<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/normal-girls-sza-nella-larsen-varieties-black-feminism/"></div><p>I am not Beyoncé. Never did I feel this more strongly than when I sat high above her, watching her tiny figure strut across the stage at the PNC Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina. Screens several stories high projecting her image hung like banners for some erstwhile fascist leader. It was in many ways not the ideal concert — it was outdoors, and a thunderstorm sparked a temporary evacuation of the stadium (“Please remain calm, Beyoncé is not leaving” someone said over an intercom). But what struck me as least ideal was the staged-ness of every word and gesture, everything scripted from the high kicks, to the thank yous to her loyal and dedicated fans, to the rote delivery of the songs meant to be uplifting and to get us “in formation.” Did she know the tears I had shed in the dark over “Sandcastles,” the reckless careworn times in my car when I drove on the highway just to turn up “Sorry” loud enough to drown out my pounding heart? Did she not know the emotional catharsis I wanted to share with her at that concert? Apparently not. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/normal-girls-sza-nella-larsen-varieties-black-feminism/#more-5541" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Normal Girls: On SZA, Nella Larsen, and the Varieties of Black Feminism

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/new-new-negro/"></div><p><strong>The Harlem Renaissance, Remixed</strong></p>
<p>Once upon a time, blackness was in vogue. It was a period where the New Negro, adorned in furs, sequins, and pinstripes, walked the streets of urban America. It was a period when Langston Hughes was a young poet-busboy, when Zora Neale Hurston studied at Barnard, when W.E.B. DuBois ran the NAACP. It was a period when white revelers flocked to see black entertainers wail, shimmy, and shout at segregated venues like the Cotton Club, in the hopes of catching a little of whatever it was that made black people dance like that.  It was a period when <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFAox1Y6i5w">Marcus Garvey</a>, a Jamaican-born orator, could draw a crowd of thousands by shouting the siren call of “Africa for the Africans!” It a period when it was so cool, so joyful to be black that you could charge <a href="http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/about/blogs/room-26-cabinet-curiosities/2009/06/23/satisfy-your-soul-and-let-good-times-roll">a cover for your own house party</a>, so long as the music was good and you provided refreshments. It was the 1920s, and blackness was visible on every street corner in America, and it was as though black America had collectively decided that white America may not like us, but they were sure as hell going to see us. And we were visible with such grace and style that history saw fit to memorialize it in the name: the Harlem Renaissance. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/new-new-negro/#more-5047" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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The New “New Negro”

Marina Magloire is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University, where she teaches classes on African-American and Caribbean literature. She is currently writing a book on black feminism in the Harlem Renaissance.