African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
313 p, Updated to reflect changes in the composition of New York City's immigrant population, this volume brings together contributions from leaders in their respective fields to show how new immigrants are transforming the city - and how New York, in turn, has affected the newcomers' lives. The contributors consider the four largest groups - Dominicans, former Soviets, Chinese and Jamaicans - as well as Mexicans, Koreans, and West Africans.
The article critiques several poems by African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes, including "Ballad of Margie Polite," "Broadcast to the West Indies" and "Good Morning." Hughes' depiction of transnational solidarity between African Americans of Harlem, New York City, New York and blacks of the West Indies, including his use of an imaginary radio broadcast to portray this theme in the poem "Broadcast to the West Indies," is discussed.
Apart from the fact that it is one of very few book-length studies of a Caribbean-based British Caribbean black intellectual from the nineteenth century, and one of even fewer written by a literary studies scholar, Faith L. Smith's Creole Recitations stands out because of the light it sheds on the mechanics of anglophone Afro-Caribbean intellectual formation, self-representation, and epistemology posited in newspapers, nonfiction books, and speeches produced in the Caribbean during this period. This article is a reading of a conceptual thread that runs through Smith's book—the ways in which the approaches to transnational engagement embedded within English colonialism are at once accepted, interrogated, or utilized by Caribbean public figures in the nineteenth century. As such, Smith's book provides a way for us to situate modern Caribbean studies within an intellectual genealogy and a model for contextualizing the issues, experiences, and approaches that began to be highlighted with the advent of postcolonial studies.
The article discusses the transnational aspects of Harlem, New York City, New York, with a particular focus on the borough's cultural relations with the British West Indies during the 1920s and 1930s. An overview of the Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, including working class immigrants, is provided. The role that British Caribbean blacks played in the transatlantic media is discussed.
