Culture Shock

In August 1964, Harper’s Magazine published “Harlem Is Nowhere,” an essay by Ralph Ellison commissioned sixteen years earlier by a different magazine—’47, which was named after the year it was first published and did not survive beyond 1948, when Ellison’s essay was to have appeared. The essay, originally envisioned alongside a suite of photographs by Gordon Parks, discussed the work that the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic—the first desegregated clinic in the United States—performed for residents of Harlem, a place Ellison describes in the piece as “the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.”¹ Alienation had taken on a psychotherapeutic as well as an economic meaning: Ellison often overlaid urban space and the psyche.

“Harlem Is Nowhere,” like Ellison’s masterwork, Invisible Man (1952), was greatly informed by his work for the Federal Writers’ Project, which involved conducting oral histories in Harlem in 1938 and 1939 that touched on Ellison’s own interest in questions of housing and urban policy—issues inseparable from the catastrophic effects the Great Depression had on a populace already subject to the psychic ruptures and crises of identity that Northern racism, violence, and segregation wrought daily. Beaten down, exhausted, and driven to near insanity by life under white supremacy, Black folk had been denied not only psychiatric care but also, he wrote, “the therapy which the white American achieves through patriotic ceremonies and by identifying himself with American wealth and power.” Instead, the Harlemite was left to find poor solace in what Ellison deemed Harlem’s “slum-shocked” institutions.²

In July of the same year, Harlem rioted for six nights in response to the killing of James Powell, a fifteen-year-old Black boy, by an off-duty police lieutenant. In the immediate wake of the shooting, protests remained peaceful, but after the third day, a crowd surrounded a Harlem police precinct calling for the officer’s arrest. They were met with force by the swinging clubs of the New York Police Department. The protesters replied with thrown bricks, bottles, and rocks. The first in a series of uprisings in Harlem and in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and later in Rochester, NY, Jersey City, NJ, Chicago, and Philadelphia, such disturbances were not, according to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., “race riot[s]” but rather the “built in, continuing resentment of the black people of the black ghetto of New York against the Police Department of New York and its policies of a half a century ago.”³ The editorial note preceding Ellison’s essay in Harper’s noted, “one senses how little has changed in the everyday life of the ghetto” since Ellison first wrote the essay in 1948. As Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has observed, perhaps by coincidence, the August 1964 issue of Harper’s was likely on newsstands—with the title of Ellison’s essay prominently displayed on its cover—as Harlem and the nation took to the streets in protest.⁴

Myka Tucker-Abramson’s Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism surveys, through the novels of the 1950s and 1960s, what Tucker-Abramson calls “the landscapes created by the violent processes of urban renewal” (129). Novel Shocks begins and ends in this Harlem of Ellison and James Baldwin, with Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) and Walter Miller’s The Siege of Harlem (1964) bookending her exploration of the rapidly shifting spatial and racial contexts of the midcentury US novel. Tucker-Abramson opens with an arrival—the character Eric Jones from Baldwin’s novel, returning after three years in Paris to a newly foreign New York—and closes with a departure: the secession of Harlem from New York and the United States that has already taken place by the beginning of Miller’s novel. The symmetries are fitting, as her book is an account of how an overlapping set of movements of people and capital to, within, and away from cities like...