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 | Harlem Crossroads: |
The Harlem riot of 1935 not only signaled the end of the Harlem Renaissance; it made black America's cultural capital an icon for the challenges of American modernity. Luring photographers interested in socially conscious, journalistic, and aesthetic representation, post-Renaissance Harlem helped give rise to America's full-blown image culture and its definitive genre, documentary. The images made there in turn became critical to the work of black writers seeking to reinvent literary forms. Harlem Crossroads is the first book to examine their deep, sustained engagements with photographic practices. Arguing for Harlem as a crossroads between writers and the image, Sara Blair explores its power for canonical writers, whose work was profoundly responsive to the changing meanings and uses of photographs. She examines literary engagements with photography from the 1930s to the 1970s and beyond, among them the collaboration of Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava, Richard Wright's uses of Farm Security Administration archives, James Baldwin's work with Richard Avedon, and Lorraine Hansberry's responses to civil rights images. Drawing on extensive archival work and featuring images never before published, Blair opens strikingly new views of the work of major literary figures, including Ralph Ellison's photography and its role in shaping his landmark novel Invisible Man, and Wright's uses of camera work to position himself as a modernist and postwar writer. Harlem Crossroads opens new possibilities for understanding the entangled histories of literature and the photograph, as it argues for the centrality of black writers to cultural experimentation throughout the twentieth century. Sara Blair is associate professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. "[A] remarkable accomplishment...Worthwhile for these illustrations alone, the snapshots from the now distant past preserved forgotten Harlem tableaus...And when you factor in the ingenious fashion in which Sara Blair matches these pictures with the works of African-American literary giants, Harlem Crossroads adds up to a masterpiece making a noteworthy cultural contribution."--Kam Williams, African American Literature Book Club Endorsements: "Sara Blair's Harlem Crossroads is an important addition to the body of literature that currently exists about Harlem. It brilliantly illuminates the complex relationship between photographic representation and race, and adds new insight into the ways in which this one black community has figured in both the critical and public imaginations. Harlem Crossroads is a tour de force."--Dawoud Bey, Columbia College Chicago "Harlem Crossroads examines a set of relations, influences, and cultural styles that, to my knowledge, no one has recognized--let alone sorted through--with such visual and literary finesse. The intellectual range and ambition of the book is remarkable. I read through it thinking that this is what scholarship, at its most far-reaching, aspires to: a remapping of the intellectual territory that it considers, a synthesis of disparate arguments into a single, multivalent narrative that transforms the reader's understanding not only of its subject matter (Harlem and its legacy), but of its approach, the very idea of a 'cultural formation' that belies the disciplinary boundaries we normally adhere to."--Bryan Wolf, Stanford University List of Illustrations ix Subject Areas: | |||||
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