West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands by Emily Lutenski (review)

In West of Harlem, Emily Lutenski brings heretofore marginalized or erased black modernist experiences to the center. As the book’s subtitle suggests, there is an intimate connection between African American Writers and the Borderlands. Though the nearly exclusive focus on Harlem as the site of black modernist literary production and identity formation provides a useful center point from which to start, the center cannot hold if striving to do justice to the breadth and complexity of black lives. Indeed, any dominant narrative of blackness—in any era—will likewise occlude, suppress, and deny the great diversity of African American experience. In her rejection of “the idea that the West is anomalous in black history and experience” Lutenski joins the growing ranks of scholars who would disrupt, challenge, and outright refuse monolithic racial and cultural narratives (25).

Rather than anomalous, Lutenski argues, the West played a significant role in shaping the consciousness of the New Negro. What is more, “the borderlands West … was repurposed as … dreamscape in the years of the New Negro renaissance” (257). The dream was shared by Ralph Ellison, who argued that black freedom can be found in the American West (5–10). Here the West figures as frontier, as an escape from the black-white dialectic, and as liberating geographic space “beyond the North-South binary” of the black diaspora (12). In this West, the African American dream and the American Dream converge, rather than deferring the latter for the advantage of the former. To figure black freedom through geographic mobility, however, introduces a new challenge, and a not unproblematic one at that: “if American culture is to be maintained, new frontiers must be created” (9).

Lutenski’s argument, it should be noted, is a cultural one. The book’s thesis, to paraphrase its promotional copy, is that borderlands cultures influenced the art of key figures of the Harlem Renaissance in surprising and important ways. In short, one would be mistaken to conceive of African American identity as a monoculture rather than a diverse culture characterized by cultural mestizaje. By recovering the ways in which “Mexico played a formative role in [Langston] Hughes’s transnational and antiracist vision” we can better see that “a politics and aesthetics long considered Pan-African” must also “be understood as multiethnic” (27). The same could be said of the politics and aesthetics of Richard Wright (who was also deeply influenced by sojourns in Mexico), as well as Jean Toomer (who arrived in Harlem from the West, and kept a home in New Mexico), Arna Bontempts (who set multiple works in Los Angeles, where he “spent his formative years”), and other major figures of the Harlem Renaissance—the last three of whom Lutenski devotes separate chapters to in the book (26).

Lutenski’s masterful recovery of the West’s influence on the African American imaginary—the myths, metaphors, and folklore around which identities coalesce and form—gestures toward the work of Paul Gilroy, whose seminal notion of the Black Atlantic encouraged looking beyond national borders. In illuminating previously occluded cultural and intellectual influences, such projects run parallel to work done in borderland studies, as José David Saldívar notes in Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. In drawing from both Gilroy and Saldívar, Lutenski’s recovery project suggests the need—given the inextricable connections that bind them together—for greater engagement and conversation between ethnic studies fields.

As a spatial studies project situated in the borderlands of the American West, Lutenski’s work engages deeply with the work of Latina scholars such as Mary Pat Brady and Norma Alarcón. It is no surprise, then, that in opposition to her opening gesture toward Gilroy and “constructs of the transnational,” Lutenski must insist that “region” cannot be elided—that place matters (12). Even a more abstract and metaphorical account of space theory must insist on the importance of place, as indicated by Mary Pat Brady’s emphasis on “the discursive and the spatial...