The Rural Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

The Rural Harlem Renaissance shows how African American rural culture shaped the work and reception of well-known Harlem Renaissance artists during the decade when America became a predominantly urban nation. Scholarship on this period has focused, in the main, on Black migration to cities, and has implicitly accepted the premise that modernity was categorically urban; this book documents the distinctly rural modernity that African American farmers and others pursued in the 1920s and the role it played in defining its urban correlate. It presents the early poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer against the rich archival backdrop of Black rural education, community uplift, lynching, and technical and conceptual developments in agriculture (including experimentation with industrial techniques). The book documents how these and other period authors who sought to represent African American rural life in the 1920s elided or accommodated the alternate rural modernity they confronted.