Cross-Cultural Harlem - Reimagining Race and Place

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Harlem has been the capital of both Black America and a global African diaspora, an early home for Italian and Jewish immigrant communities, an important Puerto Rican neighborhood, and a representative site of gentrification. How do we understand the power of a place with so many claims and identifications? Drawing on fiction, sociology, political speech, autobiography, and performance, Sandhya Shukla develops a living theory of Harlem, in which peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other, even while Blackness remains crucial.Cross-Cultural Harlem reveals a dynamic of exchange that provokes a rethinking of spaces such as Black Harlem, El Barrio, and Italian Harlem. Cross-cultural encounters among African Americans, West Indians, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Italians provide a story of multiplicity that challenges the framework of territorial enclaves. Shukla illuminates the historical processes that have shaped the diversity of Harlem, examining the many dimensions of its Blackness-Southern, African, Caribbean, Puerto Rican, and more-as well as how white ethnicities have been constructed. Considering literary and historical examples such as Langston Hughes's short story "Spanish Blood," the career of the Italian American left-wing Harlem congressman Vito Marcantonio, and the autobiography of Puerto Rican-Cuban writer Piri Thomas, Shukla argues that cosmopolitanism and racial belonging need not be seen as contradictory. Cross-Cultural Harlem offers a vision of sustained dialogue to respond to the challenges of urban transformations and to affirm the future of Harlem as actual place and global symbol.

Product details

• Authors: Sandhya Shukla, Shukla Sandhya
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 03.05.2024
• EAN: 9780231208475
• ISBN: 978-0-231-20847-5
• No. of pages: 320
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Family; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Black & Asian Studies, Literary Criticism, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American & Black, Relating to African American / Black American people, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form