The Sounds and Colours of Harlem: Sharing the Secrets of African American Urban Landscapes

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore strategies African American picturebooks are using to construct a sense of the Black urban home. Specifically, it looks at Carole Boston Weatherford's Sugar Hill (2014), Faith Ringgold's Harlem Renaissance Party (2015), and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts's Jake Makes a World (2015) to discuss the ways such books use windows and the figure of the flaneur to outline the vibrancy of living in a Black community. It focuses on the strategies of showing the insiders' perspective of the story as well as inviting outside observers to immerse themselves in African American ways of life, thus negotiating the observer-participant dialectic.