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Affective Narratives: Harlem and the Lower East Side

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2010

CATHERINE ROTTENBERG
CATHERINE ROTTENBERG
Affiliation:
Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel. E-mail: rottenbe@bgu.ac.il
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Abstract

This paper begins by juxtaposing contemporary discourses on Harlem and the Lower East Side, arguing that the processes of iconization of these two neighborhoods have been very different. Whereas the iconicity of Harlem has always been shot through with ambivalence, the Lower East Side has come to signify a relatively unambivalent sacred space for US Jewry. The second part of the essay then traces the representations of Harlem and the Lower East Side back to early twentieth-century African American and Jewish American novels, claiming that critically analyzing the theme of ambivalence in these texts – and, more specifically, how ambivalence manifests itself differently within each literary tradition – is key to understanding not only why Harlem and the Lower East Side have undergone parallel but divergent processes of iconization, but also the way Jews and blacks have been positioned and have attempted to position themselves in relation to dominant white US society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , November 2010 , pp. 777 - 793
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Hasia Diner, Lower East Side Memories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 50.

2 Hasia Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth Wenger, eds., Remembering the Lower East Side (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

3 Gates, Henry Louis, “Harlem on Our Minds,” Critical Inquiry, 24 (1997), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

4 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Betrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1973), 26.

5 Today it is axiomatic to say that race, class, and gender interact with and are articulated through one another. While I certainly agree that these categories overlap and interact in complex ways, I am arguing that there is a decided emphasis on one category over another in these African and Jewish American texts and that this in and of itself is interesting and in need of explanation.

6 My notion of “real and imagined” space is indebted to Edward Soja's Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Read-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). In contrast to Soja's conception of Thirdspace, I understand these real and imagined spaces as sites in which and through which the territorially subjugated necessarily negotiate with dominant culture.

7 “Introduction,” in Diner, Shandler, and Wenger, 2, 6.

8 See the many excellent articles by different scholars in Diner, Shandler, and Wenger.

9 See Diner, 8, 27.

10 Nathan Irvin Huggins, Revelations: American History, American Myths (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 21, emphasis added.

11 See, for example, Alain Locke's “The New Negro,” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992; first published 1925), 7; and James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan (reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1991; first published 1930), esp. 160–284.

12 See Gates. In his article, Gates is very clearly echoing Nathan Irvin Huggins's earlier essay, “Harlem on My Mind,” which was written in conjunction with the controversial Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition (and served as the introduction to the 1979 commemorative text edition) and which resonates with the famous song lyrics. See Huggins, 21.

13 Gates, 11.

14 Diner, 170.

15 Gates, 6, 12.

16 For a short history of the Lower East Side prior to the 1880s see Diner, 46–47.

17 Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 122–23.

18 Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 46. All subsequent references to the novel come from this edition and will be given in parentheses. This is my reading of Helga's yearning for Harlem. In the novel, Helga expresses a deep homesickness for “Negroes” (92). Her homesickness, I would argue, emerges out of the desirability described during Helga's initial sojourn in Harlem.

19 This is an ambiguous section. I argue, however, that Larsen is emphasizing the separateness of white and black Harlem and ultimately on a certain kind of segregation between these two worlds. See Quicksand, 45.

20 Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun (reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1990; first published 1928), 96, emphasis added. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will be given in parentheses.

21 This is my interpretation, since the quote I have inserted is from a later section of the novel. But the sentiments that Angela expresses when she first sees Harlem are similar (see 96). The quote taken from a later section seems to articulate the “everything” of Harlem more succinctly.

22 Gates, 11.

23 Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1993; first published 1917), 93. All subsequent references to the novel come from this edition and will be given in parentheses.

24 Anzia Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements (reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995; first published 1923), 2. All subsequent references to the novel come from this edition and will be given in parentheses.

25 Anzia Yezierska, Arrogant Beggar (reprint, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997; first published 1927), 12–13. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will be given in parenthesis.

26 Anti-Semitism, though, does not figure prominently in the novels. Interestingly, the discomfort in white space is more pronounced for the Jewish women protagonists. For two articles that begin to articulate this gendered difference see Kahan, Lori Harrison, “Drunk with the Fiery Rhythms of Jazz,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 51, 2 (2005), 416–436Google Scholar; and Catherine Rottenberg, “Race and the New Woman,” in idem, Performing Americanness (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2008), chapter 5.

27 See Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), esp. 25–48.

28 See, for example, Matthew Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

29 See, for example, Karen Brodkin's How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).