Looking for Harlem: The absent Narrator in Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes' The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955)

Abstract

An examination of The Sweet Flypaper of Life from 1955, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava’s much neglected photo-textual collaboration, this article looks at Roy Decarava’s photographic studies of Black neighborhoods in the 1940s and Langston Hughes’ accompanying text; a meandering memoir narrated solely from the perspective of an elderly African American woman. The article argues that the book positions itself in a non-man’s land – literally and at times photographically - in order to to render homage to the resilience and beauty of an African/American neighborhood in the face of economic adversity.