Cultural Resistance Through Art During the Harlem Renaissance, Essay Example

World War I profoundly alter the socio-cultural landscape in the United States, provided the impulses that undergirded the germination of the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. This movement was a literary and artistic flowering in which black writers and artists portrayed black culture as high culture in a unique and highly stylized manner. The cultural artifacts that emanated from this movement represents cultural forms of resistance against white hegemony in an attempt to deconstruct a firmly embedded and stringent racial status quo. In addition to the development of radical self-expression in the African American community, art granted African Americans a platform to become politically engaged. Ultimately, art enabled African Americans to construct a counter narrative about their lived experiences in a country that has muted their voices in the grand narrative and has skewed official narratives about the history of African Americans in the United States.

A comparison of varying perceptions of “black art” elucidates how art can function as a mechanism Black conservative George Schuyler penned The Negro Art Hokum, which was a scathing attack against the very concept of “negro art.” Schuyler decried the existence of a distinct black culture predicated on the fundamental  premise that whites and blacks living in America are equals. In response, the celebrated black poet Langston Hughes penned a short essay entitled The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain in which he expounded on the quotidian anguish of a collective racial group that has been degraded and discriminated against for over two centuries. He lauded the celebration of African-American cultural flowering and innovation as a means of resisting a society that has a possessive investment in whiteness, thereby rendering African Americans subaltern and second-class citizens. Indeed, cultural products created during the Harlem Renaissance boldly expressed and portrayed the unique, lived experiences of the black masses. While both of these narratives about black art are filtered through the prism of class, Langston Hughes’ viewport retains greater currency because he viewed art as a mechanism that empowered the consciousness of a stigmatized and oppressed people rather than belittling them. Hughes’ sensibility to the history of African Americans in the United States and the achievements therein overtly rejects the possessive investment in whiteness that has defined America since its inception.