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

Chapter 1. African American Aesthetics and the City: Picturing the Black Bourgeoisie in New York

20 African American Aesthetics and the City Picturing the Black Bourgeoisie in New York They had heard of New York as a place vague and far away, a city that, like Heaven, to them had existed by faith alone. All the days of their lives they had heard of it, and it seemed to them the center of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom of the world. —Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods The 1907 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s short film Fights of Nations includes one of the earliest cinematic depictions of African American life in New York City. Introduced with an intertitle reading, “Sunny Africa, Eighth Avenue, New York,” the film’s presentation of black urbanity features the clientele of a New York City cabaret who drink, cakewalk, and fight. Despite this, the film is not about Harlem or any other neighborhood in particular; nor is it about African American life more generally. Instead, Fights of Nations narrates a story of American origins; it presents a collection of vignettes of international strife and American refuge. Together they support—perhaps even write—a developing mythology in which the young nation is presented as the world’s haven, a peaceful promised land for the oppressed. The film provides examples of Spanish, Mexican, Jewish, Scottish, and Irish people experiencing (often self-inflicted) violence and strife in their home countries, and it concludes by gathering different characters, some from the previous stories, in a space that is introduced via intertitle as “America, the Land of the Free.” The nation’s mythic significance is suggested through the presence of an American eagle above a collection of national flags, and an American Indian woman kneeling before them. The film ends with a shot of Uncle Sam entering the scene, as if suggesting that disparate people can find a home within the nation’s avuncular embrace. 1 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ AFRICAN AMERICAN AESTHETICS AND THE CITY 21 Though the film is a compelling early example of mythmaking in its construction of a nation marked by inclusion and tolerance, it is even more interesting for the sleight-of-hand it performs with its African American characters . Unlike the other stories, which are set in either another country (“Mexico and Spain”) or an unspecified space (“Sons of the Ould Sod”), the film’s black characters are placed in a specific world: “Sunny Africa, Eighth Avenue, New York.” Furthermore, most of the other scenes are set in pseudoexterior locations (pseudo in that they are sets), while “Sunny Africa” is actually an interior cabaret space (still a set) with a narrative that relies on many of the generalizations about black people made popular in nineteenth-century minstrel and vaudeville performances (drinking, dancing, fighting). Such obsessive placement of the black characters is more striking when one takes into account that they are later excluded from the film’s concluding national mosaic, an absence that I will discuss in more detail later. This chapter begins with this example not to focus on the way in which the city appears in the “Sunny Africa” section of Fights of Nations but to suggest the highly complex and extremely fraught chain of significations generated by the presence of black bodies in early American film. The vignette is important in that it suggests that by the early twentieth century, New York City was FIGURE 1. “America, the Land of the Free,” in Fights of Nations (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1907). MAKING A PROMISED LAND 22 already recognized as home to a large African American population. Moreover, the scene’s cabaret setting and minstrel show display a set of behaviors, including drinking and violence, that were already associated, from popular music, the stage, and early film, with urban blacks. Most important, the film’s self-conscious focus on defining nation suggests the contradictory position of black Americans in the United States at the time: on the one hand, we see an acknowledgment of an urban African American population, on the other hand (if we are to believe the film’s resolution), black people ultimately have no place in “America, the Land of the Free” at the beginning of a new century. The issues raised by the “Sunny Africa” section only scratch the surface of a much more complex set of political and social factors beginning to define African American life during the early twentieth century. For African Americans, the...