Time Travelers and Truth Tellers: Revisiting Cheryl Wall and Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions to the Harlem Renaissance

This essay considers how Cheryl Wall’s Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995) impacted New Negro era scholarship specifically and African American literature, generally. Through direct engagement with Wall’s foundational text and her analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s formal innovations on the personal essay, I identify, reflect, and contextualize Black feminist critical genealogies, field transformation/expansion, and the evolution of transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to the art and aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance. I also spotlight notable recent scholarship from Imani Owens and Autumn Womack before concluding with an ecocritical reading of Anne Spencer’s poetry as an exemplar of emergent trends in the field.