Reading twentieth century urban black cultural movements through popular periodicals: a case study of the Harlem Renaissance and South Africa’s Sophiatown

Abstract

There exists a long history of debate among scholars in the humanities and social sciences regarding the potential of literature and popular culture to be socially transformative and to generate collective identities that empower a community. This transformative power of literature and popular culture, particularly in terms of the value granted to oppressed peoples seeking expression or catharsis, represents perhaps the truest value of cultural production. Its long-term contributions to the resilience of racially oppressed communities both in the USA and worldwide cannot be overstated. In Sophiatown and during the Harlem Renaissance, two periodicals, Drum and The Crisis, allowed black writers and readers alike to share in the formation of new modes of identity that spoke back in a firm voice to the long-standard stereotypes of blackness that permeated white-dominated popular culture. In both South Africa and Harlem, these publications gave voice to a distinctly black and urban culture, resisting notions of the “tribal” or “plantation” black subject. These movements were historically significant both within the study of black culture and literature and within the trajectory of socially transformative political movements.

Keywords:

• Harlem
• Sophiatown
• identity
• Drum
• The Crisis
• NAACP

Notes

¹ Halisi, Black Political Thought in the Making of South African Democracy, 4.

² Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”.

³ Masilela, “Black South African Literature”.

⁴ “African Americans in World War I”.

⁵ Astor, The Right to Fight.

⁶ Tuttle, Race Riot.

⁷ O’Neil and Conrad, I Was Right On Time, 43.

⁸ Gross, “The Negro in American Literary Criticism,” 277.

⁹ Pilgrim, “The Coon Caricature”.

¹⁰ Gross, “The Negro in American Literary Criticism,” 278.

¹¹ Gates “The New Negro and the Black Image”.

¹² Locke, “The New Negro,” 3.

¹³ Ibid.,

¹⁴ Gates Jr. and Higginbotham, Harlem Renaissance, 167.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Wormser, “The Crisis Magazine Established”.

¹⁷ Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 513.

¹⁸ Du Bois, “The Negro Since 1900: A Progress Report,” 411.

¹⁹ Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro, 20.

²⁰ Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 514.

²¹ “Peonage,” The Crisis,: 304.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ “The Waco horror,” The Crisis, 4.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Fauset, “Nostalgia,” 157.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Ibid., 158.

³⁰ “Up North,” The Crisis, 223.

³¹ Ibid. 224.

³² “Jazz Interpreted,” The Crisis, 81.

³³ Goodhew, Respectability and Resistance, 3.

³⁴ Lodge, “The Destruction of Sophiatown,” 85.

³⁵ Halisi, Black Political Thought, 37.

³⁶ Patel, The World of Nat Nakasa, 10.

³⁷ Masilela, “Black South African Literature”.

³⁸ Vinson, “Sea Kaffirs”, 281–303.

³⁹ Graham and Walters, Langston Hughes, 35.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 36.

⁴¹ The election of Malan set forth the legal institution of (already) separatist policies from British and Dutch colonization such as the Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, The Population Registration Act of 1950, as well as segregating schools, work reservations, and busses.

⁴² Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 48.

⁴³ Gready, “The Sophiatown Writers of the Fifties”, 146.

⁴⁴ Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 32.

⁴⁵ Graham and Walters, Langston Hughes, 15.

⁴⁶ Chapman, The Drum Decade, 186.

⁴⁷ Sampson, “Obituary: Anthony Sampson”.

⁴⁸ Douglas, The Story of South African Jazz, 65.

⁴⁹ Masilela, “Black South African literature.”

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Rabkin, “Drum Magazine,” 54.

⁵² Nxumalo, “Mr. Drum Finds Out,” Drum, 12.

⁵³ Ibid., 14.

⁵⁴ Nxumalo, “Mr. Drum Goes to Jail,” Drum, 15.

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ Rabkin, Drum Magazine, 54.

⁵⁷ Mattera, Gone With the Twilight, 98.

⁵⁸ Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi, 7.

⁵⁹ Gready, “The Sophiatown Writers of the Fifties,” 150.

⁶⁰ Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 173.

⁶¹ Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi, 131.

⁶² Rabkin, Drum Magazine, 1.

⁶³ Ibid., 27.

⁶⁴ Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi, 71.

⁶⁵ Biko, I Write What I Like, 45.

⁶⁶ Themba, “Marta,” 32.

⁶⁷ Rabkin, Drum Magazine, 61.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 62.

⁶⁹ Masilela, “The Black Atlantic and South African Modernity,” 92.

⁷⁰ Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, 14.

⁷¹ Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 144.