The Transitional Phase — Time of Scepticism

Abstract

There are considerable differences of opinion among literary critics as to the causes of the marked change which took place in Afro-American literature in the 1930s. Those who identify the Harlem Renaissance with exoticism and see the white primitivists and patrons as the driving force behind the movement, argue that it experienced ‘a spectacular demise’.¹ What is more: the quick collapse is taken as evidence of its superficiality ² Others — usually those who emphasise the Afro-American rather than the ‘white’ origins of the Harlem Renaissance — do not see the Great Depression as marking the end of the movement. They argue that there was a temporary recession in literary activity which had been fully overcome by the end of the 1930s.³ However, the notion of ‘renaissance’ would lose all precision if one were to describe the following decades summarily as a ‘second period of Renaissance’, as Franklin has done.⁴ Most authors of the generation between the 1920s and 1960s were guided by intentions which differed from those of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet, to attempt an exact analysis of the ‘post-Renaissance’⁵ generation was presumably not Franklin’s main concern anyway. He wanted to draw attention to the continuity in Afro-American literature. To this extent he has certainly made an important point.