THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND THE CANONIZATION OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY EXPERIENCE

Abstract

The Harlem Renaissance, an African-American socio-political, cultural and literary movement, was known, among many other things, for its literary outpourings and has continued to attract a flurry of critical attention. While critics have focussed on the ripple effects of the cutting-edge issues of    identity,   subjectivities and cultural rootedness which pre-occupied the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and which have undoubtedly traversed national and international boundaries, it is its canon-forming potentialities that we explore in this paper. Thus based on a new-historicist approach, the paper seeks to examine the various ways by which the movement has subtended the present canonical status of the African-American literary tradition. The paper delves into the historiography of canonicity in African-American literature before critically analysing the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to arrive at the conclusion that the movement was catalytic toward the eventual canonization of black American literature.