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The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance

Two portions of The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance appeared in print before January 2008. Part of chapter three appeared in Journal of American Studies (40: 3) in 2006. The book chapter, which is 15,000 words long, is an expanded version of this 7,000 word article. The second half of chapter five (pp. 167-186) draws upon ‘Moses and Nation-building: Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European’, which was published in Comparative American Studies (5:3) in 2008, but there is a shift of emphasis in the argument towards collage form.

Collage aesthetics is a new, particularly extensive, concept, which establishes connections between collage patterns in modernist visual art, Boasian anthropology and Harlem Renaissance writings. Refusing any single interpretative frame for African American modernism, it opens up multiple cultural, political and aesthetic contexts for reading formal innovation. The volume’s sustained attention to revisions of Boasian anthropology necessitated extensive research into the writings of Boas and his students. The chapter on The New Negro supplied new evidence about the anthology’s conception and reception as a result of archival research into numerous “little magazines” and modernist anthologies as well as newspapers and periodicals.