have you ever found yourself apologizing and/or making excuses for a book you’ve read? that was me yesterday after finishing a book about certain leading figures of the harlem renaissance. no, i’m not going to mention the book or link it here, but if you really want to know, send me an e-mail or something.
at any rate…this book was pretty underwhelming. i was particularly disappointed b/c the harlem renaissance is one of my favorite historical periods. y’know how some people are world war ii or civil war buffs, and they’re all about reading books (both fiction and nonfiction) from those particular eras? the harlem renaissance is kinda like that for me. you can see why i was excited about reading a book that previously had escaped my notice. i mean, i took a class at nu about the harlem renaissance, so it’s not as if i haven’t read a book (or ten, or a couple dozen) on the subject. not saying that i’m an expert b/c that’s very far from the truth…just that this was presented as a seminal text in the field and i was kinda surprised that it had flown under my radar.
i found myself making excuses for the sucktasticness of the book. it was written in 1991, or so i thought, so therefore it came out just as more information was being disseminated about some of the folks featured in the book. i was wrong. i just looked at the book again and it was published in 1999, so i’m no longer willing to offer that excuse.
excuse #2: it’s almost like a coffee-table book. there’s lots of pictures and the book isn’t that long of a read, so one could flip through it while hanging out at someone’s home, etc. that would be ok, if if was meant just as a picture book and it didn’t contain multi-page biographical sketches of people.
and those bio sketches? incomplete. the profile on james weldon johnson mentioned nothing about his writing the lyrics for ‘lift ev’ry voice and sing.’ (apologies to any twitter followers who read about that yesterday.) langston hughes was one of the most prolific writers of his time, and there’s nothing about the short stories and other works he published after, say, 1931. and if you’re going to make a statement about how almost all the women featured in the book had intimate relationships with other women, then you should be able to back that up.
so, yeah. this book? not awesome. i’m glad i checked it out from the library and didn’t actually buy it.
but it was useful for one thing, though. i’m now on the lookout for any books or research about the sexuality of ‘key figures’ of the harlem renaissance. (another apology to twitter followers for the redundancy.) there were more than a few people who could be classified as bisexual, if not gay/lesbian, but for the most part, no one ever really made a big deal about it. i don’t know if folks were given more leeway b/c they were ‘artists’ and therefore it was expected that they’d behave outside of the social norm, or if it was just understood that no one cared as long as they weren’t super obvious about it, or what. i’m intrigued by it, though, and i’m thinking (hoping?) someone’s done some work on this. if not, i might have to pretend to want to do a research paper on this, and i’m not sure i’m willing to commit to that. if you have any leads on books/papers/websites/etc. pertaining to this, though, feel free to share them with me. thanks.