James de Jongh, Graduate Center English Faculty

De Jongh traces the evolution of the usage of Harlem by literary artists over the past seventy years. He concentrates on the aesthetic and cultural force of the idea of Harlem and its promise as a cultural capital in the 1920s, when it was appropriated by a generation of black poets, and its social and political challenges in the 1940s for those such as Langston Hughes and LeRoi Jones. The study is an examination of the continuing force of Harlem as an image of the Black Diaspora.

de Jongh, James. Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009