When Harlem Was in Vogue

"David Levering Lewis’s 1981 book is not one of those that proves the Harlem Renaissance’s self-awareness. Instead, it’s an elegant and opinionated intellectual history written with the benefit of half a century of hindsight. For Harlem Renaissance scholars of my generation, second-edition “New Literary Historians” trained in the late 1980s and ’90s, When Harlem Was in Vogue was a common enemy. We resented its charges of New Negro naivete—American racism was no “misunderstanding which forceful prose by honor college graduates could do much to attenuate,” Lewis scoffed—and its implication that all cultural politics was a contradiction in terms. We defined our revisionist takes on the Renaissance against his tight focus on uptown New York society, on the well-connected Black “talented tenth,” and on an average Harlem writer distracted enough to assume “that race relations in the United States were amenable to the assimilationist patterns of a Latin country.” Our studies of the radical origins and cosmopolitan outreach of the Harlem movement bore the negative impression of Lewis’s emphasis on the local and the liberal. Thirty years on, however, it’s easy to see how much of his book we inhaled and admired. Though I can’t stop questioning its narrowing, dismissive thesis, it’s the history I recommend to friends and students seeking a readable introduction to Harlem’s rise as “the Negro Capital of the World.” Lewis remains the least tediously detached writer on the Renaissance ever to have wielded a thick footnote. Only When Harlem Was in Vogue could describe Marcus Garvey’s ideology as a “farrago of Booker Washington and Mussolini,” and only there could this description seem well-founded."