Harlem: The Discovery of a Heterotopia
Harlem: The Discovery of a Heterotopia
Preliminary Imagination:
I’ve only been living on the brink of West and East sides of Harlem on the isle of Manhattan for a mere 8 months. During this droplet of time, my wandering gaze and curiosity has witnessed some subtle and some not so subtle changes.
Pop-up construction crews down the avenues, “Coming Soon” signs branded with corporate logos, and the “For sale” marks dressing storefronts, I’m sensing a beginning. Spotted: a new trendy burger joint adorably titled Harlem Shake a couple blocks away, a promised Whole Foods on the corner of 125th and Lenox, and an influx of Yogis with their mats toggling behind them up and down Adam Clayton Powel Boulevard. But, in a somewhat obvious way, there is an end looming as well – “Closing sale,” “Out of business,” “Liquidation.”
The rapidity with which Harlem is experiencing gentrification is pressing and sometimes you can even feel it physically – like being at the center of one of those sped-up science class videos of seasons changing and plants growing all around you; urban decay and rebirth at a speed uncomfortable to the naked eye.
The term gentrification was coined by Ruth Glass in the early 1960s:
One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes – upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages – two rooms up and two down – have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period – which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation – have been upgraded once again…Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed” (Glass, 1964, p. xviii).
As I stand at the median between St. Nicholas Avenue and Fredrick Douglas Boulevard on 125th,
I can almost hear the brassy, rushed voice of Amy Archer, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist,
from the quirky film The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), attempting to solve the puzzle of Harlem,
“Say, Jimmy, we oughta get down there, see what this is all about, see!”
The hurried sensation of transition calls for a caring of the inevitable change, an attempt at slowing down to make sure the change is not only documented but also is smooth, comfortable, and appropriately appreciated – dealt with instead of just happening, acknowledged. A way to make sure what was there before doesn’t disappear into oblivion and remain only in the faint clouds of the memories of its inhabitants – themselves decaying – mutating and evolving as we speak, stories must be captured in their prime potency. Stories of what it was like to be a part of the Harlem community, what it’s like now. What does this place mean to its residence? How do they conceive of their home and consider its expected future and changing face? What images, ideas, and narrative will they take with them as they shift along with their landscape?
As the stories of Harlem begin fading into history, so does its physicality. The five to six story tenements and townhouses with ornate decorations, the ancient rusted fire escapes, loudly lined up restaurants serving cheap and greasy treats, the innumerable hair and nail shops are disappearing quickly. These that make up images of Harlem today will soon be totaled, becoming a part of remembering – a historical memory of a place that was the crux of a black culture.
As a new member to the community, I may still be an outsider and claim not complete knowledge of the culture, place, and people that I navigate on a daily basis. But I do, however, recognize the potency of the time in Harlem now – it’s brimming with stories that call to be told, heard, photographs that scream to be captured before both become too blurred – and so, as maybe becoming cliché of my generation, I’m creating a website.
Discovery:
Turns out, the pressing urgency I feel about the shifts I experience in Harlem, a shift that certainly my neighbors who’ve habited the spaces longer than me have described in their stories to me feel, is what Pierre Nora (1989) was eluding to in his description of the concept of the acceleration of history: an “increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past” (p. 7). Nora’s usage of historical here is significant and harps on a deeper reality to why the slipping of time call to me to become recorded. The sense of historical here seems to go beyond a historicizing of an event or time just by its passing-from-the-present nature; it connotes a sense of making of history – as a significant passing of time. It’s not a mere moments shift into the past, but the historicizing of it – of it becoming a lesson or a story or a memory that has the potential to effect the future vision and understanding of the place now.
With my recorder and camera in hand, I paced up and down my neighborhood lurking around strangers, asking them to speak with me. Mostly, I found success with those sitting on front steps of their brownstones or those conducting business in their shops. Of the twenty-five conversations – some only a few moments, some over an hour – I decided to “use” ten of them to share on the site because they were the most complete and a representative sample of the opinions and conversations I had. I’ve also included some of the not-so-packaged, awkward fumbles, and noisy recordings in my ethnographic experimentation in the “outtakes” section of the site, along with some photographs of the places of my encounters. This was done so that those would not be lost entirely, to avoid misrepresentation through my edits, and because I feel they capture a certain sensual experience. The sounds of the city, the side conversations amongst neighbors, a young woman singing to the street with her headphones in hear ears, and clumsy confrontations: “the resulting paths, juxtapositions, sounds, interruptions, durations, and rhythms ‘actually impinge on the body/mind/brain in a multiplicity of ways’ [Kennedy, 2003, pp.27-28] and attempt to provide sensations that create the conditions for potential learning experiences” (Ellsworth, 2004, p. 27).
