The Novel and the Photograph in Twentieth-Century Harlem

FAIN: FA-52122-05

Sara B. Blair
Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)

Through key decades of the American century, long after the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem remained a generative cultural site. Iconic as black culture capital yet exemplary of the second ghetto, it served as a crossroads for black, white, and other writers; for literary and photographic projects; for competing views of American modernity. The cultural experiments there undertaken, in the fluid era of New Deal, postwar, Cold War, and civil rights America, are the subject of my book. I consider a wide array of projects that use Harlem as a context to explore the conjunction between literary modes and the effects of the mass image—and thereby to revisit both US racial dispensations and the role of the novel in the nation’s life.