Cultural Nationalism in Women's Lyrical Ballads of the Harlem Renaissance

This article argues that women poets writing in the Harlem Renaissance marshaled the communal connotations of ballad form and genre to enter covertly into and influence the masculine domain of Black cultural nationalism. The elasticity of the ballad enabled Georgia late a subject position wherein Black women could contribute to the effort to cultivate a New Negro consciousness as Black women poets. This reading shows that the respectability politics of their conventional poems overlay demands for racial and gender justice and sovereignty.