Several folks did not want to be recorded and those are the stories I’ve written out myself. With these, I did not want to remove myself entirely from the dialogue and present the story objectively, as I think that kind of removal would’ve been impossible. Instead, I recognize my authority in telling the story of someone else by presenting it through my subjective lens, embedded with my perspective on the conversation. In doing so, I recognize my position as an auctor, which “signifies the witness” and I validate this force by knowing that my witnessing “presupposes something – a fact, a thing or a word – that preexists” not only the encounter I had with people but also myself, located in the forces of history (Agamben, 1999, p. 149-50). Additionally, the storytellers themselves act as auctors in their telling of Harlem as a place, an entity on its own, and must be noted to also come from presupposed positions. Just as in Eric Carlson’s I Remember Julia (1996), the stories I present act as partial accounts of Harlem, its history and its present, complicit of the complex and multifarious positionality of its witnesses. Through their telling of memories, a collage of pictures, voices, and history emerge, a sort of distant montage of life in Harlem begins to move in slow motion and a history lost (like that of Julia, the doctor, mother-to-be) being to be rebuilt.
The few stories that I’ve had the privilege of telling through my own words may present a different style of narrative than the ones that come through the audio of those that chose to be recorded, which lends a great space to imagine the possibilities of representation and the making of history – a retold memory, a re-representation, which denotes “the difference between real memory – social and unviolated, exemplified in but also retained as the secret of so-called primitive or archaic societies – and history, which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past” (Nora, 1989, p. 7). Both the storytellers, those that have occupied the physical space of their remembered stories, and I attempt to recapture the past and capture the present through first remembering and then retelling, performing the act of memory, situating it and constructing it (Jelin, 2003). And just like us, the third viewing of these stories by those that encounter the website, will experience the exclusionary, divisive nature of narrative – the sheer narration of the story already interpretive by social production.
An important theme that emerged during my conversations was that of the past and its inescapable presence in the imagining of the storytellers. So many of my attempts to arrest the now of the characters in my study were thwarted by constant retelling and interruptions by notions of the past and place, as opposed to present and individual. This is what Nora (1989) means when he talks about the “rupture of equilibrium” – our presence, present, becomes displaced “under the pressure of a fundamentally historical sensibility” (p. 7). Nora means to say here that the now only exists in conjunction, always, with the historical past – the now is never anew but “something always already begun,” as I found to be the case with several people’s stabs to explain the Harlem of today, as well as to tell of their own present condition (p.7). It is precisely the reasoning for the importance we give to memory and remembering – “because there is so little of it left,” that it only exists briefly, maybe, on its own before becoming conjunctional with the past (p.7).
To my surprise, many recounts of the past of Harlem were completely in contrast with one another, harking to the already interpreted nature of the narrative. And meanwhile, the recounted memories on personal matters were obviously subjective, what would be possibly a more fact-based recount was still disputed amongst the storytellers. For example, while some remembered the presence of the police to be a positive force in their neighborhoods, stating that they actually knew the cops by name and had a relationship with them, others reported that the police were an intrusive, unwelcomed part of the streets back when. Nora (1989) describes the difference between the mythical formation of memory and the actual position of previous events – like historical sites and historical objects, where history is manipulated by memory to become something else, making “facts” of history mostly alterations of actual historic events into cultural memory. This then transforms the events to the past into copies of themselves that are used in order to describe and define the present, defining the police presence now in conjunction with their historical memory of it in the past.
The ways in which I found the telling of historical memories of the neighborhood by its residents, and even the perspectival shifts of it, emphasize Nora’s (1989) lieux de mémoire, an artificial place where cultural memory is made, where cultural appropriation of history occurs and is made by cultural memory. The consistent highlighting of the heroes of the Harlem Renaissance by its current residents alludes to the forming of historical, cultural identity that is brought to the Harlem now through the substitution of history and transforms into a social moment, a social issue (Jelin, 2003). There’s replacement of environments of memory (milieux de mémoire) by places of memory – “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, nor yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded” – the references to Langston Hughes House spliced from its historical story and returned to the present in order to represent a telling of a historical culture. History is appropriated and reappropriated beyond recognition into the lieux de mémoire, which allows it to be then used for political and cultural aims of society, politicizing Harlem as a culture, a place, and a historical site. Harlem history becomes transformed through works of memory of its current residents into something else and takes on social significance through an intruding collective memory (Jelin, 2003).
