THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING HARLEM: THE RENAISSANCE AND THE POLITICS OF MODERNISM

New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. By William J. Maxwell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xi + 254 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.50 (cloth); $17.50 (paper).

Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919Â1925. By Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. xv + 248 pp. Notes, index. $29.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper).

Robert Self
University of Michigan

Historians and cultural critics of the last generation have devoted considerable attention to the political and aesthetic hothouse that was Harlem in the 1920s. Much as the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s stimulated interest in the Old Left of the 1930s, the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements of the sixties opened new scholarly vistas on the Harlem Renaissance and its nurturing of African American artistic expression and protest politics. Harlem in the 1920s was not simply "in vogue," as David Levering Lewis has reminded us, it was the staging ground for the launching of black power—not the specific, tactical black power of Stokely Carmichael but the universe of African American cultural and political forms and the enunciating power of those forms, for which the twentieth century may yet best be remembered. But Harlem's "New Negro" intellectuals, artists, and activists faced innumerable challenges as they forged an African American space within modernism. Two new books, by William J. Maxwell and Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., highlight one of the most important of these many challenges: how Harlem figures navigated between communist radicalism on the one hand (left) and state-sponsored reactionary conservatism, even repression, on the other (right). Read together, Maxwell and Kornweibel offer key revisions of the literary and political dimensions of the renaissance in monographs that should fit comfortably within Harlem Renaissance scholarship.