Harlem as a site of the black cultural sublime was invented by those writers and artists at the turn of the century determined to transform the stereotypical image of Negro Americans as ex-slaves, members of an inherently inferior race—biologically and environmentally unfit for mechanized modernity and its cosmopolitan forms of fluid identity—into an image of a race of culture-bearers. To effect this transformation, the New Negro would need a nation over which to preside. And that nation’s capital would be Harlem, that realm north of Central Park, centered between 130th and 145th Streets.
Since the earliest decades of this century, then, the lure of Harlem has captivated the imagination of writers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians around the world. Stories are legion of African American and African pilgrims progressing to Manhattan, then plunging headlong into the ultimate symbolic black cultural space—the city within a city, the “Mecca of the New Negro” (as Alain Locke put it)—that Harlem became in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Fidel Castro’s recent journey uptown, recalling his famous sojourn at the Hotel Teresa thirty-five years ago, is only the most recent of a long line of such pilgrimages into America’s very own heart of darkness. The list of pilgrims is long and distinguished, including Max Weber and Carl Jung, Federico García Lorca and Octavio Paz, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, Kwame Nkrumah and Wole Soyinka, Marcus Garvey and Malcom X, Ezekiel Mphaphlele and Nelson Mandela, and so forth. “Harlem was like a great magnet for the Negro intellectual,” Hughes wrote, “pulling him from everywhere. Once in New York, he had to live in Harlem.” Harlem was not so much a place as it was a state of mind, the cultural metaphor for black America itself.
What does seem curious to me about the Harlem Renaissance—and relevant to us here—is that its creation occurred precisely as Harlem was turning into the great American slum. The death rate was 42 percent higher than in other parts of the city. The infant mortality rate in 1928 was twice as high as in the rest of New York. Four times as many people died from tuberculosis as in the white population. The unemployment rate, according to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was 50 percent. There was no way to romanticize these conditions, but Locke and his fellows valiantly attempted to do so. Even James Weldon Johnson, one of the most politically engaged of all the Renaissance writers in his capacity as the first black secretary of the NAACP, wrote Black Manhattan to create the fiction of Harlem as a model of civility and black bourgeois respectability, rather than as an example of the most heinous effects of urban economic exploitation and residential segregation. For Johnson, Harlem was “exotic, colorful, sensuous; a place of laughing, singing, and dancing; a place where life wakes up at night.” Moreover, he continued, “Harlem is not merely a Negro colony or community, it is a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world. It is not a slum or a fringe, it is located in the heart of Manhattan and occupies one of the most beautiful and healthful sections of the city.” Locke, always an optimist, whom Charles Johnson called “the press agent of the New Negro,” declared Harlem the cultural capital of the black world: “Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia. Harlem, I grant you, isn’t typical—but it is significant, it is prophetic.” The “Harlem” of literature and the Harlem of socioeconomic reality were as far apart as Bessie Smith was from Paul Whiteman. The valorization of black rhythm, spontaneity, laughter, sensuality—all keywords of depictions of blacks by blacks at the time—contrasted starkly with Harlem’s squalor and the environmental or structural limitations upon individual choices such as those finally depicted in Wright’s Native Son (1940) in part as a reaction against what he felt to be the Renaissance writers’ bohemian decadence.
The Renaissance’s fascination with primitivism, one could argue, has today found a counterpart in three arenas of representation: the reconstruction of the institution of slavery; the valorization of vernacular cultural forms as a basis for a postmodern art; and the use of a lyrical voice-of-becoming in fictions that depict the emergence of black female protagonists with strong, resonant voices and self-fashioned identities. Subjects heretofore to be avoided—such as slavery and the female tale of the transcendence and emergence of the self—and vernacular linguistic forms have all emerged like the return of the repressed as dominant themes in African American literature. What remains to be explored, however, in the written arts of this renaissance, are the lives and times of the grandchildren of the Bigger Thomases and Bessie Mearses of Native Son, which by and large have been of interest primarily to young black filmmakers, who far too often seem to be caught in the embrace of a romantic primitivism, navigating us through the inner city more for sexual titillation than for social critique. Given the stark statistics that we all know so well describing the nightmare reality of black inner-city life—one in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 in prison, on probation, or on parole; 46 percent of all black children born at or beneath the poverty line—one is forced to wonder where this generation’s Bigger Thomas is. Until this subject matter finds a voice as eloquent as that voice of the newly emergent and aspiring middle-class black self, today’s renaissance runs the risk of suffering the sorts of critique that we level against the Harlem Renaissance seven full decades later. For there are two nations in America, and these two nations, one hopeless, one full of hope, are both black. African Americans live a hyphenated life in America. Morrison’s Beloved explores what the hyphenation of race costs. It is incumbent upon our artists now to explore what the hyphenation of class costs.