Harlem as Foucault’s Heterotopia:
In my attempts to encapsulate the multiplicity of Harlem, of its historical voice and current memory work, I began understanding the difficulty and impossibility of finding legitimacy of Harlem as a whole, a complete place. Its multiple descriptions, its contested history – a collective shell and a subjective nostalgia, its disparate understanding by the people that inhabit it now and have through its historical time make it an incomprehensibly complex and disorienting site. For Harlem, only Foucault’s (1967) conceptualization of a heterotopia comes close in capturing it:
There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do
exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like countersites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously, represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopia, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy (p. 3, 4).
From my conversations, attempts at recording, telling, historicizing, and invoking memories, I see Harlem as one of those “sites that are constituted as incongruous, or paradoxical,” “sites that are ambivalent and uncertain because of their multiplicity of social meanings that are attached to them, often where the meaning of a site has changed or is openly contested,” a place that has “some aura of mystery, danger or transgression” for many, “defined by their absolute perfection” by the ones that make it iconic, glorious, and idyllic for the flourishing of a culture, and “sites that are marginalized within the dominant social spatialization” in the greater landscape of Manhattan (p. 2-9). Harlem drips with the magical powers of a heterotopia, which have the ability to unite contradictions in one place: “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (p. 6). And the people are able to call to mind, through historical joint experience and works of memory, a place where they once found themselves (seeing themselves where they are not – a shadow of a historical, utopic, past Harlem) that gives them the meaning of their presence in the place now.
Harlem, in all its multitudes, is my playground for now, a place of inquiry. With summertime approaching, the socialites of Harlem reverberate through my ears as I approach Lenox Anenue from the west. Weary and drained from a good march down 125th, I feel my senses awaken from the pleasant music coming from Red Rooster and the beautifully draped dresses scraping by as I wait for my halal food at the cart. Yet another wave of remember crashes over me, attempting to drown me in its calling. To swim afloat the currents of the work of remembering, to soothe and nurture my curiosity, I will borrow a feather from the cap of Franco La Cecla’s (2012) Against Architecture and write, as “writing is the most honest way to deal with the city and with space, because writing does not kill magmaticity, nor presume to invent it, not expect to exhaust it. Writing keeps in step, it cherishes the stones and the people who live with them, it speaks of the process through which the stones and the people mingle with one another. That which elsewhere I have called “local frame of mind,” a personal and collective history where spaces and territories are indistinguishable from the experience one has with them over the course of time. That is, it is something that can be defined only by storytelling” (p. 3).
Reference
Agamben, G. (2000). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone
Books.
Carlson, E. S. (1996). I remember Julia. Temple University Press.
Glass, Ruth. 1964. Introduction. London: Aspects of Change. London: Centre for Urban Studies
and MacGibbon & Kee.
Ellsworth, E. A. (2005). Places Of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. Psychology Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1967). Of Other Spaces. Diacritics, Vol. 16, No.1. Retrieved from
http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf
La Cecla, Franco. (2012). Against Architecture. California, USA: PM Press.
Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire. Representations, (26,
Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory), 7-24.
Preliminary Imagination:
I’ve only been living on the brink of West and East sides of Harlem on the isle of Manhattan for a mere 8 months. During this droplet of time, my wandering gaze and curiosity has witnessed some subtle and some not so subtle changes.
Pop-up construction crews down the avenues, “Coming Soon” signs branded with corporate logos, and the “For sale” marks dressing storefronts, I’m sensing a beginning. Spotted: a new trendy burger joint adorably titled Harlem Shake a couple blocks away, a promised Whole Foods on the corner of 125th and Lenox, and an influx of Yogis with their mats toggling behind them up and down Adam Clayton Powel Boulevard. But, in a somewhat obvious way, there is an end looming as well – “Closing sale,” “Out of business,” “Liquidation.”
The rapidity with which Harlem is experiencing gentrification is pressing and sometimes you can even feel it physically – like being at the center of one of those sped-up science class videos of seasons changing and plants growing all around you; urban decay and rebirth at a speed uncomfortable to the naked eye.
The term gentrification was coined by Ruth Glass in the early 1960s:
One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes – upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages – two rooms up and two down – have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period – which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation – have been upgraded once again…Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed” (Glass, 1964, p. xviii).
As I stand at the median between St. Nicholas Avenue and Fredrick Douglas Boulevard on 125th,
I can almost hear the brassy, rushed voice of Amy Archer, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist,
from the quirky film The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), attempting to solve the puzzle of Harlem,
“Say, Jimmy, we oughta get down there, see what this is all about, see!”
