been better understood through a greater emphasis on Caribbean cross-currents

Island Relations, Continental Visions and Graphic Networks

Research in recent decades has drawn out the Caribbean dimensions and occlusions of the Harlem Renaissance and its historiography. Building on the foundations of such work, this chapter focuses on a rarely discussed Caribbean backstory to a symposium on Negro art that W. E. B. Du Bois ran in TheCrisis through much of 1926. As a backdrop to US-tropical American fissures, the discussion charts some of the graphic, textual, and representative tensions between Alain Locke’s Survey Graphic, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” and The New Negro anthology and rival work by Eric Walrond and Miguel Covarrubias in Vanity Fair. In the foreground, it examines how Knopf’s 1925 edition of Haldane Macfall’s 1898 novel, The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer – which is virtually unheard of today – prompted one of the most significant discussions on the issue of black representation in the arts in the 1920s

Cyril Briggs: Guns, Bombs, Spooks and Writing the Revolution

In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Cyril Briggs founded the journal Crusader in 1918 and, a year later, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), an organization closely linked with the Communist Party of America (CPUSA)—often seen as a black ‘wing’ of the party. Galvanized by the Russian Revolution, Briggs devoted himself to both international communism and black liberation. Briggs attempted to sustain a balance between his “black” and “red” activism. While he and fellow ABB members sought to influence Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and hoped to federate a number of black organizations, they also pushed the Communist International (Comintern) and CPUSA to consider the plight of black people. Briggs’s views concerning black liberation became increasingly militant, peaking around the 1921 Tulsa race riot, earning him the especial attention of the Bureau of Investigation which classified the ABB “entirely radical”. This essay focuses on the 1918-1922 period, the lifespan of the Crusader. This timeline intersects with a variety of world events with black-red historical resonance: the close of the First World War in 1918; the US race riots or “Red Summer” of 1919; the creation of Comintern and the Communist Party of America in 1919; the Russian Civil War; the foundation of the League of Nations in 1920; the 1921 Tulsa race riots. Throughout its publication, the Crusader contained revolutionary and anti-colonial writing on a range of topics including the Mexican Revolution, Irish nationalism, armed self-defence and Caribbean self-rule. The aim here is to examine how the Russian Revolution in conjunction with these momentous world developments inspired Briggs and other contributors to the Crusader. The role played by the 1921 Tulsa race riots and its relation to the prominence of the ABB and state surveillance form a key part of the discussion. The suggestive links between the fiction and non-fiction of Briggs and contributors like Romeo L. Dougherty to the magazine and the documents of US surveillance agents are examined. Specifically, the letters of agent “800”, James Wormley Jones, and Briggs’s short story, “The Ray of Fear” serve as points of comparison. The argument being forwarded is that both the output of the Crusader and that of surveillance agents like Jones contributed to an imaginary of Black power—some forty to fifty years before the slogan became popular

Between the Bocas: A Literary Geography of Western Trinidad

Situated opposite the mouth of the Orinoco River, western Trinidad has long been considered an entrepôt to mainland South America. Trinidad’s geographic position—seen as strategic by various imperial governments—led to many heterogeneous peoples from across the region and globe settling or being relocated there. The calm waters around the Gulf of Paria on the western fringes of Trinidad induced settlers to construct a harbour, Port of Spain, around which the modern capital has been formed. From its colonial roots into the postcolonial era, western Trinidad therefore has played an especial part in the shaping of the island’s literature. Viewed from one perspective, western Trinidad might be deemed as narrating the heart of the modern state’s national literature. Alternatively, the political threats posed around San Fernando in Trinidad’s southwest in the 1930s and from within the capital in the 1970s present a different picture of western Trinidad—one in which the fractures of Trinidad and Tobago’s projected nationalism are prevalent. While sugar remains a dominant narrative in Caribbean literary studies, this book offers a unique literary perspective on matters too often perceived as the sole preserve of sociological, anthropological or geographical studies. The legacy of the oil industry and the development of the suburban commuter belt of East-West Corridor, therefore, form considerable discursive nodes, alongside other key Trinidadian sites, such as Woodford Square, colonial houses and the urban yards of Port of Spain. This study places works by well-known authors such as V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, alongside writing by Michel Maxwell Philip, Marcella Fanny Wilkins, E. L. Joseph, Earl Lovelace, Ismith Khan, Monique Roffey, Arthur Calder-Marshall and the largely neglected novelist, Yseult Bridges, who is almost entirely forgotten today. Using fiction, calypso, history, memoir, legal accounts, poetry, essays and journalism, this study opens with an analysis of Trinidad’s nineteenth century literature and offers twentieth century and more contemporary readings of the island in successive chapters. Chapters are roughly arranged in chronological order around particular sites and topoi, while literature from a variety of authors of British, Caribbean, Irish and Jewish descent is represented