Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 3 - The New Negro among White Modernists

  • from Part I - Re-reading the New Negro
  • Edited by Rachel Farebrother, Miriam Thaggert, University of Iowa
  • Book:
    A History of the Harlem Renaissance
    Published online:
    20 January 2021
    Print publication:
    04 February 2021, pp 55-71

  • Summary

    For many of Harlem’s New Negro writers, friendships with whites provided invaluable access to publishers, patrons, financial opportunities, and social power. Yet these interracial relationships also required artists to navigate whites’ racially limited expectations about black identity, expression, and behavior. Jean Toomer’s friendship with Waldo Frank, for example, led to an aesthetically productive but racially problematic collaboration. Frank and Toomer provided each other with practical and emotional support as they developed their 1923 novels, Toomer’s Cane and Frank’s Holiday, and the creative implications of their racial difference are complex, particularly because Frank delivered Cane’s manuscript to Horace Liveright, and he advocated for its publication. Likewise, Carl Van Vechten’s friendship with Nella Larsen offered the latter a sense of community and practical support as she wrote Quicksand and Passing, novels whose publication Van Vechten also encouraged with his friend Alfred A. Knopf. New Negro writers navigated the power dynamics of these friendships with skill, nuance, and resilience.