West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands. Culture America Series. By Emily Lutenski

Abstract

West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands . Culture America Series. By Emily Lutenski. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. xii + 332 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $37.50.) In West of Harlem , Emily Lutenski argues that although “African American presence” is often “forgotten in the American historical memory,” African American literature and the American West have always been mutually constitutive cultural, material, and symbolic sites (p. 7). Opening with a productive juxtaposition of two speeches delivered within a month of one another at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Frederick Douglass’s speech on the fair’s “Colored American Day”—Lutenski works in the conceptual space opened between the two, identifying the damaging effects wrought by the … jneary{at}hunter.cuny.edu