The Bildungsroman in Jim Crow Modernism

Abstract This chapter considers the prominence of the Bildungsroman in the late Nadir period and the Harlem Renaissance. Classically structured around the tension between self-fulfillment and social acclimation, the genre became an important site for African American authors to consider the Jim Crow logics of what childhood and maturation meant in the United States. It also hosted many of the era’s explorations of the multiple meanings of education—including education for race leadership, aesthetic education, and what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “caste schooling” system designed to replicate white hegemony. The chapter ranges across examples of the genre from authors including James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, with a particular focus on the Bildungsromane of W.E.B. Du Bois.