Emily Allen Williams’s Writing the Harlem Renaissance: Revisiting the Vision offers a richly informed exploration of the contemporary and historical significance of the Harlem Renaissance. The contributors’ fresh excavations of this site of cultural flowering probe its wider intellectual, aesthetic, and humanistic scope. Their research turns attention to the movement’s diverse range of social, cultural, philosophical, and political interests that continue to elicit discerning scholarly insights. The book is most timely, moreover, as a centennial commemoration and revaluation of the legacy and continued promise of New Negro art. The illuminating perspectives from which the movement is reassessed include journalism, sociopolitical theory, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, thereby validating Williams’s perception of the Harlem Renaissance as a multivocal venture that holds vital significance for a global array of creators and thinkers. These new excavations emphasize the literature’s capacity to speak ‘beyond the mystical theoretical imaginings’ often identified with the aesthetic outpouring of the movement. The volume positions the literature at an enlightening philosophical juncture where architects of culture and society are emboldened to unroll the past, thus to understand the present, and move meaningfully into the future.
