The City in African-American Literature

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Charles Scruggs

Reviewed by

Charles Scruggs University of Arizona

There are sixteen essays in this volume, plus an editors' introduction which states that the book's intention is to fill a gap in the critical study of African American literature. The editors claim that, while our "national" letters have been primarily "anti-urban" in nature, African American writers have often valorized the city as a fluid space that permits the formation of both self and community, and they imply as well that African American literature has expressed more varied views of the urban experience than has the literature of the established canon. The format of the book attempts to reflect this diversity, for the topics range from Frederick Douglass through the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary writers, and include discussions of Richard Wright, William Attaway, Willard Motley, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, John A. Williams, Toni Morrison, Samuel R. Delany, and Charles Johnson. The book ends with an essay on the black playwrights of the 1960s.

Donald B. Gibson's article "The Harlem Renaissance City: Its Multi-Illusionary Dimension" illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of this collection of essays. Revisionist in intention, Gibson blames academics and others for reducing the city in literature and life to a mythological dichotomy of good versus evil. His point is that the Heavenly City-Demonic City opposition oversimplies human experience in the city, and he argues further that "the conception of the northern city as the City of God never caused a single individual to raise a single foot to take one step northward." Or westward, eastward, or southward, for that matter, since black people migrated to urban centers throughout the United States even though the myth of the black migration has the North and Promised Land as largely synonymous. He insists that in reality the city is "a dynamic of interrelated forces acting and reacting in relation to each other," and one important "force" that has been neglected by critics of the Harlem Renaissance is the economic issue of social class within the modern city.

Unfortunately, Gibson's article never gets around to relating his ideas to specific texts, which is too bad because a consideration of social class could have illuminated, for instance, the middle section of Jean Toomer's Cane, Claude McKay's Home To Harlem, and Nella Larsen's Passing. Where Gibson goes wrong, of course, is in his dogmatic assertion that myth is not a motivating force, either in giving reasons for migration or in forming a conception of the real city. But anyone who has listened to Robert Johnson's "Sweet Home, Chicago" or read Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter (to say nothing of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's Jazz) knows that an idea in one's imagination is as "real" as the actual world he or she perceives.

I dwell upon Gibson's essay because it is one of the most interesting in The City in African-American Literature, and because it points to a problem concerning the book's organization. The book's thesis as defined by the editors is that, generally, white writers ignored Winthrop's "city on a hill" to explore "the open road," whereas black writers looked to the city in order to escape the confined pastoral space of American racism. Thus, despite Gibson's remarks, both myth and genre expectations have already slipped in through the backdoor. Indeed, in her essay "John A. Williams: The Black American Narrative and the City," Priscilla R. Ramsey contradicts both the editors' anti-urban thesis and Gibson's strictures upon myth when she insists that the Puritans brought with them an "urban notion" of "what America would become"; that is, the trope of "a city on a hill" not only inspired them to migrate to the New World but also filtered their perception of it. Other essays in the volume that make use of myth are Donald M. Hassler's "The Urban Pastoral and Labored Ease of Samuel R. Delany" and Robert L. Tener's "The Inner and Outer City: A Study of the Landscape of Imagination in Black Drama." It wouldn't matter if individual essays disagreed with each other or the editors' general thesis, providing there was some sense or order or intention to the debate; but that intention seems to be missing here.

And I would argue further that the book's stated thesis is also suspect. Opening their introduction by quoting Morton and Lucia White's The Intellectual versus the City, the editors imply that the dominant anti-urban tradition in American literature overwhelms all others. While everyone would admit that the anti-urban is one tradition, to claim it is the only one or even the dominant one hardly does justice to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, or William Dean Howells in the nineteenth century, to say nothing of home-grown modernists like Waldo Frank, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, and Lewis Mumford in the twentieth century (to name only a few). Indeed, the editors fall into the trap that Gibson argues must be avoided when talking about African American writers and the city: Following the Whites, they speak in binary terms or in terms of "ambivalence and animosity" when the real issue in discussing the city in literature, whether from a white or black point of view, is far more complicated, involving spatial relationships, cognitive maps, intertextuality, issues of class and gender, and so on. Farrah Jasmine Griffin, for example, in her 1995 book on the city and black literature "Who Set You Flowin'?": The African-American Migration Narrative, rightly expands her focus to include "musical and visual works."