Harlem: From ’Black Metropolis’ to Gentrification

Module description

In 1900, Harlem was an affluent, predominantly white neighbourhood. By the 1920s, however, Harlem was home to the world’s largest black urban community, its name was widely employed as a synonym for black America, and it was even heralded as the emerging ‘race capital’ of the black world. This module explores the processes of migration, segregation and congregation through which Harlem became and remained a black community, and also reconstructs the multiple meanings Harlem acquired over the course of a century for its residents and for media, literary authors, visual artists, social scientists and others in the United States and beyond.

Beginning with the demographic transformations that remade the neighbourhood in the early twentieth century—including the influx of migrants from the Caribbean and the U.S. South—the module then considers the political and artistic ferment of the 1920s and 1930s and interrogates the notion of a ‘Harlem Renaissance.’ Subsequent topics examine the social and intellectual forces that recast the neighbourhood’s symbolic significance, as Harlem’s image as the frontier of black progress was increasingly displaced by the notion of Harlem as the archetypal American ‘ghetto.’ Processes such as deindustrialisation and the impact of public housing policy will be read in conjunction with representations of Harlem in journalism, the social sciences, fiction, poetry, film and the visual arts. Finally, the module looks to the controversies surrounding ‘gentrification’ in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Throughout, the module seeks to illuminate the significance of place in the production of racial discourse—by drawing on work by historians, cultural geographers and others—in order to understand Harlem’s enduring symbolic capital within discussions of black life in the United States and beyond.

Provisional teaching plan

1. Introduction: Placing Harlem
2. Making a Black Metropolis
3. New Negroes
4. Harlem in ‘Harlem Renaissance’ Writings
5. Caribbean and African Connections
6. Indignant Generation: Radicalism and Protest during the Depression and Second World War
7. Urban Crisis
8. The Movements: Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Arts
9. Ghetto Wars: Representing Harlem from Dark Ghetto to Precious
10. The ‘New Harlem’: Gentrification and Authenticity

Assessment details

1 x 3,500 words essay (100%)

Teaching pattern

10 x 2-hour weekly seminars

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