"Carl Van Vechten & The Harlem Renaissance"

For anyone interested enough in Carl Van Vechten to want to find out more, I cannot highly enough recommend Emily Bernard's Carl Van Vechten & The Harlem Renaissance. I was inspired by The Tastemaker and our discussion of it, enough to make my next book Bernard's, which has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years.

As the title indicates, she focuses entirely on Van Vechten's connection to Black culture, which allows her to go more deeply into issues of race than White. She quotes some materials that White either did not access or did not cite, and frankly, there's very little material that feels repetitive of The Tastemaker ; she's playing a different game. Although it's from Yale UP, it's also eminently readable for an academic book — Bernard emphasizes in her introduction how any time she had the impulse to make an argument, she tried to pull back and let the narrative make that argument for her.  Fascinating insights into Van Vechten's connection to such major Black cultural figures as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Ethel Waters.

I realize that some people may not want to spend any more time with Van Vechten, based on some of the negative personality traits emphasized by  The Tastemaker, but if you feel like you can stand more CVV in your life, this is the next book to read.

[posted on behalf of our friend Philip Clark]