Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919–1939 (review)

Black Americans’ cultural and national identities have long been debated. Are black Americans more African than American, or vice versa? Corbould’s engaging book offers a fresh historical interpretation to this long-standing conversation. Her detailed analysis of visual art, literature, newspaper editorials, cartoons, plays, historical and anthropological scholarship, pageants, poems, and other sources uncovers ways in which black American identity was not predicated upon choosing to be either African or American but rather melding together both African and American subjectivities into a multifaceted and coherent identity rooted in the United States and the African diaspora.

Corbould argues that a distinctly black urban public life, which emerged in the interwar years, reclaimed a dynamic sense of Africa—as opposed to the timeless, primitive Africa of white supremacist lore—and forged cultural and political alliances with oppressed black people around the world. These connections beyond the U.S. border transformed black Americans from Negroes, whose past was erased by slavery, into African Americans, who had ties to specific places and histories. African Americans—no different from Italian, English, or German immigrants—claimed a proud, unique national past and celebrated their historic role in making the American nation. Corbould contends that ultimately, by becoming African American, black people made multiculturalism acceptable and “paved the way for the emerging hyphenated identities of so many Americans today” (219).

Corbould’s interdisciplinary approach and close analysis of diverse sources gives this study remarkable breadth, tracing how numerous playwrights, political orators, intellectuals, and pageant directors imagined Africa and the African diaspora through musical motifs, literary themes, and new historical narratives that reclaimed a “usable” black past. These artists and intellectuals asserted that Africans and black Americans were not the same, despite what certain black nationalists and neo-colonialists, like Marcus Garvey, and white supremacists imagined and argued. Nonetheless, the interwar black public accentuated the historical and political connections between Black Americans, Africans, and people of the African diaspora. Central to Corbould’s interdisciplinary analysis is her belief that as blacks became African American, “culture and politics were never far apart” (215).

This process became most complete, Corbould intimates, when black Americans immersed themselves in political debates and military struggles associated with the American occupation of Haiti and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian invasion seemed to bring the black urban public to life: Political cartoons graphically depicted and openly criticized the evils of imperialism and fascism; plays and poems celebrated the African diaspora; and tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Harlem in solidarity with besieged Ethiopians.

For the most part, however, the black public appears shadowy in this book. Corbould tends to overlook intraracial class diversity and conflict in her analysis of the black public sphere. Listing the many organizational affiliations of Arthur Schomburg and John Henrik Clarke, or analyzing the works of New Negro artist-intellectuals and scholar-activists, hardly offers a thick description of an interwar black public life and its evolving cultural identity. Instead, Corbould’s black public was limited to cultural and political elites. Thus, thirty years later, in the wake of far-reaching Black political and cultural movements, the identity formation process that Corbould argues began in the interwar period finally was complete.