Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance

Rachel Farebrother is lecturer in American Studies at the University of Swansea, UK.

• Contents: Introduction; Boasian anthropolgy and the Harlem renaissance; '[F]lung out in a jagged, uneven but progressive pattern': 'culture citizenship' in The New Negro; '[A]dventuring through the pieces of a still unorganized mosaic': Jean Toomer's collage aesthetic in Cane; 'Think[ing] in hieroglyphics': Zora Neale Hurston's cross-cultural aesthetic; Reading Zora Neale Hurston's textual synthesis in Jonah's Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Prize: Honourable Mention in the British Association of American Studies Book Prize 2009 '... the book admirably demonstrates how 'marginal, or even eccentric' (p. 48) approaches to the Harlem Renaissance and modernism can usefully illuminate their subjects anew.' Review of English Studies 'The Collage Aesthetic is an intelligent book that extends past research produced in the larger fields of American vernacular modernism and African-American culture to point in a new and dynamic direction for interdisciplinary approaches in American studies... Farebrother's book will help to rethink aesthetic concerns and the powerful alternative mode of knowledge that comes from literary texts and the arts.' Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 'It is always a pleasure to review a book that one wholeheartedly enjoys and admires. The College Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance is a beautifully, carefully conducted study. It is also sufficiently contained in its focus on three writers to allow the reader’s mind to roam to other writers, other works, and related issues. I found the book inspiring in its offering a key term that not only connects visual arts, anthropology, and creative writing but also stages a model exploration of the complicated relations between Harlem Renaissance writing and other modernist work, and the cultural and political contexts within which both occurred. Farebrother makes a strong case for the payoffs of a critical approach that reveals such new relations without erasing important, meaning-making distinctions.' African American Review