Looking For Harlem: Urban Aesthetics in African-American Literature

178 Pages·2000·1.07 MB·English

by  Maria Balshaw

Looking for Harlem
Urban Aesthetics in African
American Literature
Maria Balshaw
P
Pluto Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
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First published 2000 by Pluto Press
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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
00–009743
ISBN 0 7453 1339 6 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 1334 5 paperback
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton
PrintedintheEuropeanUnionbyTJInternational,Padstow,England
For Jake and Lily

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
The Criteria of Negro Art 6
The Race Capital 10
1. New Negroes, New Spaces 14
Racialised Urbanity 17
From the Harlem Special Issue to The New Negro 20
Fire!! Magazine 23
2. Space, Race and Identity 30
The H of Harlem 32
Harlem Hierarchies: Racial Performance, Social Space 36
The Conjure Man Dies 38
3. Passing and the Spectacle of Harlem 44
New Women, New Negroes 46
Spectacle, Race and Gender 52
Danse Sauvage 61
Passing Encounters, City Scenes 63
A Vital, Glowing Thing 69
4. Women in the City of Refuge 72
‘The Closing Door’ 75
The Silent Story 79
‘On Being Young – A Woman – and Colored’ 83
Frye Street: All the World is There 86
‘Nothing New’ 88
Black Notes/City Notes 94
5. Consumer Desire and Domestic Urbanism 97
Reading the Urban Domestic 101
The Street 107
Reading the Signs Inside 109
Small Victories 117
viii LOOKING FOR HARLEM
6. Elegies to Harlem 123
Looking For Langston 126
Looking For … or At? 129
Bitch or Dumpling Girl 134
Conclusion 141
Notes 143
Index 166
Acknowledgements
IshouldliketoacknowledgethesupportoftheAHRBInstitutional
Fellowship Scheme, which has allowed me to prepare this
manuscript as part of the work of the 3 Cities project,
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/3Cities. The support of the
UniversityofBirminghamisalsogratefullyacknowledged.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 Langston and Jazz’, 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 the 3 Cities project, 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
ix
x LOOKING FOR HARLEM
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.
Toni Morrison, ‘City Limits, Village Values’ (1981).1
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
1