Queering the Harlem Renaissance through Nordic Networks and Gay Archives

The Harlem Renaissance -to its participants better known as the Black Renaissance or the (New) Negro Renaissance -was a major flourishing of African American arts and letters with the political goal of bettering the position of Black people in Jim Crow America.The movement covered both arts and sciences as its participants produced everything from fiction and non-fiction writing to music, visual arts, plays, anthropological fieldwork, and sociological studies.During this time period of the early twentieth century, Black culture found new audiences across the segregationist color line.The movement peaked in the 1920s when Harlem "was in vogue" and white people flocked to the new cultural center of Black life to experience its famed nightlife, cabarets, and jazz clubs.The Renaissance fundamentally affected the development of American modernism at large, as white authors began to imitate, copy, and borrow from Black culture and discourse to produce avantgarde and modernist art of their own (Baker 1987, North 1994, Smethurst 2011).As much twenty-first-century scholarship on the movement has shown, the Black Renaissance was also queer at its core.Many of its most important artists, essayists, and theorists belonged to sexual and gender minorities.Though many such identities and relations were hidden from the public, the movement also included openly queer figures such as blues singer and performer Gladys Bentley, a lesbian drag king pioneer of her times.Additionally, queer themes emerged in Black Renaissance writing more openly than in other American modernist texts of the early twentieth century.As Benjamin Kahan has recently explored, African American authors were able to evade the Comstock censorship laws of the times more successfully than their white counterparts. 1This meant that the Black Renaissance is one of the few places of American modernism where queerness was able to flourish already prior to the 1930s (Kahan 2023, 51).In this essay, I consider the queerness of the Black Renaissance through an underexplored angle: the interracial relations and connections the movement had to Northern Europe.For the past two years, I have been