Cross-Cultural Harlem - by Sandhya Shukla (Paperback)

About the Book

Drawing on fiction, sociology, political speech, autobiography, and performance, Sandhya Shukla develops a living theory of Harlem, in which peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other, even while Blackness remains crucial.

Book Synopsis

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Harlem has been the capital of both Black America and a global African diaspora, an early home for Italian and Jewish immigrant communities, an important Puerto Rican neighborhood, and a representative site of gentrification. How do we understand the power of a place with so many claims and identifications? Drawing on fiction, sociology, political speech, autobiography, and performance, Sandhya Shukla develops a living theory of Harlem, in which peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other, even while Blackness remains crucial.

Cross-Cultural Harlem reveals a dynamic of exchange that provokes a rethinking of spaces such as Black Harlem, El Barrio, and Italian Harlem. Cross-cultural encounters among African Americans, West Indians, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Italians provide a story of multiplicity that challenges the framework of territorial enclaves. Shukla illuminates the historical processes that have shaped the diversity of Harlem, examining the many dimensions of its Blackness--Southern, African, Caribbean, Puerto Rican, and more--as well as how white ethnicities have been constructed. Considering literary and historical examples such as Langston Hughes's short story "Spanish Blood," the career of the Italian American left-wing Harlem congressman Vito Marcantonio, and the autobiography of Puerto Rican-Cuban writer Piri Thomas, Shukla argues that cosmopolitanism and racial belonging need not be seen as contradictory. Cross-Cultural Harlem offers a vision of sustained dialogue to respond to the challenges of urban transformations and to affirm the future of Harlem as actual place and global symbol.

Review Quotes

In Cross-Cultural Harlem, Sandhya Shukla offers a beautifully nuanced reimagining of Harlem as a dynamic space where people have lived in difference rather than just with differences, in which identities and identifications are far more complex than often simplified notions of race relations suggest. This valuable book tells a much fuller, multifaceted story of cultural encounters in upper Manhattan.--Vera M. Kutzinski, author of The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas

Reminding us of the concrete and abstract relationships that make up a neighborhood, Sandhya Shukla remaps Harlem's affective geographies. Through Shukla's elegant close readings and intertextual creativity, we are given a new path through the solidarities of grief and hope that have long made Harlem a home for radical imagination.--Shane Vogel, author of Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze

Cross-Cultural Harlem is a beautiful and daring piece of scholarship. Sandhya Shukla tells new stories about an iconic neighborhood and casts a fresh eye on sedimented ones. The result is a careful, compassionate, and compelling case for a place-based and racially complex ethic of relationality.--Jacqueline Nassy Brown, author of Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool

About the Author

Sandhya Shukla is associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Virginia, where she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. She is the author of India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (2003) and a coeditor of Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (2007).