The hurried sensation of transition calls for a caring of the inevitable change, an attempt at slowing down to make sure the change is not only documented but also is smooth, comfortable, and appropriately appreciated – dealt with instead of just happening, acknowledged. A way to make sure what was there before doesn’t disappear into oblivion and remain only in the faint clouds of the memories of its inhabitants – themselves decaying – mutating and evolving as we speak, stories must be captured in their prime potency. Stories of what it was like to be a part of the Harlem community, what it’s like now. What does this place mean to its residence? How do they conceive of their home and consider its expected future and changing face? What images, ideas, and narrative will they take with them as they shift along with their landscape?
As the stories of Harlem begin fading into history, so does its physicality. The five to six story tenements and townhouses with ornate decorations, the ancient rusted fire escapes, loudly lined up restaurants serving cheap and greasy treats, the innumerable hair and nail shops are disappearing quickly. These that make up images of Harlem today will soon be totaled, becoming a part of remembering – a historical memory of a place that was the crux of a black culture.
As a new member to the community, I may still be an outsider and claim not complete knowledge of the culture, place, and people that I navigate on a daily basis. But I do, however, recognize the potency of the time in Harlem now – it’s brimming with stories that call to be told, heard, photographs that scream to be captured before both become too blurred – and so, as maybe becoming cliché of my generation, I’m creating a website.
Discovery:
Turns out, the pressing urgency I feel about the shifts I experience in Harlem, a shift that certainly my neighbors who’ve habited the spaces longer than me have described in their stories to me feel, is what Pierre Nora (1989) was eluding to in his description of the concept of the acceleration of history: an “increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past” (p. 7). Nora’s usage of historical here is significant and harps on a deeper reality to why the slipping of time call to me to become recorded. The sense of historical here seems to go beyond a historicizing of an event or time just by its passing-from-the-present nature; it connotes a sense of making of history – as a significant passing of time. It’s not a mere moments shift into the past, but the historicizing of it – of it becoming a lesson or a story or a memory that has the potential to effect the future vision and understanding of the place now.
With my recorder and camera in hand, I paced up and down my neighborhood lurking around strangers, asking them to speak with me. Mostly, I found success with those sitting on front steps of their brownstones or those conducting business in their shops. Of the twenty-five conversations – some only a few moments, some over an hour – I decided to “use” ten of them to share on the site because they were the most complete and a representative sample of the opinions and conversations I had. I’ve also included some of the not-so-packaged, awkward fumbles, and noisy recordings in my ethnographic experimentation in the “outtakes” section of the site, along with some photographs of the places of my encounters. This was done so that those would not be lost entirely, to avoid misrepresentation through my edits, and because I feel they capture a certain sensual experience. The sounds of the city, the side conversations amongst neighbors, a young woman singing to the street with her headphones in hear ears, and clumsy confrontations: “the resulting paths, juxtapositions, sounds, interruptions, durations, and rhythms ‘actually impinge on the body/mind/brain in a multiplicity of ways’ [Kennedy, 2003, pp.27-28] and attempt to provide sensations that create the conditions for potential learning experiences” (Ellsworth, 2004, p. 27).
Several folks did not want to be recorded and those are the stories I’ve written out myself. With these, I did not want to remove myself entirely from the dialogue and present the story objectively, as I think that kind of removal would’ve been impossible. Instead, I recognize my authority in telling the story of someone else by presenting it through my subjective lens, embedded with my perspective on the conversation. In doing so, I recognize my position as an auctor, which “signifies the witness” and I validate this force by knowing that my witnessing “presupposes something – a fact, a thing or a word – that preexists” not only the encounter I had with people but also myself, located in the forces of history (Agamben, 1999, p. 149-50). Additionally, the storytellers themselves act as auctors in their telling of Harlem as a place, an entity on its own, and must be noted to also come from presupposed positions. Just as in Eric Carlson’s I Remember Julia (1996), the stories I present act as partial accounts of Harlem, its history and its present, complicit of the complex and multifarious positionality of its witnesses. Through their telling of memories, a collage of pictures, voices, and history emerge, a sort of distant montage of life in Harlem begins to move in slow motion and a history lost (like that of Julia, the doctor, mother-to-be) being to be rebuilt.
The few stories that I’ve had the privilege of telling through my own words may present a different style of narrative than the ones that come through the audio of those that chose to be recorded, which lends a great space to imagine the possibilities of representation and the making of history – a retold memory, a re-representation, which denotes “the difference between real memory – social and unviolated, exemplified in but also retained as the secret of so-called primitive or archaic societies – and history, which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past” (Nora, 1989, p. 7). Both the storytellers, those that have occupied the physical space of their remembered stories, and I attempt to recapture the past and capture the present through first remembering and then retelling, performing the act of memory, situating it and constructing it (Jelin, 2003). And just like us, the third viewing of these stories by those that encounter the website, will experience the exclusionary, divisive nature of narrative – the sheer narration of the story already interpretive by social production.
