The Black Renaissance and the Radical Politics of Black Print Culture, 1915- 1945
Video Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Yolanda Mackey-Barkers
Exhibition Number 535
Abstract
This project considers how cultural producers involved in the Black social movement known as the Harlem Renaissance utilized literature and literary production as a vehicle to invoke political action, seek racial justice, and advocate for social reform. As a social history, this project highlights the radical politics of Black print culture during the years 1915 to 1945. It foregrounds the gender, economic and political dynamics of Black publishing by exposing the androcentric networks and re-centers Black women’s intellectual labor by turning to the expansiveness of their work. In it I offer new perspective on the ways that Black creatives navigated the publishing industry during a time of efflorescence and contraction by foregrounding the financial dimensions of publishing, the significance of diasporic networking, and the influence of radical politics on their work on and beyond the page. My critical archival methodology has shown that as the literature of this period employed an increasingly radical politics, the financial backing for this work all but disappeared. By turning to rejected or posthumously published literature and centering Black women’s intellectual labor, I argue that Black creatives responded to the conditions and exclusions of publishing during this era by developing alternative means to circulate their work and ideas, including curating private readerships, building strategic alliances, founding and editing magazines, and engaging in the politics of radical organizing. By attending to the tension between Black radical politics and print culture, I demonstrate the innovative measures Black creatives took to share their work with public audiences.
Importance
This project offers a necessary retelling of the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movements by starting the story where Black women enter. Drawing primarily from an archive of unpublished writing, correspondence, and the day-to-day documentation of memos and reports, the project stitches together understudied records to recover the critical role Black women played in advancing radical politics while illuminating how they responded to the political and financial exigencies that limited publishing opportunities in the 1930s and 1940s.
DEI Statement
This project offers a necessary retelling of the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movements by starting the story where Black women enter. Drawing primarily from an archive of unpublished writing, correspondence, and the day-to-day documentation of memos and reports, the project stitches together understudied records to recover the critical role Black women played in advancing radical politics while illuminating how they responded to the political and financial exigencies that limited publishing opportunities in the 1930s and 1940s.