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18. Underground to Harlem: Rumblings and Clickety-Clacks of Diaspora
- University of Minnesota Press
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415 Underground to Harlem: Rumblings and Clickety-Clacks of Diaspora MARK ANTHONY NEAL 18 The railroad was perhaps the most prominent metaphor of travel and movement for blacks at the dawn of the New Negro era, as Pullman porters, jazz musicians, and World War I veterans became the ambassadors for diasporic formation—if we are to consider the vast geographical difference found across the United States and North America as, ultimately, an articulation of difference that produced all the tension associated with shared national borders. Those railroads have long been romanticized as a site of black progress, even in the twentieth century, when Spike Lee reimagined, in his film adaptation of Richard Price’s novel Clockers, the plight of a generation of black youth who could no longer look toward a promised land. At the film’s resolution, we find the protagonist Strike (Mekhi Phifer) putting aside his model train set—a metaphor for the redundancy of progress for the hip-hop generation—to board a train for, literally , nowhere. And yet I’d like to argue that such a view of the promised land, whether Marcus Garvey’s Africa or destinations that inspired the “great” migration , undervalues the ways that various black bodies produced community, and even notions of diaspora, in the midst of movement, relocation, and dislocation. Those railroads were just one iteration of that movement; I like to think instead of a subway ride, which, in the early days of the system, only took you to 110th Street—areas north of that point, Harlem and the Bronx, were deemed hinterlands, apparently not fit for civilization. When enterprising developers found themselves without tenants for a New York City that they imagined would tame those hinterlands, they found willing migrants in the communities of relatively newly minted black Americans, who, given the routes they traveled—unwillingly and by force—to the so-called New World, offered little resistance to moving uptown from Lower Manhattan and the Tenderloin section of the city. As James Weldon Johnson noted in Black Manhattan, blacks in New York were largely relegated to what is now known as Greenwich Village and Little Italy well into the nineteenth century and were later forced uptown to the Tenderloin, San Juan Hill, and West 416 MARK ANTHONY NEAL Fifty-Second Street. The move to Harlem, whether forced or by choice, seemed par for the course for black NewYorkers, if not for a nation of Negroes in general. Twenty years before Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay would publish his groundbreaking novel Home to Harlem—his reflection on the vagabond nature of black diasporic formation—a generation of black New Yorkers were already calling Harlem home: a tethered notion of being and place that remains largely undisturbed, gentrification notwithstanding, to this day. As Thabiti Lewis writes of McKay’s tome, his “narrative, adroitly powered by the meanderings of a soldier and a locomotive symbolism of a train, reflect his modernist proclivities, as well as the diverse rhythms of black life, and the myriad ways in which masculinity imagines and performs community.”1 This home was never static—Harlem was always already a cosmopolitan space, reflective of the overdeveloping metropolis that shared its borders (and had to build upward) but also of the comings and goings of southern migrants and Afro-Caribbean immigrants. That this place would be not only a site of becoming and coming together but also a site of departure and expansion highlights the tension between roots and routes that has always animated black life across the globe. I am imagining here Harlem as a way to rethink diaspora, as I am powerfully swayed by the work of political scientist Richard Iton, who wrestles with notions of black diaspora throughout his recent book In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era. Pushing aside concepts of diaspora that privilege the transatlantic slave trade and a rupture with Africa, on one hand, and, on the other, a seemingly inherent desire to reclaim Africa, through what Iton calls the “cycle of retaining, redeeming, refusing and retrieving” Africa, we might think of Harlem and the renaissance that called it home as a productive site of diaspora, as opposed to yet another jump-off for thinking of diaspora as a homelessness from Africa.2 Again, Iton is useful, arguing that we might “conceive of Diaspora as an alternative culture of location and identification to the state, which would encourage a de-emphasis on the circulation...