Description
Book SynopsisLeading scholars consider crucial aspects of Harlem’s social, political, and intellectual history, its artistic, cultural, and economic life, and its representation across an array of media and genres.
Race Capital? models new Harlem scholarship that interrogates exceptionalism while taking seriously the importance of place and locality.
Trade ReviewHarlem: race capital, center of black culture, seat of black militancy—or dreamscape? These rigorous, innovative, and bold essays by contemporary scholars confront the myriad ways Harlem signifies and offer fresh, new ways of understanding the aesthetic, cultural, and historical meanings of that iconic place. -- Mary Helen Washington, author of
The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950sA marvelous collection of scholars from across disciplines offer an unparalleled understanding of the importance—real, symbolic, or imagined—of Harlem to African American and black diasporic cultures. -- George Hutchinson, author of
Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940sWith forceful essays and sharp framing, this volume offers an indispensable treatment of a single, iconic American neighborhood, providing, with it, a window to the world.
Race Capital? reminds us why and how Harlem is a feeling, a place, and a force of history. It captures, too, why we still need reminding at all. -- N. D. B. Connolly, author of
A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South FloridaThese fascinating essays will change the way you think about modern Harlem. From numbers-runners to communists, poets to street-corner orators, Harlemites have been making and remaking urban culture since the Great Migration. Provocative, luminous, and eye-opening, this collection exemplifies the very best of recent scholarship about the Mecca of black America. -- Martha Biondi, author of
To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York CityIn this important and timely book, the wide-ranging and layered interrogation of the so-called “race capital” trope reveals a Harlem with much of its warts, contradictions, subtleties, and splendor. The chapters prod and provoke, unearthing new ways, across space and time, of thinking about a place that we thought we knew. -- Shannon King, author of
Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro EraA bold multidisciplinary work and deserves scholarly attention. * Journal of American History *
Highly recommended. * Choice *
This wonderful collection . . . assembles a treasure trove of essays that cut across disciplinary and chronological divides. . . . Wide-ranging [and] thought-provoking. * Journal of American Studies *
Race Capital? issues forth intriguing thoughts on the continued debate over Harlem’s exceptionalism. . . .The collection’s variegated source material, from the visual to the literary, lends credence to the ways in which Harlem can still be deeply investigated. * Journal of African American History *
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction, by Andrew M. Fearnley and Daniel Matlin
Part I: Mythologies1. From Prophecy to Preservation: Harlem as Temporal Vector, by Andrew M. Fearnley
2. Class, Gender, and Community in
Harlem Sketches: Representing Black Urban Modernity in Interwar African American Newspapers, by Clare Corbould
3. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto Discourse, by Daniel Matlin
4. What’s the Matter with
Baby Sister?: Chester Himes’s Struggles to Film Harlem, by Paula J. Massood
Part II: Models5. Harlem’s Difference, by Winston James
6. Black Women’s Intellectual Labor and the Social Spaces of Black Radical Thought in Harlem, by Minkah Makalani
7. Harlem as Culture Capital in 1920s African American Fiction, by Cheryl A. Wall
8. City of Numbers: Rethinking Harlem’s Place in Black Business History, by Shane White
9. Harlem, USA: Capital of the Black Freedom Movement, by Brian Purnell
10. Richard Bruce Nugent and the Queer Memory of Harlem, by Dorothea Löbbermann
Part III: Black No More?11. Race, Class, and Gentrification in Harlem Since 1980, by Themis Chronopoulos
12. When Harlem Was in
Vogue Magazine, by John L. Jackson Jr.
Harlem: An Afterword, by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Contributors
Index
