Vernacular Tradition During Reconstruction and Through the Harlem Renaissance
Vernacular Tradition During Reconstruction and Through the Harlem Renaissance Citlali Vernacular tradition is the representation and documentation of spoken stories and songs passed down over time. In African American literature, it’s seen in song lyrics and stories. During the Reconstruction period (1860s-1870s), when enslaved African Americans were documenting their experiences and creating stories based on their time in slavery, the vernacular tradition also presented dialogue in stories and poems, recording how people’s dialects might have sounded. Jumping forward to the Harlem Renaissance (1920s-1930s), blues songs and poems became much more popular as African Americans were able to express creativity a lot more freely, though in defiance of white society saying otherwise. During slavery and Reconstruction, a large point of slave and abolitionist narratives was to spread awareness of the atrocities of ...