Abstract
Baldwin, who was a prolific writer, used Harlem in many of his fictional stories as well as essays and plays. This entry will offer a brief overview of Harlem in James Baldwin’s (1924–1987) oeuvre before examining some cross-sensory elements in his first short story, “Previous Condition” (1948) and his only children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976). In both texts that have received less scholarly attention, the multisensorial urban scenes of Harlem evoke sight, hearing, and touch, intertwining music, movement, and entrapment that serve to illuminate some of the ways in which urban space can convey Baldwin’s reflections on race relations in the United States.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The poetics of space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.
Baldwin, James. 1953. Go tell it on the mountain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Baldwin, James. 1965. Previous condition. In Going to meet the man, 81–100. New York: Dial.
Baldwin, James. 1998. The price of the ticket. In James Baldwin collected essays, 830–842. New York: Library of America.
Baldwin, James. 2018. Little man, little man: A story of childhood. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bluefarb, Sam. Spring 1969. James Baldwin’s ‘previous condition’: A problem of identification. Negro American Literature Forum 3 (1): 26–29.
Boggs, Nicholas. 1999. Of mimicry and (little man little) man: Toward a Queersighted theory of black childhood. In James Baldwin now, ed. Dwight A. McBride, 122–160. New York: New York University Press.
Boggs, Nicholas, and Jennifer DeVere Brody. 2018. Introduction. In Little man, little man: A story of childhood, ed. James Baldwin, xv–xxii. Durham: Duke University Press.
Boyd, Herb. 2009. Baldwin’s Harlem: A biography of James Baldwin. New York: Atria Books.
Howes, David. 2003. Sensual relations: Engaging the senses in culture and social theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Karefa-Smart, Aisha. (Winter 2013). “Foreword: The Prodigal Son”. African American Review 46.4 Special Issue: James Baldwin: 559–561.
Leeming, David. 2015. James Baldwin: A biography. New York: Arcade Publishing.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2016. The production of space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Massey, Doreen. 2007. Space, place and gender. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Spillers, Hortense J. Winter 2013. Introduction. African American Review 46.4 Special Issue: James Baldwin: 563–572.
Taylor, Sara. Fall/Winter 2008. “Denigration, dependence, and deviation: Black and White Masculinities in James Baldwin’s ‘going to meet the man’.” Obsidian 9.2: 43–61.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Salenius, S. (2022). Baldwin, James: Multisensorial Spaces of Harlem, New York. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_147-2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_147-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities
Publish with us
Chapter history
-
Latest
Baldwin, James: Multisensorial Spaces of Harlem, New York- Published:
- 10 June 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_147-2
-
Original
James Baldwin’s Multisensorial Spaces of Harlem, New York- Published:
- 12 November 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_147-1