- Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film by Paula J. Masood
Paula J. Massood’s Making a Promised Land is an ambitious project, focusing on Harlem as a racial space, a legendary black neighborhood, and also as a series of complex visual significations about African American citizenship. As she suggests, Harlem is a “place that is at one and the same time resolutely historical and constantly in flux: material and imaginary, African American and American, national and multinational” (198). Needless to say, Massood’s book is both complicated and confounding, simply because at any given historical moment Harlem can be whatever it wants to be. For the most part, however, Massood gamely navigates these contradictions, tentatively examining the contours of cultural product, public discourse, visual fiction, and illusion.
This is a complicated book, and Massood tries to meld a variety of genres and aesthetic approaches with mixed results. On the one hand, she seeks to provide a history of black film and photography in and around Harlem, using the visual register as material document: the picture is evidence. On the other, Massood wants these images and films to be transmutative signs, processes of cultural and ideological flux in and of themselves. While she isn’t wrong in this approach or assumption, it is precisely this bifurcation that creates the odd pull in the book. Given that Harlem is and isn’t, simultaneously, the images slip and slide, but when Massood forces them into an argument the strain becomes evident indeed. Ironically, while Massood’s written historical account is well researched and convincing, Harlem’s imagistic contours are not. Given Harlem’s retroflective ideological nature, how can Massood affirm the concrete presence of an interpretive representation? And if she is indeed attempting to replicate this overall cultural flux in her work, why choose a traditional academic form to capture a set of ideological traces?
Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the first forty years of the twentieth century, exploring the construction of Harlem as the American Mecca for the New Negro. Massood does a solid job charting the painful conflicts between the uplift desires of the black bourgeoisie and the “lesser” tastes of the masses. While black intellectuals valorized photographs indicating respectability and worthiness, this elitist attitude clashed with the popular, vaudevillian taste for [End Page 267] moving pictures. If figures like W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized portraiture as progressive emblems of racial identity, the mass taste tilted toward the consumption of a grotesque racist primitivism, relying on plantation tropes and minstrelsy. This antipathy between respectability and “shock” would provide the lines of interpretive conflict throughout the century, and here Massood begins her shift toward the filmic form.
Massood provides a strong account of the rise and fall of the race film companies between 1914−25, such as the Afro-American Film Company and the Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange, among others, which sought to portray blacks positively. Though most of these companies collapsed in the crash of 1929, a thin remainder survived either through white backing and productive control or by turning out Hollywood-style gangster films like Harlem Is Heaven (1932), Dark Manhattan (1935), and Moon Over Harlem (1939). And here we encounter the central methodological difficulty of the book: while Massood’s history is certainly useful and well argued, the image analysis is increasingly problematic. While she insists on the strong links between a geo-social Harlem and racial ideology and consciousness, the image readings themselves become flat and unconvincing. Massood’s intellectual photo-grafting is a bit of a stretch, and her subjective (and ultimately poetic) observations sit uncomfortably with her material insistence.
Chapter 3 explores Harlem’s marketable shock value between 1940 and 1960, charting the rise of urban street photography and the neo-realist film. Not only was Harlem featured significantly in a set of photo-essays appearing in consumer magazines like Fortune and Look, but it was also used as a sociological backdrop in shorts like Helen Levitt and James Agee’s The Quiet One...