Book contents
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Revising a Renaissance
- Part I Re-reading the New Negro
- Part II Experimenting with the New Negro
- Chapter 6 Gwendolyn Brooks: Riot after the New Negro Renaissance
- Chapter 7 Romans à Clef of the Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 8 Modernist Biography and the Question of Manhood: Eslanda Goode Robeson’s Paul Robeson, Negro
- Chapter 9 Modernism and Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 10 Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
- Part III Re-mapping the New Negro
- Part IV Performing the New Negro
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - Gwendolyn Brooks: Riot after the New Negro Renaissance
from Part II - Experimenting with the New Negro
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2021
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Revising a Renaissance
- Part I Re-reading the New Negro
- Part II Experimenting with the New Negro
- Chapter 6 Gwendolyn Brooks: Riot after the New Negro Renaissance
- Chapter 7 Romans à Clef of the Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 8 Modernist Biography and the Question of Manhood: Eslanda Goode Robeson’s Paul Robeson, Negro
- Chapter 9 Modernism and Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 10 Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
- Part III Re-mapping the New Negro
- Part IV Performing the New Negro
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter follows the lasting influence of Harlem Renaissance writers on Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry, even after the 1967 Fisk Writers’ conference. Specifically, it turns to Riot (1969) to think about its continuity with the poetry most closely associated with the New Negro Renaissance. This is not done for the sake of periodizing Brooks as part of the earlier generation, nor to detach her later work from its formation in and of the Black Arts Movement. Rather, the chapter traces in Brooks’s work the development of a tradition of Black migratory poetics: poetry that formally and imaginatively enacts human transnational movement. Brooks’s migratory poetry illuminates and at times dismantles violence and constraint, but also turns its back on borders, attempting to find, create, define, and take up space beyond the nation state. As such, Riot also provides a key pivot or transition between Black modernist poetics and our contemporary moment in poetry.
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- A History of the Harlem Renaissance , pp. 111 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021