Beyond the Book

In her new book, Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place, Sandhya Shukla invites readers to reconsider what they think they know about Harlem, a neighborhood that has played an outsized role in the literary and cultural life of the United States.

1. Tell me about your title. Why did you choose it? Perhaps you can say a word about how cross-cultural differs from multi-cultural.

The title of the book is meant to offer a direct line into its framing argument, that understanding Harlem as a space of relationality, where different peoples, communities, and ideas come into contact, both intimately and conflictually, will help us think more deeply and richly about race and place.  You’re right to ask about my wanting to emphasize the “cross” of cross-cultural, as an alternative to the “multi” of multicultural, because it’s a central intervention of the work, to move us away from thinking of communities sitting discretely side by side, toward exchange as a central organizing principle of Harlem and urban space more generally.  This theoretical shift leans on Caribbean thinkers like Wilson Harris and is elaborated in the book through the material of histories, imaginative writing, performance and everyday experience across forms of peoplehood and community as well as geographic regions like “East” or “West” Harlems.  The aim is not merely to add other groups into the mix, but to underscore how Harlem’s Blackness, its barrio, its historic Italian and Jewish formations, and more, have long been internally variegated and given meaning through their proximity to and dialogues with each other.

2. At first glance, this book, Cross-Cultural Harlem, could seem like a departure from your first one, India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures in Postwar America and England. Yet I could see how they would both emerge from a similar interest in cultures colliding into and absorbing each other. How do you think of the relationship between the two books?

Both Cross-Cultural Harlem and India Abroad consider densely, heterogeneously constituted expressive cultures and social life.  For India Abroad, the frame of diaspora enabled an understanding of how migrant peoples and their children (and children’s children) lived and moved through identifications, colliding and absorbing, as you say, along the way.  Diaspora holds many elements that cross-cultures do, recognition and misrecognition, racialization, loss and aspiration.  Nonetheless, I felt that my accounts in India Abroad seemed always to hurtle toward a diversification that threatened to implode the very category I was working with, of Indianness, even if I had set it up as provisional and open to interrogation.  It was an analytical bind that needed another kind of study to loosen.

Still, the diasporic cultures I studied in India Abroad were emplaced, expressed through a tension between dwelling and mobility, with global content and structure, and that was generative for my thinking on spatiality.  I have always been interested in cities and racial formation, and when I raised my eyes to where I lived, maybe where all of us live, I realized that I wanted to bring out the experience and creative possibility of multiplicity.

3. What led you to the study of American literature? Person, place, or text?

It’s a simple question, but I have a two-part answer.  Like everyone in this business I have always loved to read, but I wasn’t an English major, and it wasn’t until I took a course taught by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Black women’s fictions, in my very last semester of college, that I started to think about pursuing literary and cultural studies in graduate school.  From there I had a pretty circuitous route, through political science, African American Studies, American Studies, history and anthropology.  With such eclectic training, I come to literature, always, with an interdisciplinary sensibility about the inextricability of representation and social life.

Second, our academic interests start and end with the personal, and so I will mention something of my background.  My parents were immigrants, and I moved around a great deal when I was growing up.  I was conscious of shifting attachments and identifications and curious about how places are inhabited and represented.  Finally, I’m not at all embarrassed to say that one (intellectual!) origin story begins in New Jersey: most of my childhood was spent there, which means that I was always looking at and reading about New York City.  Therein may lie one logic for my decision to write about Harlem.

4. What current trends excite you about literary criticism, especially those happening in the field of American literature?

For quite some time now, there has been increasing attention to hemispheric and global understandings and that has certainly changed how we all approach American literature.  We simply cannot understand any literary (or cultural) imagining through nation-bound models, or at least without attention to porous boundaries and crossings.  Methods and insights from Black studies, or ethnic, or gender studies, are no longer on the periphery, but central to what we do.

I have a deeply historical and even historicist inclination – that has become manifestly clear to me over the years of my research, writing, and teaching – but I’m still stimulated by debates on how we read.  It matters less to me whether the preferred method is “surface” or “close” reading, or for that matter, reading around (which is probably what best describes my own approach), than the productive self-consciousness and self-reflexivity that have resulted from these conversations.

