Review of Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay' Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The novel, which depicted street life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe.
In "Conceiving Freedom," Camillia Cowling examines how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the slow process of emancipation in Cuba and Brazil. Slavery in those countries ended only after the rest of Latin America had abolished the "peculiar institution" and even after the American Civil War.