This wonderful collection of essays explores the enduring significance (both real and imagined) of Harlem from the early twentieth century to the present. Taking as its starting point Alain Locke's reference, in 1924, to Harlem as “both ‘setting and symbol’ in the portrayal of ‘our contemporary race development’” (3), it assembles a treasure trove of essays that cut across disciplinary and chronological divides to consider the far-reaching implications of “the sheer persistence and pervasiveness of notions of Harlem's special character” (8).

The volume is divided into three parts. The first one, “Mythologies,” traces the emergence of such tropes as race capital and ghetto, exploring how they were “entrenched, adapted, and contested” (11). It eschews the “Harlem-centricism and Harlem exceptionalism” (6) often associated with New Negro intellectuals like Alain Locke by attending to modulations in a discourse of preeminence that have been surprisingly persistent and malleable in the face of extensive social and cultural change. The second section, “Models,” turns to specific dimensions of Harlem's history, culture and representation (including queer Harlem and the portrayal of Harlem in 1920s African American fiction), with particular emphasis upon its integration into “broader national and diasporic configurations” (13). Finally, “Black No More?” considers how discourses of distinctiveness have mutated as Harlem has become a “byword for gentrification” (1). As a whole, the collection captures in its dynamics the interplay between the “real” and symbolic meanings that have accrued around Harlem, not least because its “past and present continue to be deeply entangled and contested” (17).

It is impossible to do justice to the richness of the material in this wide-ranging, thought-provoking volume in this short review so I will restrict my comments to three main topics. To date, much of the scholarship on Harlem has concentrated on the interwar years, but Race Capital? provides a synoptic view, cutting across time periods in fruitful (and surprising) ways to generate productive comparisons and juxtapositions. Take, for instance, John L. Jackson's study of how iconic images of Harlem's 1920s heyday have been incorporated into the “marketing of a ‘new Harlem Renaissance’ that indicates, authenticates, and domesticates gentrification” (269). More generally, the new conceptual frameworks developed to interpret Harlem are in step with what William J. Maxwell has identified as a larger “transtemporal turn” in Harlem Renaissance studies.Footnote ¹ In this vein, Andrew Fearnley establishes that “the idea of Harlem has been used as a temporal vector, a means of charting the historical position and trajectory of black Americans” (27). Taking this focus on temporality in an alternative direction, Dorothea Löbberman explores “queer moments of ‘touch’ between the early and late twentieth century” (223), analysing Richard Bruce Nugent's novel Gentleman Jigger, which was begun in the 1920s but published only in 2008, and the “queer temporality” (232) of films commemorating the Harlem Renaissance, such as Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston (1989) and Brother to Brother (2004), directed by Rodney Evans.

Another cluster of essays trace Harlem's history as a centre for political radicalism while attending to the complex entanglements of race, gender and space. In a marked departure from an enduring tendency to romanticize male autodidacts such as Hubert Harrison, Minkah Makalani investigates the galvanizing role that black women activists such as Grace Campbell and Williana Burroughs played in the creation of what Clare Corbould has called a “counter-public sphere” comprising informal meetings, street-corner lectures and intellectual societies.Footnote ² Elsewhere, Brian Purnell convincingly demonstrates that Harlem's position as “the capital of the black freedom movement throughout much of the twentieth century” derived from “its multitude of connections to, and two-way communications with, other places” (202, original emphasis).

Since the 1920s, writing on Harlem has been punctuated with calls to “escape New York.”Footnote ³ Such scholarship has tended to draw sharp dividing lines between the local and the global, assuming that analysis of Harlem inevitably generates narrow discussion of “U.S.-bound themes of cultural nationalism, civil rights protest, and uplift in the literary culture of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’.”Footnote ⁴Race Capital? develops a more supple, nuanced understanding of the dynamic interplay between place and transnationalism since “even internationalist discourses and activism take place somewhere” (14, original emphasis). Winston James’s tour-de-force essay, “Harlem's Difference,” for instance, names Harlem as a “black contact zone,” with a population “from different parts of the Caribbean and the wider African diaspora” that was “far more heterogeneous” and integrated than in any other US city (118). Together with dense overcrowding and high housing costs that made renting out rooms to lodgers the norm, this created “an environment that enabled the most remarkable level of transculturation anywhere within the African diaspora” (119).

Overall, Race Capital? invites readers to look anew at Harlem, a place that has provoked considerable critical commentary, but within rather narrow disciplinary and temporal boundaries. I would encourage you to seek it out.