"This was the year 1927 in the City of New York"
Author: Nella Larsen
Recommended Reading: Passing
All of us know that the gay and sparkling life of the so-called Negro Renaissance of the ‘30’s was not so gay and sparkling beneath the surface as it looked. . . It was a period when, at almost every Harlem upper-crust dance or party, one would be introduced to various distinguished white celebrities there as guests.” Langston Hughes “When the Negro was in Vogue
If you’ve taken my reading recommendation and begun Passing then perhaps these lines from Langston Hughes’s “When the Negro was in Vogue” will appear with particular vibrancy. Have you spotted Carl Von Vechten’s double Hugh Wentworth, who attends all of Irene’s soirees?
There are many parallels between the world Larsen depicts in Passing and Hughes’s retrospective essay on the height of the Harlem Renaissance which he calls “The Negro Renaissance.” Both authors write about the intersection of class and race in Black bourgeois society, both identify the unequal movement between Black neighborhoods like Harlem as sites of entertainment for white visitors while Irene must pass for white in order to gain entrance to a tea-room when she is feeling faint in the Chicago streets at the beginning of the novel. Both represent the imperfections of the society and the way “Gay sparkling life. . . was not so gay and sparkling.” For example, Irene and Brian’s ongoing conflict about whether to remain in New York or to move to Brazil (it was commonly believed that in Brazil there was no segregation). Irene is hopeful that New York and the United States are progressing while Brian believes there will be better opportunities for their family in a place that is not strictly divided by race.
This, Irene told her, was the year 1927 in the city of New York, and hundreds of white people of Hugh Wentworth’s type came to affairs in Harlem, more all the time. So many that Brian had said: “Pretty soon the colored people won’t be allowed in at all, or will have to sit in the Jim Crowed sections.” Passing Nella Larsen
Compare the above passage with this one from Hughes’s essay:
But some Harlemites thought of the millennium had come. They thought the race problem had at last been solved through Art plus Gladys Bently. They were sure the New Negro would lead a new life from then on in green pastures of tolerance created by Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Claude McKay, Duke Ellington, Bojangles, and Alain Locke.
I don’t know what made any Negroes think that—except that they were mostly intellectuals doing the thinking. The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any. As for all those white folks in the speakeasies and night clubs of Harlem—well, maybe a colored man could find some place to have a drink that the tourists hadn’t yet discovered.
Irene is clearly one of these Harlemites who believes the year 1927 is representative of progress and that with the passage of time things will get better while both Larsen as narrator (Irene Redfield is generally considered a standout example of a character with an unreliable point of view) and Hughes as essayist clearly see the problem as more complicated and more deeply rooted than a matter that can be solved by the arrival of tourists in Harlem.
I don’t want to go over too many of the parallels between the two texts because you should really read them in Hughes’s enchanting prose. Hughes’s essay both captures the romance of the age and at the same time provides a critical lens for putting pressure on our own romantic conceptions about what the Harlem Renaissance represents. While we tend to praise the works that came out of this movement many scholars remind us in their essays on the period that the Harlem Renaissance was hardly inclusive and largely exploitative. Our culture has benefited greatly from the cultural and artistic contributions of Black Americans, but too often those achievements are appropriated by the dominant rather than promoted or allowed to flourish and benefit the communities they originally came from. For example, think about the way that the Black body is used in something like Baz Lehrman’s recent adaptation of The Great Gatsby to give his film a sense of worldliness and glamour in flashes, instrumentalizing Black culture and Black bodies without questioning the conditions under which they exist.
Personally, my favorite texts are those that successfully walk the line between at once depicting the glamour of a particular age, its seductive qualities that made it what it was, and at the same time are critical of its content. For me both Passing and “When the Negro was in Vogue” represent the very best of this so I hope you’ll take some time to read them both, and join me next Tuesday to reflect on urbanism in the novela.
The version of the novel I have linked to is published by Chemeketa Press which is a press based out of Chemeketa Community College. I selected this version of the book because the press’s mission of making affordable versions of books for students seems like a laudable venture. There are other great versions, for example, the Norton edition (and Norton Press is collectively owned by their employees which also makes it a great press to support) which includes supplemental materials. I encourage you to consider supporting your local bookstore by purchasing from them, but should you want to support Maison Metropolitanist as a digital learning space buying through the affiliate link at Book Shop (linked above) is one way you can do so. For now, proceeds from the Maison Metropolitanist shop will go directly into the cost of running this project.