‘Artists are still crossing those boundaries.’ Dr. Minkah Makalani on the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance

So tell me a little bit about your area of expertise as it relates to the Harlem Renaissance.

So I'm an intellectual historian who works on social movements, artists and activists, and their involvement in ideas about politics, progress, racial oppression, liberation.

And my first book was on the grouping of Black activist intellectuals who joined the Communist Party And this is in Harlem, but then I follow them as they travel into Europe and follow a group of those who settle in London in the mid-1930s.

And so I'm talking about these activist intellectuals in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, or what I like to refer to as the New Negro Movement, to capture kind of the range of what occurs and what we think about as the Harlem Renaissance.

The artistic production that we tend to think about with the Harlem Renaissance in terms of the literary production of people like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, etc., Zora Neale Hurston, as well as the political activism and organizing that many of these people were involved in.

And so Claude McKay is one of those figures.

who is well known as a Harlem Renaissance poet, a novelist.

He was also a political radical from Jamaica, actually travels first to what is now Kansas State.

to attend university and then moves to Harlem and becomes involved in the Communist Party, the Communist International, travels internationally, and then spends time in Marseille and other places in Europe as he's writing a number of novels.

So we kind of know him most for his If We Must Die poem, but he also has a number of novels that have been, some of them have been unearthed posthumously.

So that's kind of where my work falls and how it covers that Harlem Renaissance period.

But I'm also now working on questions of art and politics and democracy in the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s.

So I kind of consider myself kind of covering the early 20th to the mid 20th century.