FIRE!! Writers, Musicians, and Visual Artists of the Harlem Renaissance I: 1918-1929

Exploding in the 1920s and 1930s the creative energy of Harlem’s poets, painters, novelists, jazz and blues musicians, sculptors, photographers, graphic designers, and filmmakers changed the face of New York City and established the northern Manhattan neighborhood as the intellectual and artistic Black capital of the world. The urgent new ideas, images, and sounds generated in this period of radical self-reinvention had a profound ripple effect that is still felt today in all corners of U.S. culture. This course explores the lives and works of its most important figures.Though the material is divided into two eight-week courses—with the economic crash of 1929 ending the first and the resulting Great Depression beginning the second— they share thematic frames and can be taken in any order or alone. *from the journal FIRE!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists (1926).

Course Outline

Course Syllabus

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No Class June 19