ENG 4938 - Spring 2026 - Okonkwo

This course focuses on the 1920s “New Negro” movement or Harlem Renaissance, a moment of vibrant cultural and intellectual activity by African American and other African Diaspora reformers, poets, novelists, playwrights, actors, painters, and musicians. The Harlem Renaissance, alongside the black experience that in part informed it, is crucial to our fullest understanding of not just (American) modernity per se, but also European and Anglo-American modernism. We will stress the works of some of the period’s prominent thinkers and artists: W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, George Schuyler, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer. A number of critical expositions would help us frame our exploration of the focal novels: one, Alain Locke’s, which announces and celebrates the presence of the “New Negro”; two, by Jesse Matz, who introduces us to the modern novel; three, Nathan Irvin Huggins’s, which judges the movement a “failure”; and four, a rebuttal by Houston A. Baker, Jr., who rejects Huggins’s conclusion and insists on the movement’s successes. No matter one’s views on the era, or how literary historians parse its contexts, debates, interracial exchanges, accomplishments, legacy, and heyday—1920-1929, 1920-1935, or 1925-1960—what remains true is that the Harlem Renaissance, the first Black Arts movement, produced some of the most well-known black intellectual and creative figures to-date. Our goal is to gain a complex appreciation of this movement and its place, especially relative to the Jazz Age, to American modernist historiography, concerns and aesthetics.