And, more generally, I would say that literary criticism has become broader, more participatory, and therefore more interesting.  I don’t necessarily mean that it is more “public-facing,” because of course there have always been critics who operated in the popular sphere, not just in the academy.  But it is so difficult to point to a school of criticism (like New Historicism or deconstruction or poststructuralism) defining a department or camps of the project.  The study of literature, to my mind, has come to resemble the very best of a more interdisciplinary cultural studies, alive to production, consumption and circulation, attentive to the expressive designs, or forms, and acknowledging the pleasure of encountering texts, aesthetic objects, and ideas.

5. Your book opens with a reading of the famous image of Malcolm X lying dead at the Audobon Ballroom in Washington Heights. You note the presence of Yuri Kochiyama, the Japanese Civil Rights activist and fellow Harlem resident, at his side. I confess I have looked at that photo maybe a dozen times in my life and never seen her or what she might mean. Did you know about her when you began the book? Or could you only see her when you knew to look for her?

Now that you ask that question about process, I am realizing I should have written about it in the book!  I did know about Yuri Kochiyama, as an activist-hero in Asian American politics (and studies) and had remembered that she lived in Harlem and been at the Audubon on that fateful day.  The Harlem connection is what made me pick up Kochiyama’s memoir, and when I read about the felt intensity of her relationship with Malcolm X, I started to look into the corner of that photographic frame a little differently.

Of course, there are so many important ways to encounter the image of Black suffering and death, about which it is important to be conscious and careful.  Grief is a primary experience of the photo, accessible not only when it was taken, but throughout the time it has circulated.  In our present we may be brought to the scene of Malcolm X’s death through other losses of life and place, the potential extinction of Harlem included.

But drawing my own and readers’ gaze to an edge, to contemplate the cross-cultural, is also to offer some hope in solidarity, affinity, and exchange.  Never with unqualified celebration, but as a way to answer death with life, to see a future for Harlem.

6. In your first chapter, you mention a walking tour of Harlem. How much time did you spend on the ground, as it were? What did you learn from this time?

Over the years, I did spend much time on the ground, as a researcher and writer who was also a participant observer, an interviewer, and very early on, a resident on the edge of Harlem, in Morningside Heights.  I initially planned for the project to be ethnographic in a more classic sense.  But as I settled into Harlem as place and idea, my lens became somewhat differently shaped, looking onto a “field” defined less by community, or even communities, and guided more by a hermeneutic, of cross-cultures.

Living is imagining, and for a storied place like Harlem, it is fair to say that even the everyday involves relating to histories, fictions, presentations and constructions.  In opening up the lived cross-cultural, then, it made sense to me to consider the creative expression of writers like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, and the contingencies and contradictions of their worlds.  But even a proper history of a figure like the congressman Vito Marcantonio provokes questions that have to do with the imagination, of solidarity and political futures, that appear in and through language.  As I moved to the recent past and present, I did find interviews to be especially important, not as transparent windows onto something real, but as offering the stuff of life stories – presentations of selfhood, expressions of world views, and experiments in identity.

These experiences have made me think about how I am implicated in my research.  I explain in the book that one day when I was walking to the Schomburg for “archival” work, and overheard someone on the street saying, “they are trying to push us out,” I had to wonder whether the “they” included me, and how.  And when shopowners, restaurant workers or activists in East Harlem spoke to me in Spanish based on assumptions related to skin complexion, and I just reflexively answered in that language, the issue of misrecognition was one with which I had to contend.

The dilemmas may seem particularly dramatic in daily interactions or observation, but they must also attend our work as critics.  For example, I had to think long and hard about reproducing the photo you referred to earlier, of Malcolm X’s death in the Audubon, to consider my own and the book’s readers’ encounters with it, and to understand what a particular interpretation might say about investments and positionality.  In the end I decided to include the image, with what I hope is sufficient responsibility and commitment.

7. The book draws from a number of theorists—Bakhtin, de Certeau, Deleuze, Hall—across any number of disciplines. Is there one or two whom you kept coming back to? Who influenced the book more than others?

