Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film

Acknowledgments

xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project began with a simple series of questions: what is film’s status within African American aesthetics, and how might we look to films set in Harlem, the “Mecca of the New Negro,” as an indicator of the cinema’s role in the construction of African American identity? What appeared to be straightforward questions soon revealed an expansive history of cinema’s relationship to Harlem, one that broadened my query from film to other areas of visual culture and opened my eyes to the complex interactions of art, politics, and economics at play in the neighborhood. Over the years, my exploration of Harlem in African American photography and film, and vice versa, has taken me on a journey through archives and across different media, from microfiche copies of the New York Age to interactive websites promoting the “Harlem USA” development in Upper Manhattan. It has also brought me in contact with a number of people—colleagues, archivists, friends, and strangers—whose intellectual curiosity and generosity contributed to helping shape what appears in the following pages. It goes without saying that my colleagues at Brooklyn College were instrumental in the completion of Making a Promised Land. The seeds for what became a book were first nurtured during a fellowship year provided by the Ethyl R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College. I extend my gratitude to Robert Viscusi and George Cunningham for their work with the institute and their ongoing support of faculty scholarship. During the writing of this work, I was also fortunate to receive a Tow Professorship, awarded by Leonard and Claire Tow to foster faculty research. The Tow Award provided travel funds and other financial support related to this project, luxuries that are increasingly rare in an environment of fiscal austerity in higher education. My compatriots in the Department of Film—especially Daniel Gurskis, Liz Weis, Kara Lynn Andersen, Sarah Christman, Becky MacDonald, Bill Hornsby, Virginia Brooks, and Matthew Moore—have been supportive of my work over the years, and I am thankful for their interest in film scholarship in particular and their delightful enthusiasm for the cinema as a whole. I would also like to express my gratitude to the former provost, Roberta S. Matthews, for her support while she was part of the Brooklyn College community. As no scholarship is performed in a vacuum, I wish to acknowledge the fabulous film majors at Brooklyn College for asking hard questions, doubting any easy answers, and always reminding me why I love what I do. Finally, my sincere appreciation goes to Alberto Mojica, a talented filmmaker and scholar, who took time from filmmaking to assist me with film stills. Although Brooklyn College may sometimes seem like a small place, it is part of the much larger City University of New York system, which has provided me with the invaluable opportunity to collaborate with talented faculty from departments and institutions across the university. I had the lucky fortune to formulate the early stages of Making a Promised Land while participating in the “Transformative Cities” seminar hosted by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center. I would like to express my gratitude to the seminar co-coordinators, Neil Smith and Ida Sussman, and to the seminar’s faculty and student participants from across CUNY for encouraging me to broaden my historical work to present-day Harlem. I also want to acknowledge my colleagues in the Film Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center—David Gerstner, Cynthia Chris, Edward Miller, Ivone Margulies, Alison Griffiths, and William Boddy, among others—many who heard an early draft of chapter 1 as part of the FSCP’s Film and Media Lecture Series. In addition, I had the excellent help of two graduate assistants from the Graduate Center’s Program in Theatre, Andrew Kirchner and Ryan Donovan, both of whom provided research assistance at different moments in the preparation of this manuscript. Over the years, I have been invited to present my research to scholarly communities outside CUNY, opportunities that provided welcome and useful feedback for various parts of Making a Promised Land. For generously asking me to visit their institutions, I would like to acknowledge the following individuals: Amy Corbin and the Center for Ethics at Muhlenberg College; Erica Stein and Corey Creekmur at the University of Iowa; David Desser, for hosting the “Global Gangsters: Crime and International Cinema Conference,” at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Richard Grusin at the Center for 21st Century...