Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Blacks in the Diaspora) Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm not sure why the other two reviewers found Christa Schwarz's Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance difficult to read. I find Schwarz's prose clear and natural and her organizational scheme transparent. More important, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance is a valuable contribution to black and queer studies--Schwarz's scholarship is impressive and thorough. Until this book appeared, the critical question of how queer genealogy intersected with the New Negro literary movement tended to be localized in debates over individual authors, such as the question of Langston Hughes's sexual orientation. But Schwarz's book does much more than merely consolidate archives into a single text. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance performs the necessary labor of demonstrating that to talk of the Harlem Renaissance is to speak of the beginning of the queer revolution in the U.S., to suggest that among the emancipatory products of the New Negro was queer counterculture. The significance of Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance cannot be understated.

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"Heretofore scholars have not been willing -- perhaps, even beenunable for many reasons both academic and personal -- to identify much of the HarlemRenaissance work as same-sex oriented.... An important book." -- Jim ElledgeThis groundbreaking study explores the Harlem Renaissance as aliterary phenomenon fundamentally shaped by same-sex-interested men. Christa Schwarzfocuses on Countée Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugentand explores these writers' sexually dissident or gay literary voices. Theportrayals of men-loving men in these writers' works vary significantly. Schwarzlocates in the poetry of Cullen, Hughes, and McKay the employment of contemporarygay code words, deriving from the Greek discourse of homosexuality and from WaltWhitman. By contrast, Nugent -- the only "out" gay Harlem Renaissanceartist -- portrayed men-loving men without reference to racial concepts orWhitmanesque codes. Schwarz argues for contemporary readings attuned to the complexrelation between race, gender, and sexual orientation in Harlem Renaissancewriting.

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