Aberjhani's Blog: Notes of a 21st Century Digital Scribe - Posts Tagged "jazz-age"

After gaining a space on library shelves around the world, winning several major awards, and inspiring enthusiastic reviews, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance has now been released as an eBook. This means iPad-savvy, Kindle-carrying, and Nook-nabbing eReader fans may happily download the celebrated book into their private digital library.

News about the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance eBook (Facts On File and Infobase Publishing) came just this week. Along with the total lunar eclipse (which yes, I did stay up to watch) it made a great holiday surprise. One good major reason to pick up the Encyclopedia in any format (aside from homework assistance) at this time is for the background information it provides on any number of current television series and films that deal with America in the 1920s through the 1940s, and that tackle issues at any time pertaining to multiculturalism, diversity, democracy, war, etc.

One example is HBO’s hit television series Boardwalk Empire, about alcohol prohibition and mobster antics in the Northeast during the Jazz Age. Another is the movie The Great Debaters and the forthcoming film On The Shoulders of Giants. And there’s also the PBS broadcast… well, you get the point.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Google launched its Google Editions eBook Store, which includes several of my other titles: Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World, I Made My Boy Out of Poetry, and The American Poet Who Went Home Again. Kensington Books made The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois available in eBook format earlier this year. This new eBook edition of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (ISBN 1438130171) now makes almost all of my books available for digital download.

Aberjhani
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

The celebration of major historic milestones is a favorite pastime in pretty much every culture. This year, 2011, in the United States many are commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War. That means four years from now numerous festivities will take place to observe the same anniversary for Jubilee Day, or the liberation of America's slaves. In addition, countries around the ...

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The exact start of the Harlem Renaissance cannot be easily identified––nor, for that matter, can its end. There are in fact those who maintain that the Harlem Renaissance has never come to full head-on conclusion. It has instead adapted, evolved, and shifted forms like a chameleon of cultural consciousness and moved with steady unimpeded grace from one decade to the next and from one century to the next.

As for when it started: the physical migration of African Americans out of rural areas of the South, from the Caribbean and elsewhere into the New York City neighborhood of Harlem during the 1910s, certainly set the stage for the dazzling explosion of creative genius that would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. The people of African descent who made their way to Harlem “on the first thing smoking,” as Zora Neale Hurston put it, not only became captivating subjects of paintings, plays, novels, poetry, short stories, and poems. They also became devoted audiences, patrons, and often very vocal critics of the same.

Stepping into the Swing of Things

Should we say the Harlem Renaissance started with Eubie Blake and Noble Sissles’ hit Broadway musical Shuffle Along in 1921, the publication of Claude McKay’s volume of poems, Harlem Shadows in 1922, or the publication of The New Negro Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, the era-defining anthology edited in by Alain Locke, in 1925? Whether pointing to one of these years and events or reaching back even further, the renaissance without question was in full swing by the time jazzmaster Duke Ellington took over the bandstand at Harlem’s Cotton Club in 1927 and still going strong when Cab Calloway took over the beat in 1931.

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by Aberjhani