Teaching Literature of the Harlem Renaissance: Primary Materials
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Johnson Reprint Corp, 1968.
Fisher, Rudolph. City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher. U of Missouri P, 2018.
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad., Knopf, 1995
Hurston, Zora Neale. Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings. 1942. Library of America, 1995.
—. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. HarperCollins, 2000.
Johnson, Helene. “A Southern Road.” Fire!!: Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. The Fire Press, 1926, p. 17.
Kramer, Victor A., editor. The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined. AMS Press, 1987.
Larsen, Nella. Passing. 1929. Edited by Carla Kaplan, Norton, 2007.
—. Quicksand and Passing. 1928, 1929. Edited by Deborah E. McDowell, Rutgers UP, 1986.
Locke, Alain. The New Negro. 1925. Touchstone, 1999
McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay. Harcourt, Brace and Company, Google Books.
West, Dorothy. The Living is Easy. 1948. Feminist Press, 1982.
Hannah Höch: Images and Catalogue
Maloney, Meghan. “Hannah Höch and the Dada Montage.” In the In-Between: Journal of New and New Media Photography, April 29, 2013. Accessed April 9, 2018.
Jansen, Charlotte. “Hannah Höch’s Reimagining of Indigenous African Artefacts.” AnOther, August 3, 2016. Accessed April 9, 2018.
Höch, Hannah. Abduction. 1925. ArtStack. Accessed April 14, 2018.
The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Organized by Maria Makela and Peter Boswell. Essays by Maria Makela, Peter Boswell, Carolyn Lanchner, chronology by Kristin Makholm. Published by the Walker Art Center. Catalog from the exhibition held at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1996. Accessed April 11, 2018.
Recommended Reading:
In 2018 the New York Times launched an interactive feature entitled “Overlooked”: a series of obituaries for notable women not deemed notable enough at the times of their deaths to receive actual obituaries in the newspaper. These figures include Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, Ida B. Wells, and Qiu Jin.
Readers can submit a form suggesting additional “overlooked” figures, and the potential for use in the classroom seems vast. In addition to working with students on texts by and about these figures, and on students’ own (possibly multimodal or interactive) compositions along the lines of “Overlooked,” instructors could ask questions like: How does the genre of the obituary work as a form of life writing, and how does it function to celebrate, commemorate, narrativize, and/or erase? How do text and image work together? How has the work of recovery impacted the Times‘s decision to devote time and resources (precious commodities in our information-saturated media moment) to pursue this project, and what work remains to be done? What selection criteria seem to be at work in their choices, how do they square with the selections we make vis à vis canon, etc., and are they open for critique/interrogation? Is this a feminist project? In many ways, this feature makes visible the fruits of—and the ongoing need for—the work of recovery, as well as the questions raised by that work.
Here is the “Overlooked” obituary for Nella Larsen (accessed April 11, 2018):