Perhaps it is no accident that the most interesting rendering of the tension between the myth of Harlem and its social reality is to be found not in a text produced in that period but in Morrison’s Jazz, which is set in Harlem in 1926. In this novel Morrison succeeds in creating a protagonist whose fate is as shaped by her environment as by her actions, in a curious kind of stasis or equilibrium that seeks to resolve the tension between the naturalism of Richard Wright and Ann Petry on the one hand, and the lyrical modernism of Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison on the other. “Word was,” Morrison’s narrator tells us, “that underneath the good times and the easy money something evil ran the streets and nothing was safe—not even the dead.” It is in this novel that the Harlem Renaissance finally finds its most sophisticated voice and its most pointed critique, the newest renaissance grounding itself in the mirror of the old, bridging that gap between the shadow and the act, the myth and the reality, the fiction and the fact. Morrison’s ultimate message would seem to be a warning, a warning that it is only when our artists today speak the city’s “loud voice and make that sound human,” avoiding “miss[ing] the people altogether,” in all their complexity, that this renaissance can claim to be the renaissance to end all renaissances. Much depends on whether we get it.
SOURCE: Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997).
INTRODUCTION, BLACK IN LATIN AMERICA
I FIRST LEARNED that there were black people living someplace in the Western Hemisphere other than the United States when my father told me the first thing that he had wanted to be when he grew up. When he was a boy about my age, he said, he had wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Cumberland, Maryland, a black man from someplace called Haiti. I knew by this time that there were black people in Africa, of course, because of movies such as Tarzan and TV shows such as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Ramar of the Jungle. And then, in 1960, when I was ten years old, our fifth-grade class studied “Current Affairs,” and we learned about the seventeen African nations that gained their independence that year. I did my best to memorize the names of these countries and their leaders, though I wasn’t quite sure why I found these facts so very appealing. But my father’s revelation about his earliest childhood ambition introduced me to the fact that there were black people living in other parts of the New World, a fact that I found quite su
rprising.
It wasn’t until my sophomore year at Yale, as a student auditing Robert Farris Thompson’s art history class “The Trans-Atlantic Tradition: From Africa to the Black Americas,” that I began to understand how “black” the New World really was. Professor Thompson used a methodology that he called the “Tri-Continental Approach”—complete with three slide projectors—to trace visual leitmotifs that recurred among African, African American, and Afro-descended artistic traditions and artifacts in the Caribbean and Latin America, to show, a la Melville Herskovits, the retention of what he called “Africanisms” in the New World. So in a very real sense, I would have to say, my fascination with Afro-descendants in this hemisphere, south of the United States, began in 1969, in Professor Thompson’s very popular, and extremely entertaining and rich, art history lecture course. In addition, Sidney Mintz’s anthropology courses and his brilliant scholarly work on the history of the role of sugar in plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America also served to awaken my curiosity about another black world, a world both similar to and different from ours, south of our borders. And Roy Bryce-Laporte, the courageous first chair of the Program in Afro-American Studies, introduced me to black culture from his native Panama. I owe so much of what I know about African American culture in the New World to these three wise and generous professors.
But the full weight of the African presence in the Caribbean and Latin America didn’t hit me until I became familiar with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, conceived by the historians David Eltis and David Richardson and based now at Emory University. Between 1502 and 1866, 11.2 million Africans survived the dreadful Middle Passage and landed as slaves in the New World. And here is where these statistics became riveting to me: of these 11.2 million Africans, according to Eltis and Richardson, only 450,000 arrived in the United States. That is the mind-boggling part to me, and I think to most Americans. All the rest arrived in places south of our border. About 4.8 million Africans went to Brazil alone. So, in one sense, the major “African American Experience,” as it were, unfolded not in the United States, as those of us caught in the embrace of what we might think of as “African American Exceptionalism” might have thought, but throughout the Caribbean and South America, if we are thinking of this phenomenon in terms of sheer numbers alone.
About a decade ago, I decided that I would try to make a documentary series about these Afro-descendants, a four-hour series about race and black culture in the Western Hemisphere outside of the United States and Canada. And I filmed this series this past summer, focusing on six countries—Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru—choosing each country as representative of a larger phenomenon. This series is the third in a trilogy that began with Wonders of the African World, a six-part series that aired in 1998. That series was followed by America Behind the Color Line, a four-part series that aired in 2004. In a sense, I wanted to replicate Robert Farris Thompson’s “Tri-Continental” methodology to make, through documentary film, a comparative analysis of these cardinal points of the Black World. Another way to think of it is that I wanted to replicate the points of the Atlantic triangular trade: Africa, the European colonies of the Caribbean and South America, and black America. Black in Latin America, another four-hour series, is the third part of this trilogy, and this book expands considerably on what I was able to include in that series. You might say that I have been fortunate enough to find myself over the past decade in a most curious position: to be able to make films about subjects about which I am curious and about which I initially knew very little, with the generous assistance of many scholars in these fields and many more informants I interview in these countries.
