Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance
A Portrait in Black and White
Carl Van Vechten was a white man with a passion for blackness who played a crucial role in helping the Harlem Renaissance, a black movement, come to understand itself. "Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance" is grounded in the dramas occasioned by the Harlem Renaissance, as it is called today, or New Negro Renaissance, as it was called in the 1920s, when it first came into being. Emily Bernard focuses on writing – the black and white of things – the articles, fiction, essays and letters that Carl Van Vechten wrote to black people and about black culture, and the writing of the black people who wrote to and about him. Above all, she is interested in the interpersonal exchanges that inspired the writing, which are ultimately far more significant than the public records would suggest.
This book is a partial biography of a once very controversial figure. It is not a comprehensive history of an entire life, but rather a chronicle of one of his lives, his black life, which began in his boyhood and thrived until his death. The narrative at the core of "Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance" is not an attempt to answer the question of whether Van Vechten was good or bad for black people, or whether or not he hurt or helped black creative expression during the Harlem Renaissance. As Bernard writes, the book instead "enlarges that question into something much richer and more nuanced: a tale about the messy realities of race, and the complicated tangle of black and white".
About the Author
Emily Bernard is associate professor, English Department and ALANA U. S. Ethnic Studies Program, University of Vermont. She is the author of several award-winning books, including "Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten", which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Reviews
"Emily Bernard moves to the front of the line of scholars who have re-cast the Harlem Renaissance and opened up questions about the complexity of cross-racial desire and obsession as it plays out on the cultural front. An intrepid scholar, Bernard dives right into the waters of racial misunderstanding, political incorrectness, and the unfettered love that drove Van Vechten's career. This is a passionate, dead-serious exploration of and meditation on nothing less than negrophilia and its cultural yield. This book is a gem, and it will be influential for many years to come" – Elizabeth Alexander, author of "The Black Interior"
"Carl Van Vechten – a troubling, essential figure in the history of American modernism, not to mention the history of race – has found his best critic and champion in Emily Bernard, who takes the issues the writer and photographer raised in his work and examines them through the lens of a distinctly twenty-first century perspicacity" – Hilton Als, author of "The Women"
