From neglect to remembrance – the renewed image of New York’s Harlem in contemporary picturebooks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24136/rsf.2023.004Keywords:
African American children’s literature, , picturebooks, Harlem, the poetics of Black spaceAbstract
Drawing on the theory of “Black geographies” (McKittrick 2006; Hawthorne 2019) and the dichotomic concepts of “Black space” and “White space” (Anderson 2015), the article discusses the portrayal of New York’s Harlem in two picturebooks, Bryan Collier’s Uptown (2004) and Dinah Johnson’s H is for Harlem (2022). The article analyses the visual and verbal rhetoric of the narratives which reject a negative image of Black neighborhoods, popularly referred to as “Black ghettoes,” and instead produce a new discourse of Blackness which centers on the communities’ assets and contributions to global culture. It argues that the Black culture of Harlem is thriving despite the process of gentrification.
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