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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 5 page paper connecting the prevalence of the theme of black people 'passing' for white in the 1920s with the way black literature emulated white modernism during the same period. The paper concludes that in both cases, white culture was seen as superior and desirable. Both a bibliography listing seven sources and endnotes are appended to the paper.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_KBharlem.doc
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
Renaissance, after all, was a period during the 1920s when an entire people who had heretofore felt they had lost their culture on the slave ships suddenly realized they had
value and worth. A new kind of music developed that was different, distinctive, complex, exciting -- and based in the soulful melodies that had crossed the Atlantic from Africa. A
new literature arose that gave dignity and relevance to black people. There was black art and black theater -- and it was a far cry from Aunt Jemima and the
blackface minstrel shows. The development of this movement was as sudden, historically speaking, as the awakening of the Renaissance in Europe, which gave this new movement its name. There was
a sudden rush of works like Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jean Toomers Cane, both of which feature black protagonists and are set against a backdrop
of black culture. Yet it was during the Harlem Renaissance that Nella Larsen wrote her novel Passing which tells the story of a black woman pretending to be white; Wallace
Thurman, Jessie Fausset, and James Weldon Johnson all wrote on the same general theme. Why in an era in which black culture was suddenly being recognized would the theme of
hiding ones true race be significant? Two points must be made in order to answer this question. First, the literature of the Harlem Renaissance deliberately emulated that of whites --
in other words, it "passed" as white literature -- because black authors knew that adapting their subject matter to the prevailing literary movement, modernism, was the only way to sell
books in a white-dominated market. And secondly, the history of most black people, which means of most black writers, was one in which they had been discriminated against because of
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