A history of the Harlem Renaissance / edited by Rachel Farebrother, Miriam Thaggert.

"Essays such as W. E. B. Du Bois's "Criteria of Negro Art," Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," and George Schuyler' "The Negro-Art Hokum"--which make respective cases for art as propaganda, the cultural distinctiveness of black American art, and the absence of any fundamental differences between black and white American art--lay bare some of the key disagreements that continue to animate debates about the politics of representation. Marita Bonner's 1925 Crisis essay "On Being Young, a Woman, and Colored," with its eloquent insistence that any examination of the relationship between art and politics must attend to questions of sexuality and gender, anticipates critical approaches developed by pioneering black feminists, including Barbara Christian, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Deborah E. McDowell, Claudia Tate, and Cheryl A. Wall, from the 1970s. Indeed, an enduring tendency to sideline Bonner and other black women writers in critical accounts of Harlem Renaissance debates about "art or propaganda" signals the continuing salience of the black feminist project of "engendering the Harlem Renaissance [by] undoing perimeters that exclude women and their writing""-- Provided by publisher.