John L. Jackson Jr. is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University.
From being "in vogue" during the Renaissance of the 1920s, when this thriving, culturally rich and diverse African-American community was a favorite entertainment nightspot for white down-towners, to the late 1960s, when its image was that of a strife-torn war zone, Harlem has become the mythological site of American "blackness." It is this myth "Harlemworld" that Jackson, a Columbia-trained sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, is eager to deconstruct. Leaving his Columbia University student housing and living on one of Harlem's commercial avenues, Jackson began doing field work and interviewing dozens of residents. For some, Harlem represents an actual return home ("this is where my people are from"); others, like Paul, a middle-class architect who just moved there, view it as a new, and complicated, beginning. Neatly and expertly weaving theory with analysis through these interviews (and while monitoring the increasingly rapid gentrification of the neighborhood), Jackson discovers that both identities built around race and class are far less monolithic than even Harlem residents believe. He also presents astute and often astonishing insights into the images of Harlem promoted in African-American-produced popular culture like rap, hip-hop and films like Hoodlum. While written from an academic perspective, the original and exceptionally perceptive analysis Jackson provides about race and class in U.S. culture will interest anyone trying to think them though. (Dec.) Forecast: While this book never completely transcends its roots as a doctoral thesis, it does read enough like a trade book to be reviewed in newspapers; pundits will take it up either way, and journals like the New Republic are a lock. University libraries and syllabi will be a steady long-term market. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Offered as the first of a two-part ethnographic field project aimed at identifying and understanding racial differences in everyday action, this work blends participant observation, interviews, and general social research in an introduction, conclusion, and six brief essays. Starting with a brief history of New York City's Harlem, Jackson, a postdoctoral fellow in cultural anthropology at Harvard, probes popular beliefs and folk theories of race, place, and class to uncover connections between identity and behavior. Exposing the varied lives of Harlemites, he argues that rather than being segregated by race or separated by class, Harlemites share broad social contacts across class lines and beyond racial monoliths. Jackson's "Harlemworld" is a place where race and class are complicated and contradictory, and the social realities portrayed in this book challenge easy and exclusionary social-science categories. Not for the general reader, this is a work scholars may wish to relate to Elijah Anderson's works, such as Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Univ. of Chicago, 1990). For collections in cultural anthropology, class, identity, race, and New York history. [Plans for publication of the second part are not yet set. Ed.] Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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