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This chapter provides an extensive examination of how Harlem Renaissance women’s poetry participated in that movement’s spirit of resistance. While that movement’s architects often rhetorically emphasised the “new” in ways that privileged masculinity and the formal experimentalism of landmark modernist poetry by Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer circa 1922, women poets were often dismissed as too traditional, “respectable,” or apolitical in their use of form, themes, and sensibilities. Yet, by incorporating gendered theories and experiences into their poetics, African American women poets provided unconventional and antitraditional explorations of gender and sexuality through expression, performance, and orientation in their works in ways that may also be understood as “new,” “modern,” “experimental,” and deeply political. Focusing on the subversive treatment of sex, love, and respectability in poems by Gwendolyn Bennett, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, and Mae Cowdery in and after 1922, this chapter explores the strategic ways in which these poets adhered to and broke with traditional poetic forms and themes to explore modernity’s intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, as they sought new forms through which they could equally participate in the movement’s poetics of resistance. This chapter reads sex, love, and respectability as central to an intersectional understanding of African American women poets’ place in New Negro poetics of resistance. Drawing upon Black feminist accounts of the Harlem Renaissance and the theoretical framework of intersectionality, this chapter reflects on the complex trajectories in which subjugated knowledge evolves from intimate experiences with intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender. In serving as sources of subjugated knowledge, Harlem Renaissance women’s poetry reflects the often-misunderstood ways in which Black women have historically renovated poetic conventions to identify and reject gender and race oppression. Blending the unconventional and the archetypal, these women used poetry as a tool of defiance against those forces, in ways that broaden our understanding of how women contributed to the politics and poetics of the New Negro movement and modernism.

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“A flower blooming in the prison yard”: Love, Sexuality, and Respectability in Harlem Renaissance Women’s Poetry

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Michelle J. Pinkard

摘要

This chapter provides an extensive examination of how Harlem Renaissance women’s poetry participated in that movement’s spirit of resistance. While that movement’s architects often rhetorically emphasised the “new” in ways that privileged masculinity and the formal experimentalism of landmark modernist poetry by Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer circa 1922, women poets were often dismissed as too traditional, “respectable,” or apolitical in their use of form, themes, and sensibilities. Yet, by incorporating gendered theories and experiences into their poetics, African American women poets provided unconventional and antitraditional explorations of gender and sexuality through expression, performance, and orientation in their works in ways that may also be understood as “new,” “modern,” “experimental,” and deeply political. Focusing on the subversive treatment of sex, love, and respectability in poems by Gwendolyn Bennett, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, and Mae Cowdery in and after 1922, this chapter explores the strategic ways in which these poets adhered to and broke with traditional poetic forms and themes to explore modernity’s intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, as they sought new forms through which they could equally participate in the movement’s poetics of resistance. This chapter reads sex, love, and respectability as central to an intersectional understanding of African American women poets’ place in New Negro poetics of resistance. Drawing upon Black feminist accounts of the Harlem Renaissance and the theoretical framework of intersectionality, this chapter reflects on the complex trajectories in which subjugated knowledge evolves from intimate experiences with intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender. In serving as sources of subjugated knowledge, Harlem Renaissance women’s poetry reflects the often-misunderstood ways in which Black women have historically renovated poetic conventions to identify and reject gender and race oppression. Blending the unconventional and the archetypal, these women used poetry as a tool of defiance against those forces, in ways that broaden our understanding of how women contributed to the politics and poetics of the New Negro movement and modernism.