American Renaissance (literature)
The American Renaissance period in American literature ran from about 1830 to around the Civil War. A central term in American studies, the American Renaissance was for a while considered synonymous with American Romanticism and was closely associated with Transcendentalism.
Harlem Renaissance
The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. In 1917, the premiere of "Three Plays for a Negro Theatre" took place. These plays, written by white playwright Ridgely Torrence, featured African-American actors conveying complex human emotions and yearnings. They rejected the stereotypes of the blackface and minstrel show traditions. James Weldon Johnson in 1917 called the premieres of these plays "the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater". Another landmark came in 1919, when the poet Claude McKay published his militant sonnet, "If We Must Die", which introduced a dramatically political dimension to the themes of African cultural inheritance and modern urban experience featured in his 1917 poems "Invocation" and "Harlem Dancer" (published under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, these were his first appearance in print in the United States after immigrating from Jamaica). Although "If We Must Die" never alluded to race, African-American readers heard its note of defiance in the face of racism and the nationwide race riots and lynchings then taking place. By the end of the First World War, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay were describing the reality of contemporary African-American life in America.