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Fillman talks about Helene Johnson's entire corpus, which consists of thirty-four poems published in periodicals and a few undated verses that have only recently found their way into print. For most of the twentieth century, she was a footnote in American literature. But in recent years, feminist scholars and scholars of the Harlem Renaissance have been increasingly drawn to Johnson's work. In her time, she was praised by her New Negro contemporaries, published in nearly all of the major African American journals and anthologies of her day, and won several awards. In addition to her mastery of traditional verse forms, her reputation rests on her avant-garde representation of the distinctive features of African American culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Her poetry persistently engages social issues--including race politics, the subordination of women, and obstacles faced by the black working class. Her verse also explores the beauty and sensuous pleasures of the natural world.

The Harlem Renaissance gave rise to many great Black writers at the beginning of the 20th century. Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen are among familiar names. However, alongside these were women such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and many more writing poems and stories from a distinctly alternative intersection: Blackness and Womanhood. Unfortunately, some collections have been lost to time, but surviving works have begun to see use as source material for musical settings. As educational initiatives promoting canon expansion to include historically marginalized communities are becoming more of an institutional standard, we must consider the landscape of poetic sources represented in our voice teaching, regularly assign repertoire with text that aligns with our students’ lived experience, and encourage the commission of new works.This study introduces the Harlem Renaissance and the key thought leaders who established literary magazines, which served as the primary publishing platform for women writers of the time. It then presents a representative sample of writings from women active during the movement, followed by a broader comparison of all known Black women poets writing between 1919 and 1940, gathered from various sources. From this list, I compiled an inventory of existing musical settings of texts by women poets of the Harlem Renaissance, cross-referencing resources such as the Kassia Database, the Institute for Composer Diversity, SongHelix, and the African Diaspora Music Project.Because U.S. copyright laws have changed since the Harlem Renaissance, an investigation was launched to understand more about the protections that may still exist in this literature and inform prospective commissioners and composers about what texts can be freely set without necessitating permission from a copyright claimant, and which texts are still protected and therefore, require permissive use.This research aims to promote new commissions and increase the inclusion of these powerful female figures in America’s vocal canon. To interested composers and prospective commissioners, a brief overview of copyright law, an accompanying flowchart, and a preliminary procedure outline are made available to aid in discerning what texts are still copyright-protected for more comprehensive commission and budget planning.

Complementing recent critical efforts to recuperate Helene Johnson as a seminal voice of the 1920s and ’30s, this essay considers her late poems, which have been critically understudied thus far. This essay argues that Johnson continued to revise and rework the rhetoric of empowerment that characterizes her New Negro-era poetry long after she ceased publishing. In particular, she remained in poetic opposition to the Anglo-American male privilege—represented most notably by her allusions to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—that pushed Johnson and her African American feminist perspective to the margins decades before.

Modernism has traditionally been viewed as the zenith of White male genius, even though the forms that have marked the period’s innovation were largely created by women, and especially queer women and queer women of color. Examining poetry in particular provides a unique opportunity to understand the fluidity of the modernist period not only in regards to its kaleidoscopic forms and innovations but also in relation to its burgeoning alternate sexualities and gender expressions in art and literature. This dissertation is a restorative project that refocuses a handful of queer modernist women poets toward the center of a canon that has historically left them on the margins due to their gender, sexuality, race, and/or because their work has been considered too vulgar or eccentric. H.D., Angelina Weld Grimké, Djuna Barnes, and Hope Mirrlees are part of what I call the “metro of modernity,” which is a mode of alternative modernist production that emphasizes women’s artistic or creative labor rather than their biological function. I argue that “metro,” a compounded word denoting the city, the subway, poetic verse, and etymologically the womb or mother, is the mode through which these queer poets navigate and create modernity.

