Looking for Harlem

Maria Balshaw

Description

Taking the incredible flowering of African-American literature in the 1920s as its starting point, Looking for Harlem offers a cogent and persuasive new reading of a diverse range of twentieth-century black American writing.



From the streets, subways, hotels and cabarets of New York's Harlem and Chicago's Southside, Maria Balshaw moves beyond the canon to encompass often neglected writing by Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman and Claude McKay, as well as the more familiar work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Nella Larsen and Toni Morrison. In a provocative revision of African-American literary history, Balshaw examines the creation of an ‘urban aesthetic’ and explores the links between the engagement with the city and fictional reconstructions of racial identity and race writing. Focusing on the material culture of the city, the visual sense of the urban environment, the class dynamics of urban culture and the crucial importance of consumerism, this study presents a critically astute, challenging and very welcome new approach to a much-studied area of contemporary American fiction.
Introduction: Harlem on my Mind



1. 'Black was White', New Negroes, New Spaces



2. Whose City? Policing Race and Space



3. Women in the City



4. Passing and the Spectacle of Harlem



5. A Dream Deferred? The City After 'Harlem'



6. 'I love this city': Contemporary Reflections on Harlem



Conclusion



Notes and Bibliography



Index

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Democracy

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849645164
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Looking for Harlem Urban Aesthetics in African American Literature

Maria Balshaw

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

First published 2000 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Maria Balshaw 2000

The right of Maria Balshaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Balshaw, Maria. Looking for Harlem : urban aesthetics in African American literature / Maria Balshaw. p. cm. ISBN 0-7453–1339–6 — ISBN 0–7453–1334–5 (pbk.) 1. American literature—Afro-American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—In literature. 4. City and town life in literature. 5. Cities and towns in literature. 6. Afro- Americans in literature. 7. Afro-American aesthetics. 8. Aesthetics, American. 9. Harlem Renaissance. I. Title. PS153.N5 B285 2001 810.9'327471—dc21 00–0097

ISBN 0 7453 1339 6 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1334 5 paperback

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the European Union byTJ International, Padstow, England

For Jake and Lily

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction The Criteria of Negro Art The Race Capital

1. New Negroes, New Spaces Racialised Urbanity17 From the Harlem Special Issue toThe New Negro Fire!!Magazine

2. Space, Race and Identity30 The H of Harlem Harlem Hierarchies: Racial Performance, Social Space The Conjure Man Dies

3. Passing and the Spectacle of Harlem New Women, New Negroes Spectacle, Race and Gender Danse Sauvage Passing Encounters, City Scenes A Vital, Glowing Thing

4. Women in the City of Refuge ‘The Closing Door’ The Silent Story79 ‘On Being Young – A Woman – and Colored’ Frye Street: All the World is There ‘Nothing New’ Black Notes/City Notes

5. Consumer Desire and Domestic Urbanism Reading the Urban Domestic The Street Reading the Signs Inside Small Victories

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1 6 10

14

20 23

32 36 38

44 46 52 61 63 69

72 75

83 86 88 94

97 101 107 109 117

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6. Elegies to Harlem Looking For Langston Looking For … or At? Bitch or Dumpling Girl

Conclusion Notes Index

123 126 129 134

141 143 166

Acknowledgements

I should like to acknowledge the support of the AHRB Institutional Fellowship Scheme, which has allowed me to prepare this manuscript as part of the work of the3 Citiesproject, http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/3Cities. The support of the Universityof Birmingham is also gratefullyacknowledged. Portions of Chapters 2, 4 and 6 have been published in earlier versions as essays: ‘“Black Was White”: Urbanity, Passing and the Spectacle of Harlem’,Journal of American Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer 1999) pp. 307–22; ‘New Negroes, New Women: The Gender Politics of the Harlem Renaissance’,Women: A Cultural Review, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer 1999) pp. 127–38; ‘Elegies to Harlem: Looking For LangstonandJazz’, in Balshaw and Kennedy(eds), Urban Space and Representation(Pluto Press, 2000) pp. 82–98. There are many people who have contributed to the making and shaping of this book. I would like to thank Peter Nicholls for his intellectual guidance through my postgraduate years and after. Anne Beech from Pluto has been a wonderful and very patient editor. I am profoundly grateful to all those who have offered ideas, support and critique over the years, particularly James Annesley, Peter Brooker, Helen Carr, Joshua Cohen, Dick Ellis, Emma Francis, Scott Lucas, Maria Lauret and John Phillips. Douglas Tallack, in his role as director of the3 Citiesproject, has always been an inspiring intellectual role model. All those who have par- ticipated in the Urban Cultures seminar at Birmingham deserve thanks both for giving up valuable Saturdays and for keeping lively intellectual engagement going even during busy teaching terms: Carol Smith and Jude Davies especially are a model intellectual partnership. Helen Laville is owed thanks beyond measure for intellectual inspiration, friendship, babysitting and wine drinking, without you I would surely be a lesser academic and a more miserable person. I owe an enormous debt to my parents, Colette and Walter Balshaw, for their love and support, to my brother Ian for ten years of computer trouble shooting and to my extended family for childcare duties, humour and solace beyond the call of

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duty. To Jake, Lily and Nathan Kennedy I offer love and thanks for cheering me up whenever I am down and for keeping academic work in its proper perspective, not forgetting the additional con- tributions of Ryan Lucas and Lauryn Laville (my lovely goddaughter) – it is truly a crime that Bob the Builder has no place in academia: can we write it? yes we can! All my best thoughts come from conversations with Liam Kennedy, without him this book would not exist and I offer this thanks for everything his partnership brings to my life.

Introduction

They weren’t even there yet and already the City was speaking to them. They were dancing. And like a million others, chests pounding, tracks controlling their feet, they stared out of the windows for the first sight of the City that danced with them, proving already how much it loved them. Like a million more they could not wait to get there and love it back. Toni Morrison,Jazz(1992).

Almost all of the fiction of recent black writers, even when its theme is unequivocally pro-city, even when its mode and style is urbane, hip, consistently reveals characters disappointed by a marked and poignant absence of some vital element of city life that is all the more startling because of the presence of this same element or quality in their descriptions of rural or village settings … What is missing in city fiction and present in village fiction is the ancestor. 1 Toni Morrison, ‘City Limits, Village Values’ (1981).

Which city is it that Morrison speaks of here in these passionately articulated and utterly opposed utterances? The question is of course redundant since one knows without needing to be told that the City that Morrison eulogises in my first epigraph is Harlem, Capital of the Negro world. Likewise, it is as obvious that her earlier, pessimistic reading of urban space is also about Harlem, even if she does not name it as such. In the history of twentieth- century African American experience and letters it is Harlem that has held pride of place as the urban locus for an African American national imaginary. I start with these epigraphs as they pose for us the paradoxical attitude to the city one finds structuring African American urban literature throughout the twentieth century. On the one hand we find a passionate urbanism, where the city stands for the future and more particularly the future of the race. On the other hand we see the city painted as the site of deprivation, squalor and discontent, a version of racial urbanism we are perhaps more familiar with in our contemporary era. Rudolph Fisher, the Harlem Renaissance writer whose urban portraits have an important place

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