2025 Online Seminars

Renaissance Fashioning:
Alain Locke, Aaron Douglas, and the Negro Renaissance

William N. West

Please join us on Friday, February 21 at 9:00pst/12:00est for a seminar discussion of Will West’s pre-circulated paper, “Renaissance Fashioning: Alain Locke, Aaron Douglas, and the Negro Renaissance” with Cherene Sherrard-Johnson as respondent.
Please Register Here.

From the time of the Renaissance itself through the nineteenth century, “Renaissance” referred to a particular time and place: Italy (more or less) around 1450 (plus or minus).  At the turn of the twentieth century, however, renaissance or renascence began to be imagined as a more general cultural phenomenon, as an Irish Renaissance (or Celtic Twilight), a Negro Renaissance, later a Twelfth-Century Renaissance or an American Renaissance, and not only as “The Renaissance.”  From a local historical event, renascence became a general principle of culture, a potential for brilliant renewal that could appear in times, places, and cultures outside early modern Europe.  “Every age,” observed the great scholar of the Renaissance Aby Warburg in 1926, “has the Renaissance of antiquity that it merits.”  But Warburg was not merely remarking on the infinite varieties of Renaissance.  He was also acknowledging that “The Renaissance” as an ideal always reflected back on the perspective from which it was recognized, and that it was often invoked in its many forms and contexts as tacit critique of the conditions of the present.  What we identify as the Renaissance—or a renascence—is not only a historical phenomenon, but both an event and an invention, a history of engagements with the changing problems of the present.  Accounts of the Renaissance present images of what we are not, but what retrospectively we might have been and might yet become. 

The cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s that named itself the Negro Renaissance was, to turn Jacob Burckhardt’s phrase, among the firstborn of the children of Renaissance Europe, transporting the metaphor of rebirth outside of its previous cultural and historical context and thus transforming its meaning.  In 1920, W.E.B. DuBois observed a readiness for “a renaissance of American Negro literature,” but the movement that became the Negro, or Harlem, Renaissance was given clearer shape in the writings of the scholar Alain Locke and the images of the painter Aaron Douglas, especially in the collection edited by Locke The New Negro (1925).  Locke, Douglas, and other thinkers and artists of the Negro Renaissance drew on existing histories of renascence and notions of “The Renaissance” to make novel claims about identity, originality, tradition, and cultural value in the African diaspora, as well as the renaissance of fifteenth-century Italy. 

Will West is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University and is the author of Common Understandings, Poetic Confusions: Playhouses and Playgoers in Elizabethan England (U of Chicago P, 2021), As If: Essays in As You Like It (punctum, 2016), and Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2003) and co-editor of the journal Renaissance Drama.  This paper is derived from his current book project, The Renaissances We Merit: Afterlives of the Renaissance.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is the E. Wilson Lyon Professor of the Humanities at Pomona College and is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers UP, 2007), Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color, (Rutgers UP, 2012), and the editor of A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Wiley 2015), and Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature (Cambridge, 2024), as well as two volumes of poetry, Vixen (Autumn House Press, 2017) and Grimoire (Autumn House Press, 2020). 

Stay tuned for more information regarding upcoming events.