  The Harlem Renaissance was an extraordinary eruption of heightened, critical, and creative self-conscious affirmative racial identification by thoughtful Negroes bent on expressing their affirmations of their raciality through all of the creative arts and modalities of articulation, a development unprecedented in the history of the presence of peoples of African descent in the United States (Huggins 2007). The cultural significance of the productions and articulations; of the engagements, practices, and creations of the bold and talented participant-contributors; of the organizations, institutions, and publications they created and endeavored to sustain (some successfully, many others not) devoted to culture creation, refinement, preservation, and mediation— all continue to have substantial influences even today, most especially in terms of the novel ideas and idea-spaces and discursive communities that were created and articulated through the bodies of literature and works of art, music, and dance that are still being mined productively by contemporary artists and scholars. The producers and carriers of the Renaissance were natives of the whole of the African Diaspora, across the Atlantic World especially, as well as from across the African continent, and they drew on the cultural and historical legacies of both (and on those from other parts of the world) for inspiration and content for their philosophizing artistic creativity in defining and giving expression to The New Negro.