Write An Argumentative, Thesis-Based Essay About Harlem ✓ Solved

Write an argumentative, thesis-based essay about the Harlem

Write an argumentative, thesis-based essay about the Harlem Renaissance that moves beyond summarization. Use connections between course texts and apply an intersectional approach that considers gender, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, and other identity categories. Relate your argument to a contemporary issue (for example: gentrification, Black identity, police brutality), showing how themes from the Renaissance illuminate present concerns. Support your argument with specific quotations and analysis from the course texts listed below; use the texts to support, not overpower, your thesis. Use MLA to cite every primary and secondary source. Produce an academic essay with a strong introduction, supporting body paragraphs, and a thought-provoking conclusion. You may reference the following texts: David Levering Lewis, "Introduction" to The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader; Claude McKay, "If We Must Die," "The Lynching," "Harlem Shadows"; Jessie Fauset, "Dead Fires"; Alice Dunbar Nelson, "Sonnet"; James Weldon Johnson, "O Black and Unknown Bards"; Countee Cullen, "Heritage"; Alain Locke, "The New Negro"; Nella Larsen, Passing (Parts 1 and 2).

Paper For Above Instructions

Introduction

The Harlem Renaissance produced a range of literary responses that negotiated racial pride, artistic self-determination, gendered constraints, and diasporic longing. Rather than presenting a unified cultural program, the period reveals competing visions of Black identity shaped by class, gender, nationality, and color. This essay argues that Harlem Renaissance texts use stylistic urgency and narrative contradiction to expose structural violence and identity fragmentation, and that those same tensions help us read contemporary crises—especially police brutality and the cultural erasure that accompanies gentrification. By reading Claude McKay's poems, Countee Cullen's "Heritage," Nella Larsen's Passing, Alain Locke's essays, and selected works by Jessie Fauset, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and James Weldon Johnson in conversation, we can trace how Renaissance writers modeled intersectional critique and provided conceptual tools for confronting modern racialized harm (Locke; McKay; Cullen).

Thesis and Method

The thesis: Harlem Renaissance literature articulates an intersectional critique—often implicit—by staging the collision of public violence, private identity, and cultural aspiration; these texts thereby help us understand how contemporary police brutality and urban displacement operate together to repress Black bodily autonomy and communal memory. The essay uses close readings of poems and fiction alongside Locke’s theoretical framing and secondary histories to connect early twentieth-century representational politics with twenty-first-century structural violence (Lewis; Huggins).

Public Violence and the Poetic Witness

Claude McKay’s searing poems operate as public testimony that names bodily violence and refuses erasure. "The Lynching" renders the aftermath of extrajudicial killing as community spectacle and emotional rupture: the poem’s image of a "ghastly body swaying in the sun" insists that violence is both theatrical and civic (McKay, "The Lynching"). McKay’s rhetorical imperative in "If We Must Die" converts imminent death into a demand for dignity and resistance, anticipating later protest poetics (McKay, "If We Must Die"). Reading McKay alongside contemporary reports of police killings reveals continuity: racialized death remains a mechanism for social control and public desensitization, and poetry serves as a record that counters official silences.

Identity, Ambivalence, and Passing

Nella Larsen’s Passing confronts colorism, gendered vulnerability, and social mobility. Clare and Irene’s negotiations of race and respectability expose how identity is policed by social structures as much as by individual choice (Larsen). Larsen’s novel shows that "passing" is not merely a strategy for survival; it is also a response to competing demands—class mobility, sexual respectability, and the desire for belonging—that disproportionately affect women of mixed heritage. This gendered dimension highlights an intersectionality often elided in general accounts of the Renaissance: Black women experienced both racial terror and intimate surveillance, a point amplified in female-authored pieces like Jessie Fauset’s "Dead Fires" and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s lyric work (Fauset; Dunbar-Nelson).

Culture as Counterpublic: Locke, Johnson, and Cullen

Alain Locke’s "The New Negro" reframes artistic production as civic labor, urging cultural assertion as a means of political negotiation (Locke). James Weldon Johnson’s poems locate a spiritual tradition that grounds resistance in communal song (Johnson). Countee Cullen’s "Heritage" dramatizes diasporic ambivalence—longing for Africa but estranged by centuries of displacement (Cullen). Together these texts map a cultural counterpublic that both organizes pride and records trauma. They also complicate narratives of singular Blackness by foregrounding diasporic difference and classed aspirations—the very differences that intersectional analysis preserves.

From Literary Form to Urban Reality: Gentrification and Erasure

Literature from the Renaissance shows how cultural claims can be vulnerable to later displacement. Urban histories of Harlem reveal that the sites of Renaissance creativity were often erased or repurposed under later waves of development and gentrification (Freeman). This pattern—artwork memorializing a community while urban policy undermines it—converges with patterns of policing that make Black bodies hyper-visible to criminal justice systems but invisible to protective civic investment. Thus, the Renaissance’s aesthetic claims for respectability and cultural recognition can be read both as resistance and as provisional, vulnerable to structural economic reordering (Huggins; Freeman).

Intersectional Insights and Contemporary Application

Reading Harlem Renaissance texts through an intersectional lens clarifies how race, gender, class, and color operated together to determine who could claim space and safety. For example, the public spectacle of lynching addressed by McKay intersects with the gendered domestic anxieties in Larsen’s Passing: both reveal how public violence and private vulnerability co-constitute social control. Applied to contemporary policing, these Renaissance texts suggest that racialized violence is not anomalous but structural, produced alongside economic policies that displace communities (McKay; Larsen; Locke). The literary archive thereby provides language—mourning, witness, cultural memory—for movements that contest police brutality and fight displacement today (Lewis; Freeman).

Conclusion

Harlem Renaissance literature does more than celebrate an emergent Black aesthetic; it stages an intersectional critique that remains relevant for understanding contemporary racialized harm. McKay’s witness poems, Cullen’s diasporic ambivalence, Larsen’s gendered exposure, and Locke’s cultural politics together offer a framework for seeing how violence, identity policing, and urban transformation interlock. Using these texts as analytic tools equips readers to recognize and resist the twin violences of police brutality and cultural erasure in contemporary urban life.

References

• Lewis, David Levering, editor. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Penguin, 1994.
• McKay, Claude. "If We Must Die." In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis, Penguin, 1994.
• McKay, Claude. "The Lynching." In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis, Penguin, 1994.
• McKay, Claude. "Harlem Shadows." In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis, Penguin, 1994.
• Fauset, Jessie. "Dead Fires." In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis, Penguin, 1994.
• Dunbar-Nelson, Alice. "Sonnet." In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis, Penguin, 1994.
• Johnson, James Weldon. "O Black and Unknown Bards." In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis, Penguin, 1994.
• Cullen, Countee. "Heritage." In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis, Penguin, 1994.
• Locke, Alain. The New Negro. Touchstone, 1997 (reprint of 1925 edition).
• Larsen, Nella. Passing. Alfred A. Knopf, 1929.
• Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Freeman, Lance. There Goes the 'Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up. Temple University Press, 2006.