Sartorial Self-Fashioning in the Harlem Renaissance
This chapter analyzes the early history of New York’s Harlem, from its Dutch beginnings to its status as an iconic symbol of Black urban modernity in the 1920s. Drawing upon the biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, and George S. Schuyler, and with references to Marcus Garvey, the chapter details the links between Harlem as a Dutch location and its locale as a “Negro Mecca.” It highlights some of the surprising ways in which Harlem Renaissance figures claimed a biographical connection to Dutch New York to illustrate “the Dutch strain in the ancestry of key Harlem Renaissance figures.” The essay focuses on how, in the 1920s, New Negro intellectuals, especially Du Bois, Schuyler, and Toomer, explored what it meant to incorporate Dutchness in their genealogical self-fashioning, and how Marcus Garvey exploited Holland Society-style stagecraft in his rise to power.
