Playing a Color Line

Abstract Literary salons in the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance were crucial sites that contributed to the movement’s literature. Attended by most major movement figures, literary salons allowed for women to set up networks to publish their work, for the movement’s patrons and sponsors to influence its intellectual directions, and for debates about aesthetics to find new life. Beyond physical salons themselves, writers and intellectuals talked to each other in many ways, public and private, that amount to a virtual salon through the movement’s major and minor journals, where they published in quick succession essays in conversation with each other and with the cultural events the movement comprised.