“Against the ebony of her skin”: The impact of Harlem Renaissance Blues Culture and Literature on the Development of Womanism

This paper will investigate the ways in which the music and writers spurred by the explosion of African American culture that was the Harlem Renaissance were responsible for propagating the rhetoric and fresh representations of African American womanhood that would later be incorporated into the theoretical framework of black feminism championed by critics like bell hooks and brought into fruition as the recognizable school of womanism by Alice Walker. I will argue, using the literature of “proto-feminist” Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston as well as the literature of womanist writers like Walker, that without the Harlem Renaissance’s “blues jazz woman,” the womanist school could have never taken the shape it has today. In order to demonstrate the ways in which the central tenets of womanist thought are directly associated to the representation of the “blues jazz” woman, this paper will give a summative explanation of womanist theory, a survey of the representations of African American woman available prior to the work of Hughes and Hurston as well as how those representations engage with the feminist hostility toward African American female identity, and finally the ways in which womanism is embodied by both the literary and real-life representations of the “blues jazz woman.