Measuring the Harlem Renaissance : The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary Form

Soto, Michael

ISBN 10: 1625342500 / ISBN 13: 9781625342508

Published by University of Massachusetts Press, 2016

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Measuring the Harlem Renaissance : The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary Form
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1625342500
• ISBN 13: 9781625342508
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

In this provocative study, Michael Soto examines African American cultural forms through the lens of census history to tell the story of how U.S. officialdom―in particular the Census Bureau―placed persons of African descent within a shifting taxonomy of racial difference, and how African American writers and intellectuals described a far more complex situation of interracial social contact and intra-racial diversity. What we now call African American identity and the literature that gives it voice emerged out of social, cultural, and intellectual forces that fused in Harlem roughly one century ago.

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance sifts through a wide range of authors and ideas―from W. E. B. Du Bois, Rudolph Fisher, and Nella Larsen to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, and from census history to the Great Migration―to provide a fresh take on late nineteenth―and twentieth―century literature and social thought. Soto reveals how Harlem came to be known as the "cultural capital of black America," and how these ideas left us with unforgettable fiction and poetry.

About the Author

Michael Soto is associate professor of English at Trinity University and author of The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American Literature.