![]() Ray Carney, a furniture salesman with a store on Harlem’s bustling 125th Street, embodies the area’s aspirations to social self-improvement. An element of the renaissance remains, however, in Black Star Travel, which arranges tourist trips for the black community, and in the Rotary-like Dumas Club named after the mixed-race French writer Alexandre Dumas, whose father was born in sugar-rich Haiti. Instead of the honky-tonk parlours and jazz-enthused flappers of the Cotton Club are crumbling industrial warehouses and soot-begrimed tenements. The area’s “hot syncopated fascination” (as the Jamaican novelist Claude McKay called it) has long gone. Orson Welles’s notorious “voodoo” version of Macbeth, staged in Harlem in 1935, was the movement’s last gasp while it lasted, ‘Harlemania’ instilled pride in a number of African American writers and artists.Ĭolson Whitehead’s gloriously entertaining tenth novel, Harlem Shuffle, unfolds in uptown New York four decades on from the renaissance. Black folk heritage – so called “primitive” art and music – was the mainstay of this arts movement that flourished in pre-civil rights New York. Uring the Harlem Renaissance that coincided with the Jazz Age in 1920s America, ‘Harlemania’ took hold in upper Manhattan nightclubs, as wealthy white thrill-seekers bopped to Duke Ellington hothouse stomps and bumped up against West Indian migrant calypso and the ragtime of tin-pan pianos. ![]() New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT. ![]()
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