Graeco-Roman Antiquity and the Women of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance (c.1919-1935) stands as a touchstone for Black American arts and culture, while its remarkable creativity renders it significant in the history of the United States as a whole. Yet two major occlusions remain in studies of the movement: the work of the women of the Harlem Renaissance and their engagement with Graeco-Roman antiquity. The fellowship at the CHS in Fall 2025 gave me time to embark in earnest on a book project exploring classical reception in the Harlem Renaissance, and to do so in a location where I could more easily access the invaluable holdings of the Library of Congress and the archives of some of the key figures the project focuses on; and – more whimsically – to do so in the very city where one of those central figures, Zora Neale Hurston, studied and worked.

Examining women’s engagement with Greek antiquity in the Harlem Renaissance reveals that their dialogue with the ancient Mediterranean rendered them doubly invisible: not only as women writers in a predominantly male environment, but as Black women engaging with a culture that continued to be primarily associated with whiteness. These artists’ dialogue with antiquity is intricately entangled with their race and gender activism, and its illumination lays bare their entwinement of past and present, and of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, to create works of transnational and transhistorical scope that are deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance. These are works that celebrate other ‘ways of knowing’ to envision alternative futures and destabilize the structures of coloniality that contributed to the creation of uneven and deeply inequitable societies in the first half of the twentieth century; inequities that, in many cases, persist to this day.

In the wake of transatlantic slavery, the American Civil War, emancipation, and the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance flourished. So, too, did engagements with ancient Greece and Rome. To illuminate this entwinement, my project has three principal objectives. First, to unveil and analyse the echoes, allusions, and resonances of Graeco-Roman antiquity within the Harlem Renaissance. Second, to focus on the movement’s female writers, highlighting the radical nature of their writing. Third, to show the ways in which engagement with the discipline of Classics contributed to the marginalisation of the movement’s women.

From Chandler Owen’s description of racism as ‘a hydra-headed monster’ in the wake of the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, to Sterling A. Brown’s 1927 poem ‘The Odyssey of Big Boy’, and Countee Cullen’s 1935 Medea, there is a pervasive but underexplored thread of classical antiquity woven through the Harlem Renaissance. When this engagement was by women, it has been even more thoroughly overlooked. Yet, writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Redmon Fauset all had a classical education which they deployed in their fiction. Their dialogue with the ancient Mediterranean was radical not only because of the accretions of white elitism associated with Classics at the time, but also because – recognizing a valorization of queerness in antiquity – they turned to the ancient world to narrate tales of gender non-conformity and envision a utopian queer future. Their work is often a form of ‘wayward’ mythography, in the positive, reclaimed sense Saidiya Hartman has advocated.

Recognizing that it was the Black women of the Harlem Renaissance who spearheaded its dialogue with the ancient Mediterranean helps rebalance perceptions of the movement which have, so often, been dominated by its male figures, from Langston Hughes to Alain Locke to Countee Cullen. Simultaneously, it reveals a mode of reception that is characteristic of the movement: one in which Graeco-Roman antiquity plays only a glancing role and is often used to liberatory effect. That liberatory manoeuvre is especially striking because it goes against the grain of the discipline of Classics having often been deployed as an oppressive tool of exclusion, on grounds of race, class, or gender; but in the Harlem Renaissance, those tools of oppression were repurposed as tools of resistance. Just a few years later, this became a feature of anti-colonial and postcolonial African diaspora writing, but the creative work of several Black women of the Harlem Renaissance positions them as precursors to that postcolonial strategy.

During my fellowship at the CHS, I focused primarily on Zora Neale Hurston, whose writing I have taught for several years in Comparative Literature modules such as ‘Myth After Slavery’ and ‘Modern Myths’ at King’s College London, but whose work I had not yet had the opportunity to research extensively. I may not have found her Lysistrata (written in 1936, but never performed and now believed to be lost) – though I haven’t totally given up hope that someone will one day! – but examining the material held in the archival collection at the University of Florida in Gainesville granted me a new perspective on her writing and her creative process. It also underlined the precarity even of twentieth-century material created by those not in positions of central privilege: since Hurston died in poverty, many of her papers were burned after her death, and several of those in the archive still bear the trace of that conflagration, with scorch marks and obliterated voids rendering fragmentary what could otherwise have been whole.

As well as the CHS fellowship granting me the time to work on this project and access to crucial resources, the unexpected connections and explorations that were fostered by conversations with my fellow fellows, and our engagement with each other’s research, underlined the value of academic community and its very tangible impact on one’s work. Beyond the CHS, too, the opportunity to speak with colleagues and give talks at Barnard College, Bryn Mawr, and Howard University have strengthened my research. And the experience as a whole, with the rare luxury of time to devote exclusively to research, the idyll of the CHS itself, the academic events it hosts, and the joy of collegial company with all who work at the CHS, is one I will always be grateful for.