Harlem: Black Manhattan and the Practices of the City

Abstract

The prospect of the urban presents a sublimated terrain of the contested where the question of inclusion maps the site of conflict. Narrative, predicated upon occupying the position of the insider, emerges as a consequence of the rituals that govern participation in urban routines. The space where narrative routine achieves the status of practice remains unproblematised and in effect undertheorised. We tend to mistake indulgence for practice in evaluating the urban and in making this grand gesture the space of contestation, which is quite adequately theorised, suddenly ceases to become so. While the historical text that is the basis of this chapter, Black Manhattan by James Weldon Johnson, makes no pretensions to being an ethnography of early twentieth century Harlem, it does attempt to capture a sense of that process by which the empty urban space of New York comes alive and becomes that conscious practice of life that is Harlem. Johnson’s Harlem is an intimate account of a place that is otherwise typified as the urban ghetto and very obviously the other. In terms of geographical lay of the land captured as practice in an intervention by Johnson where he uses metaphors of transit, Harlem was not a place ‘you went out to, ' rather it was a place that you ‘went through, ' which indicates an expectation that belies the conventional sensibility of a place that you had to steer clear of. The shared narrative experience of such an autonomous rite of passage could perhaps be found in an understanding of the ‘stories’ that invite a process of sacralisation as they get caught up in the practice of being passed on.1. © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013.