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The Era of the New Negro African American Politics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Harlem Negro Harlem is practically a development of the past decade, but the story behind it goes back a long way. —James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” 1925 Contemporary discussions of Harlem invariably focus on how it was—and continues to be—an African American space. What this means depends on the speaker, but what is indisputable is that Harlem remains, in Charles S. Johnson’s words, “the Mecca of the Negroes the country over.”1 Harlem has maintained its legendary status as a black neighborhood over the decades, through multiple economic ups and downs and shifts in African American and American politics. Nevertheless, a wave of economic growth that began in earnest in the late 1990s has challenged this identity. For the development’s supporters, the combined presence of former President Bill Clinton and a host of chain stores, such as Old Navy and Starbucks, is a sign of the area’s revitalization and integration into American life. For those less enthusiastic about the changes, the influx of big business threatens to transform the symbolic site of black America into nothing more than a carbon copy of middle—white— America. Though economic in its focus, the roots of the tension between preserving black Harlem and contemporary expansion reside in the area’s iconographic status as an African American place, one maintained through a variety of visual and written texts over the past century. As suggested by recent anthropological, sociological, and artistic works about the area, Harlem’s reputation as the African American community exerts a fundamental influence over its public reputation.2 Even in the wake of massive changes—in architecture, in economics, in politics—Harlem appears almost frozen in time, with present-day descriptions and images of the space relying on, perhaps clinging to, what John L. Jackson Jr. has referred to as a “wasness” that “tethers [it] to another time altogether.” For Jackson, “Harlem is famous today almost exclusively because the argument can be made that it . . . 1 Introduction ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ was famous in the past, way back ‘When Harlem was in vogue.’”3 But why such nostalgia? What fuels the desire to cling to the area’s history as an African American community even as its demographics—and American politics in general—have changed? And what role has art, particularly film and photography, played in representing an urban space that so solidly signifies African American progress and citizenship? This discussion opens with Charles S. Johnson’s 1925 reference to Harlem as a “Mecca” so as to situate the following analysis in a historical context that at once addresses the importance of the arts and letters of the Renaissance era, but that also reminds us, as James Weldon Johnson was suggesting in the opening epigraph from the same year, that Harlem’s story is more complex than first appearances may suggest. To understand Harlem’s enduring legacy as both a cultural product and as a public discourse, therefore, we must consider three interconnected forces. First, we should assay the development of the area in the historical context of urbanization, industrialization, and migration, all of which have been factors in Harlem’s growth since its annexation to New York City in the late nineteenth century. Second, as the area’s reputation as a promised land developed, it emerged as the site on which African American politics and aesthetics—the latter being umbilically tied to the former—have been debated, defined, and redefined. Third, such deliberations over the status of the “New Negro” were often fought visually as well as verbally, and the new technologies of photography and film joined other visual arts—painting and printmaking in particular—in defining the imagistic contours of African American life in a new century. In what ways, then, were photography and film marshaled for African American political causes? Was there a hierarchy of acceptable African American aesthetics? And what role did (and does) Harlem play in this dynamic? Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film explores these and related questions by looking at the changing faces of Harlem produced by photography and film over the past century and considering the ways such images have come to stand for African American and, by extension, American experience. Harlem: “Manhattan’s First Suburb” While the establishment of Harlem’s African American population is most often associated with the years following World War I and the demographic shifts associated...

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