Introduction
“The Negro novel is a city novel. It has always been,” says Blyden Jackson (1976: 180). The city in African American literature featured Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Washington, among others; however, Harlem always held the most prominent locale to emblematize the black urban experience. The image of the city changed drastically throughout the twentieth century reflecting the changes in the black urban spectacle. In the 1920s, Alain Locke designated Harlem as “race capital” and the “Mecca of Negroes” (1925: 629). His definition was predominantly based on the sanguine outlook of the Harlem Renaissance where Harlem was the crux of a cultural upsurge that followed the 1880s Great Migration. The city was the setting of myriad novels that came out from this school. Nonetheless, the fêtedmovement collapsed with the Great Depression and the city was no longer painted with gaudy colors. The economic hardships were accompanied by the shock of disillusionment and...
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Saber, Y. (2020). “What else is a Woman to do?” Negotiating Urban Spaces in Ann Petry’s The Street. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_211-1
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