Description
Book SynopsisReveals the American West played a significant role in the lives and work of many of the artists who created the signal urban African American cultural movement of the twentieth century. Uncovering the forgotten histories of these major American literary figures, the book gives us a deeper appreciation of that movement.
Trade ReviewThis book should be considered by anyone who wishes to attain a working understanding of the broader connections between the Harlem Renaissance and the African American experience in the West." -
New Mexico Historical Review"A high quality of archival recovery and historical contextualization lies at the heart of West of Harlem. Lutenski ends with a coda reminding scholars that the borderlands is a multiethnic place that holds Americans, Native Americans, Anglo-Americans, Asian Americans, and also African Americans. West of Harlem highlights the productive impact of the grating between the borderlands West and African American literary production." - Journal of American History
"In West of Harlem, Emily Lutenski brings heretofore marginalized or erased black modernist experiences to the center. [She] joins the growing ranks of scholars who would disrupt, challenge, and outright refuse monolithic racial and cultural narratives." - American Studies
"In addition to introducing a new geographic rubric that invigorates African American literary studies and is, in turn, animated by a range of scholarly traditions—most notably, modernism, feminism, and Chicana and Chicano studies—Lutenski’s study reveals the unacknowledged provincialism of some of the foundational studies on race and region within African American literary studies." - Western Historical Quarterly
"Expertly written and researched, enjoyable to read, relevant across specializations and disciplines." - American Historical Review
"A fresh way of seeing and reading these [Harlem Renaissance] writers as they define their identities in the spacious, diverse borderlands." - Kansas History
"Broad in scope, original, and fascinating in its content." - Choice
"Emily Lutenski explores an American West which is more racially complex and culturally vibrant than previous scholarship has led us to believe. Her book is an important contribution to western American literature and African American studies." - Blake Allmendinger, author of Imagining the African American West
"From Anita Scott Coleman’s New Mexican homesteads to Arna Bontemps’s imagined Los Angeles to Langston Hughes’s Mexican wanderings, Lutenski shows us how we must go West to go to Harlem. Accessible to a wide range of readers and creative in its framing and approach to sources, it’s a terrific book." - Flannery Burke, author of From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: One Who Stayed
1. Home on the Range: Domesticity and a Black Woman’s West
Part II: Those Who Went Away
2. the Two LAs: Los Angeles, Louisiana, and Geographies of Race
3. Revolt from the Provinces: Black Politics of Respectability and Black Sexual Politics
4. Technicolor Places:Race and Revolution in Transnational America
Part III: One Who Arrived
5. Mapping the New American Race: From New York to New Mexico—and Beyond
Coda
The Borderlands of Blackness: The Formation of a Multiethnic American Imagination
Notes
Bibliography
Index
