In Retrospect: Looking Back at the Renaissance(s)

If we agree with Houston A. Baker, Jr. that “there was no Harlem Renaissance until after the event,” then the renaissance has always had embedded within it an odd type of repetitive retrospection—a looking forward that also commemorated the past, even as the movement was occurring. This essay argues that the best example of a recursive retrospection is James Weldon Johnson’s preface to the Book of American Negro Poetry of 1922 and its revised preface of 1931. The essay comments on two retrospectives of the renaissance published in the 1970s—one by Arna Bontemps and one by Haki R. Madhubuti—as well as some of the contributions to the ALH forum.