Shanties, Brick Office Buildings, Theaters, Drug Stores, Restaurants, and Cabarets

Abstract This essay considers the impact of the hypersegration of urban space on US modernism. It takes up what happens when Blackness becomes a place, physically, culturally, and metaphorically, especially when this place, this racialized landscape, is not located in the plantation South, but in urban centers. The essay examines the various and conflicting representations of this Black landscape as home, prison, threat, exotic playground, and space both inside and outside “America,” sometimes combining these aspects in seemingly unlikely ways. It also looks at the connection between the new territories of “Blackness” and the rise of a US bohemia rendered in geographical space. To these ends, the essay will draw on texts by, among others, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot as well as on selected films, plays, and pieces of popular music.