Black Lesbian Aesthetics argues that after the groundbreaking formation of the Combahee River Collective in 1974, Black lesbian writers who—inspired by the Black Arts Movement—created a literary movement in response to, and which transcended, the limits of the radical politics of the mid-sixties and seventies. By historicizing this era within the context of earlier Black lesbian writings through a sustained engagement with the work of Pat Parker (1944-1989), Audre Lorde (1934-1992), and Cheryl Clarke (b. 1947), I develop the concept of “Black lesbian aesthetics” to argue that this proliferation of literature produced by women of color from 1974-1988 evidence heretical shifts in self-definition. Black lesbian writers were operating within [re]creative and [re]productive modes of being and Black consciousness. My understanding of aesthetics is shaped by Audre Lorde’s 1984 seminar at the Free University of Berlin, where she posits that aesthetics should be measured from the “outsider position.” Through Black Feminist Thought and criticism, queer of color critique, and decolonial theory, I elucidate the ways in which “Black lesbian aesthetics” offers new insights about political and erotic practices between Black women.

In 1965, the writer, intellectual, and activist Amiri Baraka sought to create a movement that celebrated a revolutionary aesthetic, shaped black culture, and advanced societal transformation. The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was ushered in with the assassination of Malcolm X and Baraka’s call to action with the poem, “Black Art.” Black artists produced works that celebrated blackness, proclaimed black revolution and nationalism, and gave hope for a new day. Although scholars mark 1975–76 as the end of the movement, BAM has gone on to influence the works of thousands of black artists. Through a close reading of work by Baraka and rappers Tupac Shakur and Kendrick Lamar, this thesis argues that BAM has influenced Hip-Hop music since the genre’s inception in 1973. Shakur and Lamar have kept the philosophies of BAM alive by answering the call for art that galvanizes and speaks to and for the people. In turn, they have released their own messages of peace, change, and revolution, contributing to an aesthetic that is shaping a new generation of artists who address the spiritual and cultural needs of black people and define the world in their own terms. This project extends the works of Marvin Gladney and Reiland Rabaka to regard BAM and Hip-Hop as soundings of the subaltern.

Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West led a charmed life in many respects. Born into a distinguished Boston family, she appeared in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, then lived in the Soviet Union with a group that included Langston Hughes, to whom she proposed marriage. She later became friends with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who encouraged her to finish her second novel,The Wedding, which became the octogenarian author's first bestseller. Literary Sistersreveals a different side of West's personal and professional lives-her struggles for recognition outside of the traditional literary establishment, and her collaborations with talented African American women writers, artists, and performers who faced these same problems. West and her \"literary sisters\"-women like Zora Neale Hurston and West's cousin, poet Helene Johnson-created an emotional support network that also aided in promoting, publishing, and performing their respective works. Integrating rare photos, letters, and archival materials from West's life,Literary Sistersis not only a groundbreaking biography of an increasingly important author but also a vivid portrait of a pivotal moment for African American women in the arts.

According to Du Bois's biographer David Levering Lewis, \"Harlemites, along with a significant portion of the Talented Tenth elsewhere were roiled by gossip and innuendo . . . suspicion and rumor degenerated into hilarity, followed quickly by sympathy for the recent bride\" (224-25). First published when Cullen was an energetic twenty-one, the poem is an arresting tableau of repressed passion and unsuccessful courtship and pursuit, reminiscent of John Keats's \"Ode on a Grecian Urn.\" With the closing couplet, West the absent lover becomes a type of Charon, ferrying Cullen across the river Styx. [...]would I have it in the dismal day, When I fare forth upon another ship, The heart not warm, as now, but cold and clay; The journey forced; not, sweet, a pleasure trip. [...]would I take your image by the hand, But leave you safe within a living land.

Anthropologist Franz Boas, his student Zora Neale Hurston, and others were theorizing and writing about the concept of culture-what later became known in anthropological circles as the \"culture concept\"-with the aim of disrupting and replacing the racist evolutionary comparativism's school of thinking with theories of cultural relativism.2 Evolutionary comparativism held that cultures existed on a spectrum, from primitive to civilized, and that race was a key factor in determining which culture needed to evolve (these were assumed to be non-white and non-European) and which culture was already evolved (assumed to be white and European). Weldon Johnson therefore argued that black writers grew out of American soil; they were not the transplanted \"exiles\" Whitman worried about. However, by placing the dancing man into an imagined but \"honest-to-cripe jungle,\" one that could transform the man into an object of admiration and not just curiosity, the speaker asserts a theory of cultural relativism that was coming of age in the early decades of the twentieth century.