Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond HarlemDavarian L.Baldwin and MinkahMakalani, Editors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Abstract

Escape from York: Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, Editors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.In new collection, entitled Escape from York: Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem, Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani bring together an array of brilliant scholars and writers who successfully take their readers on historical journey that makes the familiar unfamiliar. Building from and expanding the discussion beyond Harlem, beyond the 1930s, and beyond the accepted narrative of the New Negro, the collection adds layers of analysis, depth the academic discourse, and an expanding horizon of the historic index we rely upon in our current moment.Centering the Harlem Renaissance, the growing racial assertiveness that was commonplace in the early part of the twentieth century, especially among black artists, intellectuals, and activists, Escape from works expand the parameters of the center. At best, we are expanding the frame, of the Negro experience temporally, geographically, and conceptually in specific ways (19), writes Baldwin in the book's introduction. Thus, understand the New Negro Movement mandates moving the discourse outside of York, beyond the 1920s and 1930s and into myriad of spaces and sites that resulted in articulation and realization of freedom dreams. This was movement that took hold in range of places, from range of voices.According Baldwin,The Negro analytic asserted new race consciousness that was sometimes explicit but also felt through individualized rebukes or reimaginings of long-held traditions and even new expectations. This new race consciousness was profoundly shaped by class position, gender identity, geographic location, and sexual orientation. Ultimately, wide range of political and cultural mediums brought the Negro life, from the pages of literary magazines and step ladder protests storefront churches and military battlefronts, touching down and taking off from points all over the world. (19-20)Taking their cues from this framework, the authors included within this powerful collection highlight how the heterogeneity of the Negro reach is neither surprising nor arbitrary but reflective of the historic moment. The Negro Moment was the product of particular convergence, writes Robin D. G. Kelley in the book's Forward. The expansion of US and European Empires, settler colonialism, an increasingly industrialized racial capitalism and their attendant processes, expropriation, proletarization, massive migration, urbanization, rapid technological development, and war (ix) not only shaped these movements of struggle but also helped understand the diversity that defined this moment. That is, the expensive framework of the collection to escape York is not simply project of historical revision but instead an effort anchor the conversation in the historic moment.The significance and success of Escape from rests with its ability provide readers with familiar point of entry, with the known history of the Harlem Renaissance and the Garvey movement, yet expand our historic imagination from within and beyond these canonical signposts of (African) American history. For example, with An Inter cultural African Opinion: Amy Ashwood Garvey and C. L. R. James in Black Radical Makalani offers an important essay, which reveals transnational black radicalism at the turn of the century. Pushing back at periodization and narrative that inadvertently reinscribes American exceptionalism, Makalani narrates history of a Negro experience beyond the confines of civil rights, racial uplift, black migration and community formation, and modernity in which USbased scholarly discussions tend be rooted (79). To understand the New Negro Movement, the black radical imagination of this moment, and early twentieth century black activism and transformative cultural productions is look at the Diasporic black communities of London, Paris, Cuba, Tokyo, and Manila. …