Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem

by McCaskill, Barbara

• ISBN13: 9780814731680
• ISBN10: 0814731686
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-06-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

View theTable of Contents. Read theIntroduction."This is a vital reappraisal. These essays compellingly return to the often-neglected period known in African American history as 'The Nadir' to ensure that it will never again be seen as a cultural disappointment."-Carla Kaplan, author ofZora Neale Hurston: A Life in LettersThe years between the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of World War I mark a pivotal moment in African American cultural production. Christened the "Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem" era by the novelist Charles Chesnutt, these years look back to the antislavery movement and forward to the artistic flowering and racial self-consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance.Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlemoffers fresh perspectives on the literary and cultural achievements of African American men and women during this critically neglected, though vitally important, period of our nation's past. Using a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the sixteen scholars gathered here offer both a reappraisal and celebration of African American cultural production during these influential decades. Alongside discussions of political and artistic icons such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and James Weldon Johnson are essays revaluing figures such as the writers Paul and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the New England painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Georgia-based activists Lucy Craft Laney and Emmanuel King Love.Contributors explore an array of forms from fine art to anti-lynching drama, from sermons to ragtime and blues, and from dialect pieces and early black musical theater to serious fiction.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(16)
Caroline Gebhard and Barbara McCaskill
PART I: Reimagining the Past
1 Creative Collaboration: As African American as Sweet Potato Pie	17	(17)
Frances Smith Foster
2 Commemorative Ceremonies and Invented Traditions: History, Memory, and Modernity in the "New Negro" Novel of the Nadir	34	(25)
Carla L. Peterson
PART II: Meeting Freedom: Self-Invention, Artistic Innovation, and Race Progress (1870's-1880's)
3 Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister	59	(15)
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
4 "Manly Husbands and Womanly Wives": The Leadership of Educator Lucy Craft Laney	74	(15)
Audrey Thomas McCluskey
5 Old and New Issue Servants: "Race" Men and Women Weigh In	89	(12)
Barbara Ryan
6 Savannah's Colored Tribune, the Reverend E. K. Love, and the Sacred Rebellion of Uplift	101	(16)
Barbara McCaskill
PART III: Encountering Jim Crow: African American Literature and the Mainstream (189os)
7 A Marginal Man in Black Bohemia: James Weldon Johnson in the New York Tenderloin	117	(16)
Robert M. Dowling
8 Jamming with Julius: Charles Chesnutt and the Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem Blues	133	(13)
Barbara A. Baker
9 Rewriting Dunbar: Realism, Black Women Poets, and the Genteel	146	(16)
Paula Bernat Bennett
10 Inventing a "Negro Literature": Race, Dialect, and Gender in the Early Work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson	162	(19)
Caroline Gebhard
PART IV: Turning the Century: New Political, Cultural, and Personal Aesthetics (1900-1917)
11 No Excuses for Our Dirt: Booker T. Washington and a "New Negro" Middle Class	181	(16)
Philip J. Kowalski
12 War Work, Social Work, Community Work: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Federal War Work Agencies, and Southern African American Women	197	(13)
Nikki L. Brown
13 Antilynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of African American Drama	210	(21)
Koritha A. Mitchell
14 Henry Ossawa Tanner and W.E.B. Du Bois: African American Art and "High Culture" at the Turn into the Twentieth Century	231	(19)
Margaret Crumpton Winter and Rhonda Reymond
15 The Folk, the School, and the Marketplace: Locations of Culture in The Souls of Black Folk	250	(19)
Andrew J. Scheiber
Topical List of Selected Works	269	(12)
About the Contributors	281	(4)
Index	285