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Harlem and Abroad

Like other intractable figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement’s visual artists sometimes exceeded their expected parameters, and thus their anticipated representativeness of a locality. Their images, in other words, did not automatically disclose Harlem-bound or even US-bound concerns. Now familiar through continual reproduction in exhibition catalogues, scholarly monographs and literary compendia, certain artworks from the period – such as Archibald J. Motley’s Blues (1929; Figure 1) and Aaron Douglas’s Congo (c. 1928; Figure 2) – subverted any definition of the Harlem Renaissance that would hinge on a narrowly delimited urban geography or national imaginary. Motley, who painted ‘Blues’ during a stint in Paris (rather than in his native Chicago, or Harlem), explained that his subjects – musicians and dancers in a café ‘practically on the outskirts’ of town – were ‘all people from Senegal, people from Martinique . . . people from North Africa and French people, but no Americans’ (Barrie np). Douglas, from his Harlem studio, differently dreamed up mystic rituals performed in a timeless Africa, and cultivated a modernist sensibility by fusing Art Deco aesthetics and Ancient Egyptian figuration. Moreover, and besides manifesting in subject matter and style, Harlem Renaissance internationalism developed through direct cross-cultural encounters. The transcontinental itineraries of Harlem Renaissance artists are by now well documented in literary and historical scholarship and in art-historical projects. However, whereas previous work has largely focused on ‘New Negro’ and diaspora connections, my premise here is that international conceptualisations of a ‘renaissance’ also merit consideration. Examining the term’s evolution abroad offers a framework for situating interrelated developments in places like Oxford, Cairo, Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Johannesburg in addition to the better-known ‘overseas’ locales of London, Paris and Havana. The purpose of this inquiry is neither to detract from the importance of Harlem as a cultural hub, nor to impose an African American model onto a wider art history. Rather, it is to chart how international perspectives fed into and were furthered through the Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. One compelling, if perhaps counterintuitive place to begin tracking ‘renaissance’ discourse is Oxford University, where Alain Locke – eventually a key player in the Harlem Renaissance – arrived to read Philosophy in autumn 1907. The notion of a black ‘renaissance’ had already surfaced in Boston in 1901, in a book review by the Guyana-born writer William Stanley Braithwaite (73; Gates 2), whom Locke would meet on his return to Harvard University for graduate school in 1916 (Stewart 274−78). But Oxford was apparently where the term began to be consistently employed in a community comprised of young intellectuals from the United States, India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Europe, Egypt, South Africa and elsewhere. The coordinating body for this mixed coterie was The Oxford University Cosmopolitan Club (Figure 3), founded in spring 1907, which sponsored regular lectures and gatherings and oversaw the publication of a journal, The Oxford Cosmopolitan, whose first issue Locke edited. Locke’s biographer Jeffrey Stewart has proposed that the Cosmopolitan Club’s activities in 1907–1909 directly informed Locke’s later project of ‘using art to activate an anti-imperialist African Diaspora renaissance centred in America’ (150). Taking cues from Stewart, it is possible to read this ‘renaissance’ discourse as undergoing a kind of internationalisation at Oxford, where a handful of Cosmopolitan Club members, hailing from various parts of the British Empire, contributed ideas spawned from homegrown nationalist movements that had already adopted the term and/or variations thereof. The discourse is partly evident in the abbreviated essays that appeared in the Cosmopolitan: Satya V Mukerjea praised the Bengali editor and writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji (aka Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay) ‘as a representative and significant figure of the Indian Renaissance’ (10); and Hamed El Alaily paid homage to the Egyptian nationalist Mustafa Kamil as engineer of ‘an Islamic renaissance, based upon science and freedom of thought’ (22). Locke himself does not seem to have employed ‘renaissance’ in print at this early date, Joshua I Cohen