Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance

11. Harlem as a Memory Place: Reconstructing the Harlem Renaissance in Space

11. Harlem as a Memory Place: Reconstructing the Harlem Renaissance in Space Dorothea Löbbermann The topographical center of African-American modernism, 1920s Harlem , reaches out in many directions: spatially, into the international African diaspora (within the United States and outside it); temporally, into the African and American pasts, and—both with its utopian force and from our contemporary retrospective position—into the future. Its symbolic power is thus firmly established in space and time. It is this aspect that I want to keep in mind when I look at Harlem as a memory place. As a memory place, Harlem is the spatial representation of a certain part of the (African) American cultural memory; it shapes this memory and is, in turn, shaped by it. Harlem has been the carrier of memories ever since the Harlem Renaissance. This fact is already expressed in the name of the era that ties the notion of place (Harlem) to the notion of time and memory (renaissance ). In this combination, the Harlem Renaissance’s concept of a cultural renewal through the remembrance and reconstruction of an influential past is situated in the space of Harlem, the modern urban center of the New Negro movement. Harlem Renaissance writing abounds in references to the South and to Africa as culturally and spiritually significant places of the past, as, for instance, Melvin Dixon has shown in his article “The Black Writer’s Use of Memory.”1 At the same time, Harlem has continuously originated memories of itself and constructed new images for the cultural memory of black America. These images are based in the urban space of New York. I want to inquire into 210 this relationship of place and memory by investigating the memories of Harlem and the spatial images through which they manifest in texts. Harlem in the 1920s has been repeatedly reconstructed in fiction, during the Harlem Renaissance itself and in later texts. James de Jongh, in his study on the international literary appropriation of Harlem, Vicious Modernism, points out that it is important to identify Harlem as a literary motif and not simply as the (realistic) setting of novels, plays, stories, and poetry. This motif has been consciously chosen for a given text in order to refer to a significant historical place. The way the motif is designed and organized shapes the place and gives it meaning, clearly within the text but also outside it. Thus, the place’s significance is not only referred to, but also further established and reinterpreted . Through these acts of interpretation, the motif becomes a field of debate on the meaning of the Harlem Renaissance—and often, by extension, on the state of African-American life. In the fictional (re)constructions of Harlem, the achievements of the New Negro were celebrated, visions were expressed, history was assessed, and cultural identities were negotiated. In the early twenties, Harlem was still terra incognita on the map of African-American fiction. However, the intensive attention of black—and white—newspapers, as well as traveling blues singers and other public and private dissemination, had established Harlem well on the cultural landscape, both as the respectable center for racial uplift and as the notorious center of the jazz age that was attracting blacks and whites alike. Consequently, writers about Harlem, even in the 1920s, were already reacting to a strong and contradictory public image. A naive “description” of Harlem has, therefore, never been possible. Rather, the place had to be perceived through the multitudinous reflections of it, causing a perspective split between myth and fact. The utopian force behind Harlem brought about a nostalgic view even as Harlem was still growing. The diverse nature of this image of Harlem and its constant repercussions in popular culture made the Harlem Renaissance a very self-conscious movement , which helps to explain the problems of representation with which many of the artists saw themselves confronted. The Harlem Renaissance writers had to develop their motifs and modes of representation against the overdetermination of the image of Harlem. Authors of later ages additionally faced the temporal distance and, most importantly, the fact that over the course of its further development, Harlem had ceased to stand as a symbol of AfricanAmerican achievement and was now viewed as emblematic of black inner-city problems. Although this is a significant difference between the two groups of HARLEM AS A MEMORY PLACE 211 writers under consideration, I want to...