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Harlem Renaissance Literature Top 10 List

Harlem Renaissance Literature Top 10 List

The Must-Knows of Harlem Renaissance Literature

(1) The Great Migration

It's a bird, it's a plane… wait no, not that kind of migration. This was a massive movement of Southern blacks to the North.

(2) The "New Negro"

Think an Olivia Pope-style "total makeover" for the image of the ex-slave.

(3) The Rise of Jazz

Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday  = the inventors of jazz. Enough said.

(4) Duality (or "Twoness")

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I… took both? That's what happens when you've got two perspectives (black and white) dueling it out in one body. And that's duality, dear readers.

(5) Racial Division

Self-explanatory. We're not such a big fan of this one.

(6) Pan-Africanism

A call for African people across the globe to unite.

(7) Modernism

You gotta be new, you gotta be fresh, and you gotta be avant-garde… well, what counted as those things for people in the early 1900s, that is.

(8) High/Low Culture

What you get when you combine ballet with Britney Spears—only with a jazz soundtrack and cooler artists. Which is to say: when you mix what's usually considered "high art" with "popular art" or the mundane.

(9) Socialism/Communism

Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin walk into a bar… You know, that movement to create a classless, moneyless social order where everyone's equal and everyone works hard and everyone is happy forever.

(10) Urbanity

What do you think "urban" means? "Cool", maybe? Sophisticated? Totally rad? So did a lot of people back in the Harlem Renaissance. Bam.