Harlem Crossroads

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".

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 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 "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 "The book contributes worthily to the current tide of work on the interplay between word and image, literary and visual culture in the twentieth century, as well as to the scholarship on black-Jewish relations, and it will surely help spawn further scholarship."--George Hutchinson, American Literary History

• List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii Preface xvii Introduction: A Riot of Images: Harlem and the Pursuit of Modernity 1 Chapter One: Documenting Harlem: Images and Afterlives 19 Chapter Two: From Black Voices to Black Power: Richard Wright and the Trial of Documentary 61 Chapter Three: Ralph Ellison, Photographer 112 Chapter Four: Photo-Text Capital: James Baldwin, Richard Avedon, and the Uses of Harlem 160 Chapter Five: Dodging and Burning: The Writer and the Image after the Civil Rights Era 198 Coda: Looking Back: Toni Morrison and the Return to Plato's Cave 252 Abbreviations 265 Notes 267 Bibliography 317 Index 341