AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Overheat lightsmith guild wars 21/8/2023 Chapter Six brings these themes together in an analysis of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a photo text about Harlem, as a story of spaces and spatial practices. Chapter Five examines the body as it performs in the space of the photographic studio and in the city. Chapter Four enters the Harlem apartment, a compromised private space where African Americans have, nevertheless, created a ‘home place’. Chapter Three looks closely at street life, uncovering how city space is claimed and defended as African Americans become urban and learn to ‘know their place’. Chapter Two looks at political events on the streets of Harlem, where African Americans write their protest on the urban fabric. Chapter One looks at Harlem as a distinctive landscape, the paradigmatic black city produced by white power and black resistance. The balance of the full text will be shortly be posted, chapter by chapter. The Introduction outlines the historical and theoretical context and explains the methodology used in the critical readings of photographs that follow. I argue that, in depicting these spaces, photographs can serve as a powerful tool to perceive, imagine and make manifest the complexities of Harlem, exposing the effects of absent white power but also making visible the construction of spaces of resistance. Dominance and resistance are expressed spatially at all levels, from the cityscape to the space created by the body. Located within the grid of the American metropolis but set at a distance by de facto, if not de jure segregation, Harlem is the paradigm of the black city within a city. As both a ‘culture capital’ and a ghetto in the popular imagination of the twentieth century, Harlem is a complex and ambiguous place. My thesis, for which I was awarded a PhD by the University of Nottingham (UK) in 2004, argues that a critical reading of photographs can make a unique contribution to our understanding of racialised space and the struggle for the legal and symbolic ownership of place within black urban life, specifically in Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |