Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919

by Barbara McCaskill, Caroline Gebhard

Overview

The years between the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of World War I mark a pivotal moment in African American cultural production. Christened the “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem” era by the novelist Charles Chesnutt, these years look back to the antislavery movement and forward to the artistic flowering and racial self-consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance.
Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem offers fresh perspectives on the literary and cultural achievements of African American men and women during this critically neglected, though vitally important, period of our nation's past. Using a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the sixteen scholars gathered here offer both a reappraisal and celebration of African American cultural production during these influential decades. Alongside discussions of political and artistic icons such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and James Weldon Johnson are essays revaluing figures such as the writers Paul and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the New England painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Georgia-based activists Lucy Craft Laney and Emmanuel King Love.
Contributors explore an array of forms from fine art to anti-lynching drama, from sermons to ragtime and blues, and from dialect pieces and early black musical theater to serious fiction.
Contributors include: Frances Smith Foster, Carla L. Peterson, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Barbara Ryan, Robert M. Dowling, Barbara A. Baker, Paula Bernat Bennett, Philip J. Kowalski, Nikki L. Brown, Koritha A. Mitchell, Margaret Crumpton Winter, Rhonda Reymond, and Andrew J. Scheiber.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814731680
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2006
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Barbara McCaskill is General Sandy Beaver teaching professor and associate professor of English at The University of Georgia.

Caroline Gebhard is associate professor of English at Tuskegee University.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction	1
Part I	Reimagining the Past
1	Creative Collaboration: As African American as Sweet Potato Pie	17
2	Commemorative Ceremonies and Invented Traditions: History, Memory, and Modernity in the "New Negro" Novel of the Nadir	34
Part II	Meeting Freedom: Self-Invention, Artistic Innovation, and Race Progress (1870s-1880s)
3	Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister	59
4	"Manly Husbands and Womanly Wives": The Leadership of Educator Lucy Craft Laney	74
5	Old and New Issue Servants: "Race" Men and Women Weigh In	89
6	Savannah's Colored Tribune, the Reverend E. K. Love, and the Sacred Rebellion of Uplift	101
Part III	Encountering Jim Crow: African American Literature and the Mainstream (1890s)
7	A Marginal Man in Black Bohemia: James Weldon Johnson in the New York Tenderloin	117
8	Jamming with Julius: Charles Chesnutt and the Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem Blues	133
9	Rewriting Dunbar: Realism, Black Women Poets, and the Genteel	146
10	Inventing a "Negro Literature": Race, Dialect, and Gender in the Early Work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson	162
Part IV	Turning the Century: New Political, Cultural, and Personal Aesthetics (1900-1917)
11	No Excuses for Our Dirt: Booker T. Washington and a "New Negro" Middle Class	181
12	War Work, Social Work, Community Work: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Federal War Work Agencies, and Southern African American Women	197
13	Antilynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of African American Drama	210
14	Henry Ossawa Tanner and W. E. B. Du Bois: African American Art and "High Culture" at the Turn into the Twentieth Century	231
15	The Folk, the School, and the Marketplace: Locations of Culture in The Souls of Black Folk	250
	Topical List of Selected Works	269
	About the Contributors	281
	Index	285

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem is a valuable book. These fifteen essays offer a broad overview of a rich and complicated period and complement the growing body of scholarship that takes as its focus this important and previously under-appreciated era.”
- The Journal of the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States

,

“ Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem presents a compelling case for viewing the years between 1877 and 1919 as a time of outstanding literary and cultural achievement for African American men and women. . . . McCaskill and Gebhard are to be commended for the thought-provoking volume that identifies convincingly and documents meticulously the origins of "modern" African American literature. Based on solid scholarship and extensive interdisciplinary research, Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem is a significant resource for scholars in the fields of African American history and literature. 8221;
-The Journal of African American History

,

“This is a rich portrait of a complex period that has been long neglected.”
-Booklist

,

“This is a vital reappraisal. These essays compellingly return to the often-neglected period known in African American history as 'The Nadir' to ensure that it will never again be seen as a cultural disappointment.”
-Carla Kaplan,author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters

Editorial Reviews

"This is a vital reappraisal. These essays compellingly return to the often-neglected period known in African American history as 'The Nadir' to ensure that it will never again be seen as a cultural disappointment."

Carla Kaplan

" Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem presents a compelling case for viewing the years between 1877 and 1919 as a time of outstanding literary and cultural achievement for African American men and women. . . . McCaskill and Gebhard are to be commended for the thought-provoking volume that identifies convincingly and documents meticulously the origins of “modern” African American literature. Based on solid scholarship and extensive interdisciplinary research, Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem is a significant resource for scholars in the fields of African American history and literature. 8221;"

The Journal of African American History

"Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem is a valuable book. These fifteen essays offer a broad overview of a rich and complicated period and complement the growing body of scholarship that takes as its focus this important and previously under-appreciated era."

The Journal of the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States

"This is a rich portrait of a complex period that has been long neglected."

Booklist

"This is a rich portrait of a complex period that has been long neglected."

Booklist

Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem presents a compelling case for viewing the years between 1877 and 1919 as a time of outstanding literary and cultural achievement for African American men and women. . . . McCaskill and Gebhard are to be commended for the thought-provoking volume that identifies convincingly and documents meticulously the origins of “modern” African American literature. Based on solid scholarship and extensive interdisciplinary research, Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem is a significant resource for scholars in the fields of African American history and literature. 8221;
-The Journal of African American History

“This is a rich portrait of a complex period that has been long neglected.”
-Booklist

“This is a vital reappraisal. These essays compellingly return to the often-neglected period known in African American history as 'The Nadir' to ensure that it will never again be seen as a cultural disappointment.”
-Carla Kaplan,author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters

“Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem is a valuable book. These fifteen essays offer a broad overview of a rich and complicated period and complement the growing body of scholarship that takes as its focus this important and previously under-appreciated era.”
- The Journal of the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States

From the Publisher