The Promotion of Black Writers and Writings of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance, also called the New Negro Movement, represents the period of outstanding literary vigour and creativity centred in New York™s black ghetto of Harlem in the 1920s. The Harlem Renaissance is the name given to the period from the end of World War I and through the middle of the 1930s Depression during which a group of talented African-American writers produced a sizable body of works.

The Harlem Renaissance, which coincided with a similar renaissance in the visual arts and with the great creative and commercial growth of jazz, altered the character of literature created by many African-American writers. These moved from quaint dialect works and conventional imitations of white writers to sophisticated explorations of black life and culture that revealed and stimulated a new confidence and racial pride.

The Harlem Renaissance was more than just a literary movement. It included racial consciousness, racial integration, the explosion of music particularly jazz and blues, painting, dramatic revues, and some others. Common themes to be found are alienation, marginality, the use of folk material, the use of blues tradition, or the problems of writing for an elite audience.