Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America

Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
RRP:
NZ$ 32.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 26.39
Paperback
h198 x 129mm - 272pg
3 Dec 2020 UK
International import eta 10-19 days
9781847084606
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
A walker, a reader and a gazer, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is also a skilled talker whose impromptu kerbside exchanges with Harlem's most colourful residents are transmuted into a slippery, silky set of observations on what change and opportunity have wrought in this small corner of a big city, Harlem, with its outsize reputation and even-larger influence. Hers is a beguilingly well-written meditation on the essence of black Harlem, as it teeters on the brink of seeing its poorer residents and their rich histories turfed out by commercial developers intent on providing swish condos for cool-seeking (and mostly white) gentrifiers. In a mix of oral history, conversations with scholars and hobos, thoughtful musings on notable antecedents and illustrious Harlemites of the twentieth century, and her own story of migration (from Texas to Harlem via Harvard), Rhodes-Pitts exhibits a sensitivity and subtlety and stillness in her writing that is very impressive and very promising. There are echoes of Joan Didion's distinctive rhythms and pauses in her prose, without it ever feeling derivative. This is an exceptionally striking and alluring debut.
""Harlem Is Nowhere."..is a dazzling series of linked essays on Harlem as the living embodiment of...a place and time that might somehow mend the fractured history of African Americans and make it whole....Rhodes-Pitts honors the dreamers imagining what Harlem could be, while never losing sight of how each of them was thwarted by the disconnect between the heaven they envisioned and the reality they lived....We meet political agitators of all stripes, all of whom she treats with respect....It is her ability to not only see Harlem on its own terms but also grasp why Harlem matters that makes this book so exceptional....[Rhodes-Pitts has] the sharp eye of a reporter in prose, reminiscent of Joan Didion, that manages to be both remarkably cool and distinctly elegiac....She is walking toward a destination she has sought from the beginning--brave enough to seek it, and honest enough to tell us that she may never arrive."--Mike Fischer, "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel"
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts was born in Texas in 198x, and arrived in Harlem in 2002, shortly after graduating from Harvard, where she read African-American Studies. A former Fulbright scholar at the University of St Andrews, a laureate at the Centre International des Recollets, and the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, now 31, has contributed articles to, amongst other publications, the New York Times, Boston Globe, Nation, and Vogue.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781847084606
Published: 3 Dec 2020
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Granta Books
Publisher: Granta Books
Format: Paperback
Height: 198mm
Width: 129mm
Pages: 272

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