This chapter explores how the NAACP’s Crisis, the National Urban League’s Opportunity, Abbott’s Monthly and Challenge/New Challenge are representative of the more palpable literary focus on the experiences of the working classes and the poor that occurs in 1930s Black print culture. Along with novels, volumes of poetry, and coverage in the Black press more generally, these literary journals and magazines published explicit depictions of African Americans’ social conditions. As instances of how the New Negro reader of the Harlem Renaissance was recast throughout the decade, The Crisis, Opportunity, Abbott’s Monthly, and Challenge/New Challenge often targeted African Americans as working subjects and intended readers. As the chapter illustrates, the sections of literature, book reviews, editorials/criticism, and correspondence comprising these literary journalsʼ and magazinesʼ 1930s content allowed editors and writers to engage in work that both prioritized literary portrayals of African Americans’ inner lives as maids, cooks, day laborers, and the unemployed and expanded audiences for their developing literary tradition.

Modernists of the African diaspora rethink liberal governance after 1919 through subtle critique (as in René Maran’s Batouala), through direct engagement (as in the Pan-African Congresses organized by W. E. B. Du Bois), and through diasporic romance (as in Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth). The chapter commences with the “new internationalism” claimed for African-American art by Alain Locke in 1919, and ends with the global response to the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the occasion for Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth and wide range of other engaged poetry and prose. These and other diasporic African modernisms respond to the paternalism of post-Wilsonian rhetoric by reworking the narratives of reproduction, education, and labor that subtended liberal internationalist rhetoric and continued neo-imperial rule. Connecting the global response to 1919 to Pan-African aesthetics and Harlem Renaissance internationalism allows us to articulate a distinctive black diasporic response to interwar liberal order, a modernism attuned to what Du Bois called the “global color-line.”