I have been deeply influenced by thinkers and writers like Wilson Harris, Édouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau, and replying to your question with a list, this list, probably points to the Caribbean, a place, rather than any single person, as the driver of the theory.  This leads to a perhaps surprising claim, that Harlem is like the Caribbean.  Both spaces register exchanges shaped by slavery and colonialism that have resulted in unpredictable ways of being in and of the world, wherein whiteness is not the dominant form of peoplehood even while omnipresent as a force.  Harlem and the Caribbean are similarly “majority-minority,” in structure and mode.

There is a methodological aspect to this theoretical inclination.  As the concept of the Caribbean brings forms of peoplehood together, intimately and conflictually, it is firing the imagination, for possibility but not resolution, of the sort that I wanted to highlight in the constellated stories of Cross-Cultural Harlem.  For example, Wilson Harris’s critical thought is conveyed in essay form, as “theory,” but becomes ever more vivid in his fictions.  The “Guyana Quartet,” that set of four very complex and difficult novellas (Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour, and The Secret Ladder), brings to the table deep understandings of place, culture, history and creative life.  Together, these works ask what happens when differences become less opposed (peoples, ideas, we wouldn’t have thought of together may be juxtaposed or even overlap).  There’s an aesthetic answer, in something like surrealist art and writing.  But, and not unrelatedly, we may also draw political lessons about opposing closure and challenging certainty.

8. I am a scholar of the 1930s, and I was embarrassed to admit that I had forgotten what little I knew about Vito Marcantonio, the member of Congress who represented Harlem from 1939 to 1951. You devote an entire chapter to him. What does he bring to the book?

Vito Marcantonio might at first seem out of place in a book largely about representation, but I see the story of Marcantonio as central to how we can imagine the practice of cross-cultures: deep exchange with that which is, perhaps, different from you (your own identifications, your background, your “community”), never losing who or what you are, but also becoming changed as a result of the encounters.  Marcantonio came of age in a world you have written about, of leftist solidarities that included Civil Rights, anti-racism, anti-anti-immigrant feeling, and anti-imperialism.  In Congress, he represented the dense quarters of Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, Black American and West Indian populations, who had connections within and outside of the US, all living together, sometimes within boundaries of community and at other times across them.  Marcantonio never publicly detached from his background in Italian Harlem, nor, notably, did he ever accentuate his whiteness.

The theme of solidarity of the political story of Marcantonio becomes legible through questions of translation, which we tend to associate with more literary fields.  Translation here concerns much more than the fact Marcantonio was remarkably polyglot (he was able to speak English, Italian, Yiddish and Spanish), it brings to light ideas about culture, habitation, experience, and voice. In fact, the book chapter consider moments of exchange that did not necessarily require linguistic mastery.  When Marcantonio was interviewed on a New York radio program for migrants and residents from Latin America and the Caribbean, he spoke in imperfect and Italian-inflected Spanish, which only emphasized the effort involved in communicating across a divide, the understanding that can result from mobilizing other forms of attachment, and the fact of remainder.  He noted that his Spanish was not “the language of Cervantes,” but that of “the common man,” implicitly referring to knowledge developed out of Harlem’s working-class cosmopolitanism, and the practices of translation therein that he himself had engaged in.  Some Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico, in addition to those actually in his congressional district, called Marcantonio “their” representative, which we can read as an instance of Marcantonio also being translated across boundaries of locality and nation, through diasporas.

9. Your book argues that cultures do not exist independently of each other but infiltrate and blur the edges of each other. You make a similar—and fascinating—case for genres. How does this work exactly?

Partly Cross-Cultural Harlem constructs an intertextuality.  There are some actual, literal, references among the figures, texts, and events, but largely the conversations are creative ones.  In the last chapter, I ask what it could mean to see Piri Thomas’s constructed autobiographical self in a kind of imagined dialogue with the Bangladeshi comedian/playwright Alaudin Ullah, across time, through the kinds of life stories they develop.  (They may have met once: Ullah told me about a dinner at  Thomas’s house, in which Thomas told him to “keep on writing.” Whether or not that is true is less important to me than Ullah’s claim about and to that, as a formative and performative moment.)  In a similar vein, there is an obvious juxtaposition of different kinds of readings, like that of Vito Marcantonio’s model for political collaboration and one of the romantic aspirations of the protagonist of Langston Hughes’s short story “Spanish Blood.”  This assembly across the book is intended to leave readers with questions about genre, of stories more commonly associated with “real life” and others with “fiction.”

