Heritage of Africans

Heritage of the Africans
The Harlem Renaissance, that era principally occurring during the 1920s, produced several significant writers whose works are now essential to the American literature. Living during these years of economic crisis and war, many black writers found common cause with nationalist and internationalist ideologies and movements that spoke to their own desires for social equality. The triumph of postwar nationalism is encoded in many ways, from overt calls for a black nation, to the trope of national awakening, to the recuperation of folk traditions and an immemorial past. Characteristic of ethnic-nationalist discourses, a number of black American postwar tests assert the existence of an innate racial quality in those of African ancestry and represent the New Negro as the culmination of a long historical process of coming to consciousness of a special destiny. There were some problems of translation in which the result of twin exaggerations regarding African that were pervasive both in the New Negro movement and in American society at large. Not only civilized creation but also the ethical and emotional appeals were included, “Heritage”, written by Countee Cullen and “Africa for the Africans”, excerpt from the Negro World by Marcus Garvey were the call for African Americans, who need to explore their own heritage with the desire to dwell in their new faith of liberty.
On the one hand, Africa was the exotic continent, a land awash in a primitive culture that some elite artists and white philanthropists opposed to the desiccated exhaustion of western modernity. On the other hand, that same primal culture was to many African Americans a nark of shame, supposedly both anterior and inferior to European traditions. For many writers of the movement, these mixed attitudes resulted in a conflicted sense of African formed out of the simultaneous disavowal of white exotic Africa and affirmations for a sense of connection to African history, politics, and...