The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters

[...]they also evidence the movement's diverse and far-reaching implications, which helped to situate the "Renaissance" within a much broader national and international framework of cultural and social transformation and anticipated change, but whose radical potential was overtaken by an artistic mission, led by Locke, which sought to project an unthreatening image of black culture to mainstream America. Through scrutiny of recent critical texts, he argues that the Harlem Renaissance reveals itself to be an elitist response on the part of a tiny group of mostly second-generation, college-educated, and generally affluent African-Americans - a response, first, to the increasingly raw racism of the times, second, to the frightening Black Zionism of the Garveyites, and, finally, to the remote, but no less frightening, appeal of Marxism. [...]the great value of this collection lies in the multifaceted perspectives that it has assembled, and The Harlem Renaissance Revisited should be applauded for its wide-ranging contribution to scholarship on the movement. Michael Phillips's persuasive contention that Dallas continues to ignore its African American art heritage at least partly out of cultural anxiety points up the extent of black artists' critical neglect and is a powerful reminder of enduring racist attitudes towards cultural production.