Awards

• Commended for MSA Book Prize 2007.
• Short-listed for MSA Book Prize 2007
• Short-listed for MSA Book Prize 2007 (United States)
• Short-listed for MSA Book Prize 2008
• Shortlisted for MSA Book Prize 2007.
• Shortlisted for MSA Book Prize 2008.

Overview

The Harlem riot of 1935 not only signaled the end of the Harlem Renaissance; it made black America's cultural capital an icon for the challenges of American modernity. Luring photographers interested in socially conscious, journalistic, and aesthetic representation, post-Renaissance Harlem helped give rise to America's full-blown image culture and its definitive genre, documentary. The images made there in turn became critical to the work of black writers seeking to reinvent literary forms. Harlem Crossroads is the first book to examine their deep, sustained engagements with photographic practices. Arguing for Harlem as a crossroads between writers and the image, Sara Blair explores its power for canonical writers, whose work was profoundly responsive to the changing meanings and uses of photographs. She examines literary engagements with photography from the 1930s to the 1970s and beyond, among them the collaboration of Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava, Richard Wright's uses of Farm Security Administration archives, James Baldwin's work with Richard Avedon, and Lorraine Hansberry's responses to civil rights images.Drawing on extensive archival work and featuring images never before published, Blair opens strikingly new views of the work of major literary figures, including Ralph Ellison's photography and its role in shaping his landmark novel Invisible Man, and Wright's uses of camera work to position himself as a modernist and postwar writer. Harlem Crossroads opens new possibilities for understanding the entangled histories of literature and the photograph, as it argues for the centrality of black writers to cultural experimentation throughout the twentieth century.

Full Product Details

9780691130873

Table of Contents

Reviews

Shortlisted for the 2007 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association [A] remarkable accomplishment...Worthwhile for these illustrations alone, the snapshots from the now distant past preserved forgotten Harlem tableaus...And when you factor in the ingenious fashion in which Sara Blair matches these pictures with the works of African-American literary giants, Harlem Crossroads adds up to a masterpiece making a noteworthy cultural contribution. --Kam Williams, African American Literature Book Club This rich, insightful study chronicles the import of photography in African American letters from the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights era. Through meticulous documentation, Blair argues that the photographic record of the African American experience informed the literary and creative genius of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, John Oliver Killens, and Toni Morrison, among others...Ample photographs accompany the felicitous narrative, making this a useful resource not only for literature but also for anthropology, sociology, history, and photography. --A.J. Guillaume, Jr., Choice Blair's text stands at the forefront of scholarship that resists academic compartmentalization and attends to the actual social practices of artists and writers... As a work that draws together literary and photographic criticism, it offers clearheaded readings of particular textual passages and engages with a larger narrative about the development of the documentary photographic tradition... Thanks to Blair, photographic Harlem becomes the imaginative crossroads for issues of literary and visual representation, of cross-cultural collaboration, and of creative response to white othering of minority communities. --Katharine Capshaw Smith, The Journal of American History Sara Blairs book is ... a mighty contribution to photographic and literary studies, and one can only despair in the increasingly difficult task of including images whose flagrant absence in certain chapters can only be due to excessive copyright and publishing cost. The disappointment of the missing illustrations is largely compensated by the satisfaction of the ones that did make it into the volume. --Anne Crmieux, Transatlantica We can thank Blair for sketching out a broad future research agenda for historians that will be enhanced by her own lucid analysis of the complicated role played by images in conjunction with literary texts in struggles for black self-representation and Jewish antiracism in mid-twentieth-century New York. --Tamar Carroll, H-Net Reviews Harlem Crossroads is an admirably well-organized, thoughtful, and readable book... There is no doubt that it makes a compelling case for the crucial role played by photography and Harlem in the 'self-imagination, cultural politics, and literary work' of African-American writers of the twentieth century. --Clifford Endres, Journal of American Studies of Turkey The author is to be commended for the level of sophistication she brings to the debate on representation and 'race'. --Helen Mears, Wasafari It would be difficult to overstate Sara Blair's achievement in Harlem Crossroads... [T]he book offers a compelling and original entree into a rich and under examined set of cultural crossings... It will not be an easy model to follow, for it will require critics to develop Blair's exceptional skills as a reader of verbal and visual texts and adjudicator of the competing claims of aesthetics, ideology, and history. --Elizabeth Abel, Modern Philology

[A] remarkable accomplishment...Worthwhile for these illustrations alone, the snapshots from the now distant past preserved forgotten Harlem tableaus...And when you factor in the ingenious fashion in which Sara Blair matches these pictures with the works of African-American literary giants, Harlem Crossroads adds up to a masterpiece making a noteworthy cultural contribution. -- Kam Williams African American Literature Book Club This rich, insightful study chronicles the import of photography in African American letters from the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights era. Through meticulous documentation, Blair argues that the photographic record of the African American experience informed the literary and creative genius of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, John Oliver Killens, and Toni Morrison, among others...Ample photographs accompany the felicitous narrative, making this a useful resource not only for literature but also for anthropology, sociology, history, and photography. -- A.J. Guillaume, Jr. Choice Blair's text stands at the forefront of scholarship that resists academic compartmentalization and attends to the actual social practices of artists and writers... As a work that draws together literary and photographic criticism, it offers clearheaded readings of particular textual passages and engages with a larger narrative about the development of the documentary photographic tradition... Thanks to Blair, photographic Harlem becomes the imaginative crossroads for issues of literary and visual representation, of cross-cultural collaboration, and of creative response to white 'othering' of minority communities. -- Katharine Capshaw Smith The Journal of American History Sara Blair's book is ... a mighty contribution to photographic and literary studies, and one can only despair in the increasingly difficult task of including images whose flagrant absence in certain chapters can only be due to excessive copyright and publishing cost. The disappointment of the missing illustrations is largely compensated by the satisfaction of the ones that did make it into the volume. -- Anne Cremieux Transatlantica We can thank Blair for sketching out a broad future research agenda for historians that will be enhanced by her own lucid analysis of the complicated role played by images in conjunction with literary texts in struggles for black self-representation and Jewish antiracism in mid-twentieth-century New York. -- Tamar Carroll H-Net Reviews Harlem Crossroads is an admirably well-organized, thoughtful, and readable book... There is no doubt that it makes a compelling case for the crucial role played by photography and Harlem in the 'self-imagination, cultural politics, and literary work' of African-American writers of the twentieth century. -- Clifford Endres Journal of American Studies of Turkey

Author Information

Sara Blair is associate professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation.

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