SCHC 398: Asian Renaissance and Harlem Renaissance

Professor Seulghee Lee

Fall 2025: Tuesday & Thursday, 2:50–4:05

Course description:

A striking historical parallel, exactly one century apart, has emerged between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the ongoing Asian American Renaissance of the 2020s. Each movement found its cultural footing amidst a global pandemic (1918 and 2020), with its antiracist fightback against seasons of racist violence (Red Summer, 1919, and Stop Asian Hate, 2020–21), as well as during swiftly growing demographic shifts: the Great Migration that began in the 1910s and the twenty-first century boom in the Asian American population, the fastest growing minoritized racial group in the United States, in the 2020s. In addition to an emphasis on robust intramural social life, these cultural movements also share a wide range of genres, including cinema, music, performance (comedy, theater), visual art, and literature (drama, essay, poetry, novel). Most importantly, frameworks of relatively autonomous Black and Asian American cultures, signaling what Alain Locke describes in 1925 as “a renewed self-respect and self-dependence,” emerged from each renaissance. This course will attend to each movement’s major figures, as well as their canonical literary and cultural texts, in order to assess the in-group goal of a comprehensive cultural voice that indexes intramural-facing love, including notions of community, conviviality, filiality, pedagogy, pride, and resistance.