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

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

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

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

by Michael Soto

Paperback(First Edition)

$26.95 
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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781625342508
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date: 11/04/2016
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

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.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction The True Measure of a Renaissance 1

1 Measure for Measure for Measure: Three Ems in American Racial Census Taking 12

2 Harlem Society: Practicing Theory 41

3 Harlem Diversity: Nations within a Nation 71

4 Harlem Modernity: Inventing the New Negro 99

5 Harlem Geography: Race and the Spatial Imagination 129

Epilogue Census Geography and the Burdens of Representation 153

Appendix: Race/Color Categories Employed by the U.S. Census, 1790-2010 163

Notes 171

Index 195

What People are Saying About This

Gary Holcomb

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance takes Harlem Renaissance studies in a valuable new direction, offering a reading of the metaphorical meaning of the New Negro movement and Black Modernism through the way in which not only the U.S. state recorded and determined racial identity, but, more important, how New Negro intellectuals articulated blackness and African American identity during the interwar, modernist period.

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