Friends and Strangers: E. Simms Campbell’s Mapping of a Multiracial Harlem
- Title
- Friends and Strangers: E. Simms Campbell’s Mapping of a Multiracial Harlem
- Creator
- Blake Oetting
- Description
- This paper investigates "A Night-Club Map of Harlem," illustrated by E. Simms Campbell in 1932. Only recently purchased and made available by the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Campbell's map has been largely ignored by art historians of The Harlem Renaissance and American modernism. As a visual document of the interracial nightlife that characterized Harlem in the early twentieth-century, however, the map offers us new information regarding the way the physical space of Harlem became abstracted into a signification for both white and black New Yorkers. In the following pages I attempt to draw out the ways that Campbell illustrates Harlem as a space that has the ability to both cement white voyeurs' membership in a modern intelligentsia and foment black ontologies of resistance. In doing so, the social history of racialized space in Manhattan, slumming, and cartography will also be considered. I aim to describe how Campbell's map represents Harlem as a neighborhood that is comprised of white and black identity formation where both both races were able to construct subjectivities simultaneously and often in opposition to one another.
- Publisher
- Bowdoin Journal of Art
- Date
- 2018
- Format
- student project
- Link
- www.academia.edu
- Source
- Oetting, Blake. 2018. "Friends and Strangers: E. Simms Campbell’s Mapping of a Multiracial Harlem" in Bowdoin Journal of Art , Vol. IV.