The most important question that this book attempts to explore is this: what does it mean to be “black” in these countries? Who is considered “black” and under what circumstances and by whom in these societies? The answers to these questions vary widely across Latin America in ways that will surprise most people in the United States, just as they surprised me. My former colleague, the Duke anthropologist J. Lorand Matory, recently explained the complexity of these matters to me in a long and thoughtful email: “Are words for various shades of African descent in Brazil, such as mulattoes, cafusos, pardos, morenos, pretos, negros, etc., types of ‘black people,’ or are pretos and negros just the most African-looking people in a multidirectional cline of skin color–facial feature–hair texture combinations?” And how do social variables enter the picture? Matory asks: “Suppose two people with highly similar phenotypes are classified differently according to how wealthy and educated they are, or the same person is described differently depending upon how polite, how intimate, or how nationalistic the speaker wants to be? In what contexts does the same word have a pejorative connotation, justifying the translation of nigger, and in another context connote affection, such as the word negrito?”
How important is the relation of race and class? As Matory told me, “Debates about ‘race’ are almost always also about class. We debate the relative worth of these two terms in describing the structure and history of hierarchy in our two societies. North Americans,” he concluded quite pungently, “tend to be as blind about the centrality of class in our society and vigilant about the centrality of race as Latin Americans are vigilant about the reality of class and blind about the reality of race.” And what about the term Latin America? Though this term lumps together speakers of the Romance languages and ignores the fact that there are millions of speakers of English, Dutch, and various creole languages throughout the Caribbean and South America, for convenience’s sake, it seemed to be the most suitable and economical term that we could agree on to refer to this huge and richly various set of societies, each with its own unique history of slavery, genetic admixture, and race relations.
The more I learn about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the more I realize how complex and extensive the cultural contacts among the three points of Robert Farris Thompson’s “Tri-Continental” triangle could be, even—or especially—at the individual level, both those of slaves and of black elites, with Europeans and Americans and with other black people. Most of us were taught the history of slavery in school (if we were taught at all) through simple stereotypes of kidnappings by white men, dispersal of related tribal members on the auction block to prevent communication and hence rebellion, and the total separation of New World black communities from each other and from their African origins. The idea that some members of the African elite were active players in the commerce of the slave trade or that they traveled to the New World and to Europe and home again for commercial, diplomatic, or educational purposes is both surprising and can be quite disturbing.
While some scholars of slavery and of African American Studies (and I include myself in this group) may have come late to an understanding of the remarkable extent of contact between Africans on the continent with Africans in Europe and throughout the Americas (as well as, for our purposes in this book, the similarities and differences in the historical experiences and social and cultural institutions Afro-descendants created throughout the Western Hemisphere), intellectuals, writers, musicians, and elites of color have long been keenly aware of each other, starting as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if not before. For example, exchanges between African rulers and the courts of Europe started very early in the modern era. We know from the visual archival record, for instance, that emissaries from the monarchs of Ethiopia and the kingdom of Kongo came to the Vatican as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively, and established formal diplomatic embassies there. An Ethiopian embassy before Pope Eugenius IV at the Council of Florence in 1439 is depicted in bronze at the entrance to St. Peter’s. And Antonio Emanuele Funta (or Ne Vunda) was ambassador to the Vatican from Kongo, sent by King Alvaro II to Pope Paul V in 1604, via Brazil and Spain, arriving in 1608, when he died. The role of African elites in the trans-Atlantic slave trade after the early 1500s led to diplomatic and commercial ne
gotiations back and forth between Europe and Africa and Africa and Brazil, for example. And this is a logical development, once we allow Africans the same degree of agency that we presume for Europeans in the exercise of the slave trade, which was, all too often, I am sad to say, first and last, a business. But these commercial contacts were followed by those between scholars and intellectuals as well. “El negro Juan Latino,” a former slave who wore his blackness in his name, became the first African professor of grammar at the University of Granada and the first African to publish a book of poetry in Latin, in 1573. Latino is mentioned in the opening section of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and was sometimes cited in biographical dictionaries in the eighteenth century as evidence of the African’s “improvability.” The Abbas Gregorius, from Ethiopia, collaborated with a German scholar to create the first grammar of the Amharic language less than a century after Juan Latino thrived. We recall him both through his grammar and through a striking image of him that has survived. But black men and women of letters from across the black world seem to have shared a certain fascination with each other as well and seem to have taken inspiration from the accomplishments of each other, if only through works such as the Abbé Henri Grégoire’s De la littérature des nègres (The Literature of Negroes), published in 1808. In 1814, the Haitian Emperor Henri Christophe ordered fifty copies of Grégoire’s book and invited him to visit his kingdom.
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