The approach can be seen within chapters, too, such as the one on Langston Hughes’s short story, “Spanish Blood.”  In “Spanish Blood” there are two obvious narrative perspectives on freedom. One is voiced by the character of Valerio, the son of an African American woman and Puerto Rican man, and the other is of Hattie, the mother.  Atlantic slavery’s aftermaths ripple through formations of race and gender in the story’s fictional present.  And Hughes’s writing is surely shaped by personal history, of his father leaving the US to live in Mexico, his travels across that border for family visits, and, consequently, the development of Spanish linguistic facility which might allow Hughes to pass.  These details and experiences constitute more than background of the writer, they are represented in a particular way by Hughes in his autobiography, which needs to be unpacked.  No less important, here, is the fact of Harlem, in which Black and Puerto Rican peoples were indeed living together.  What I am suggesting is that the cross-cultural imaginary of “Spanish Blood” should be understood not just by reading closely, but by reading across texts (fictional, autobiographical), moments (historical and futurist), and, even, psychic constructions.

10. Everyone knows by heart the crises facing the humanities in general and English in particular: the declining number of majors, the grim job market, the falloff of leisure reading among teenagers. Despite these crises, does anything give you hope? Or would any show of optimism now just seem cruel?

I’d be concerned not about seeming cruel but romantic or naïve.  And because that is a potential misreading of my book’s proposal of cross-cultures, I appreciate the opportunity to elaborate.  Cross-cultures should never be understood as seamless or easy, where there are intimacies there are also frictions.  I return to that photo of Malcolm X’s death, full of grief and hope at the same time.  And we know so well that anti-Blackness, anti-Semitism, and nationalisms divide peoples, and bear on urban crisis.

But people really do live in extraordinary multiplicity, communicating all the time across ethnic and racial backgrounds and with different languages.  You mention teenagers and I have intimate experience, for better or worse, with their inclination to irony about fixed identities.  I do believe that to be a generational resistance to closure, not just performative cynicism.  And such openness tacks with the work I dearly hope Cross-Cultural Harlem, and, really, all of my projects, can do.

In terms of the humanities, I, too, feel the despair underlying your question.  Can I say, only, that there are also so many scholars and so many students who continue to be invested in critical thought, and are articulating that in any number of ways?

I take solace in big inclusive public universities like those at which you and I both do our work, and the vigorous debates there about access, regional address and relevance, relationships to all kinds of communities.  In every classroom I see intense racial, ethnic, class, religious, political and sexual diversity, and that will have effects.  I know these institutions are under attack, by political forces of recent formation, but also longer economic trends of privatization.  Still, when I talk to my colleagues and my students, and even most administrators, I realize that the project of the public university is a wonderful one, that won’t be abandoned or surrendered without a fight.

11. When you receive tenure at Penn State, you get to choose one book from the library and put a plate on the inside back cover explaining to students and anyone else who checks it out why the book mattered to you and why it should matter to others. Every year, the library displays all the newly selected books and their plates. The celebration restores some of my faith in the mission of the research university.

Which book would you choose and what would you say about it?

What an amazing gift of recognition!  My choice would be the 1988 novel The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh.  Ghosh is widely known now in literary circles for his Ibis trilogy, the novels Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire, as well as the non-fictional The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, which has been foundational for literary and cultural criticism on climate.

But Ghosh’s earlier work, The Shadow Lines, exemplifies for me an attempt to capture the absurdity and painful consequences of borders while at the same time understanding why people seek stability, even in the form of nationalism. There is an especially memorable grandmother figure, whose fantasies about territory and identity are surely critiqued.  But the novel also builds a sympathy for the character by contextualizing her hopes and dreams in the modern world-system that offers enticing freedoms and establishes cruel limits.

It makes so much sense to me that Ghosh, as a trained anthropologist, would be alive to the complexity and contradictions of the quotidian, but also, as a fiction writer, devoted to expressing deep longing and fleeting possibility.   Through it all, The Shadow Lines never compromises its political values.  Isn’t that what all of us, critics and citizens, are aspiring to do in our work?