The Harlem Renaissance writer's use primitivism in defining black identity, it is especially a male fantasy. It is easier to imagine men as roustabouts, vagabonds, bums and heroes, harder to draw sympathetic females whose whole existence is their bodies and instinct. . . . Without women, and without children, there can be no race or race consciousness." (Nott C. S. 1969)
The Harlem Renaissance was not the half realized efforts of imaginative individuals, but a "complex field of sounding strategies" drawn from the collective experience and consciousness of black peoples, "the spirit house and space of black habitation." Freedom not frustration; openness not closure; ingenuity not imitation; assertion not acceptance--"the human will's resistance to tyranny and the human mind's masterful and insistent engagement with forms and deformations"--marked the birth, the rebirth, and the birthright of the Harlem Renaissance. Likewise, in his own scholarship and that of others, we see not only a shift from an "Anglo-American space-time," to what a national racial expressivity, but a linking of this cultural emphasis to the larger universe of African culture.
Freed themselves, these scholars have found in others a freedom and vitality earlier scholars all but failed to imagine. The "discovery" of the Harlem Renaissance itself mirrors this renaissance of the imagination and serves, in turn, to sustain these imaginative revisions. However, just as scholarship both nourishes and is nourished by the challenges to intellectual and political authority presently sweeping the world, there remains an inner tension, at least a question, that is not easily resolved and opens onto an understanding of the past, of the Harlem Renaissance, that has yet to be addressed.
Basically, Obsessive concern with race was already an important component of American culture, and in the 1920s it emerged in new forms..........
