Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Case of Countee Cullen

• Published in: Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.) Vol. 14; no. 3; pp. 507 - 515
• Main Author: Kuenz, Jane
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2007
• Subjects: African American literature; African Americans; American literature; Cullen, Countee (1903-1946); Folk music; Johnson, James Weldon (1871-1938); Locke, Alain LeRoy (1886-1954); Logic; Modernism; Poetry; Racism; Rock music; Sexuality; Thurman, Wallace (1902-1934); Harlem-New York City New York; United States > US
• ISSN: 1071-6068; 1080-6601; 1080-6601
• DOI: 10.1353/mod.2007.0064

Most prior literary work was simply invisible, and too much of it suffered from "bombast, bathos and artificiality," as Alain Locke put it, especially when compared to the era's genuine contributions in popular music, the growing commercial success of which threatened to reveal, in the same "loser wins" logic Shumway borrows from Bourdieu, its essential inauthenticity, both racially and aesthetically.1 The studied conventionality and sheer badness of much late nineteenth-century African American writing, poetry in particular, while similar in kind to the worst output of the most popular white writers at the time, was also a direct consequence of the self-censorship imposed in response to the racism of post-Reconstruction American culture (e.g., where racist notions about black women's sexuality led inexorably to the unassailable virtue of fictional heroines).