An important theme that emerged during my conversations was that of the past and its inescapable presence in the imagining of the storytellers. So many of my attempts to arrest the now of the characters in my study were thwarted by constant retelling and interruptions by notions of the past and place, as opposed to present and individual. This is what Nora (1989) means when he talks about the “rupture of equilibrium” – our presence, present, becomes displaced “under the pressure of a fundamentally historical sensibility” (p. 7). Nora means to say here that the now only exists in conjunction, always, with the historical past – the now is never anew but “something always already begun,” as I found to be the case with several people’s stabs to explain the Harlem of today, as well as to tell of their own present condition (p.7). It is precisely the reasoning for the importance we give to memory and remembering – “because there is so little of it left,” that it only exists briefly, maybe, on its own before becoming conjunctional with the past (p.7).
To my surprise, many recounts of the past of Harlem were completely in contrast with one another, harking to the already interpreted nature of the narrative. And meanwhile, the recounted memories on personal matters were obviously subjective, what would be possibly a more fact-based recount was still disputed amongst the storytellers. For example, while some remembered the presence of the police to be a positive force in their neighborhoods, stating that they actually knew the cops by name and had a relationship with them, others reported that the police were an intrusive, unwelcomed part of the streets back when. Nora (1989) describes the difference between the mythical formation of memory and the actual position of previous events – like historical sites and historical objects, where history is manipulated by memory to become something else, making “facts” of history mostly alterations of actual historic events into cultural memory. This then transforms the events to the past into copies of themselves that are used in order to describe and define the present, defining the police presence now in conjunction with their historical memory of it in the past.
The ways in which I found the telling of historical memories of the neighborhood by its residents, and even the perspectival shifts of it, emphasize Nora’s (1989) lieux de mémoire, an artificial place where cultural memory is made, where cultural appropriation of history occurs and is made by cultural memory. The consistent highlighting of the heroes of the Harlem Renaissance by its current residents alludes to the forming of historical, cultural identity that is brought to the Harlem now through the substitution of history and transforms into a social moment, a social issue (Jelin, 2003). There’s replacement of environments of memory (milieux de mémoire) by places of memory – “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, nor yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded” – the references to Langston Hughes House spliced from its historical story and returned to the present in order to represent a telling of a historical culture. History is appropriated and reappropriated beyond recognition into the lieux de mémoire, which allows it to be then used for political and cultural aims of society, politicizing Harlem as a culture, a place, and a historical site. Harlem history becomes transformed through works of memory of its current residents into something else and takes on social significance through an intruding collective memory (Jelin, 2003).
Harlem as Foucault’s Heterotopia:
In my attempts to encapsulate the multiplicity of Harlem, of its historical voice and current memory work, I began understanding the difficulty and impossibility of finding legitimacy of Harlem as a whole, a complete place. Its multiple descriptions, its contested history – a collective shell and a subjective nostalgia, its disparate understanding by the people that inhabit it now and have through its historical time make it an incomprehensibly complex and disorienting site. For Harlem, only Foucault’s (1967) conceptualization of a heterotopia comes close in capturing it:
There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do
exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like countersites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously, represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopia, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy (p. 3, 4).
From my conversations, attempts at recording, telling, historicizing, and invoking memories, I see Harlem as one of those “sites that are constituted as incongruous, or paradoxical,” “sites that are ambivalent and uncertain because of their multiplicity of social meanings that are attached to them, often where the meaning of a site has changed or is openly contested,” a place that has “some aura of mystery, danger or transgression” for many, “defined by their absolute perfection” by the ones that make it iconic, glorious, and idyllic for the flourishing of a culture, and “sites that are marginalized within the dominant social spatialization” in the greater landscape of Manhattan (p. 2-9). Harlem drips with the magical powers of a heterotopia, which have the ability to unite contradictions in one place: “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (p. 6). And the people are able to call to mind, through historical joint experience and works of memory, a place where they once found themselves (seeing themselves where they are not – a shadow of a historical, utopic, past Harlem) that gives them the meaning of their presence in the place now.
Harlem, in all its multitudes, is my playground for now, a place of inquiry. With summertime approaching, the socialites of Harlem reverberate through my ears as I approach Lenox Anenue from the west. Weary and drained from a good march down 125th, I feel my senses awaken from the pleasant music coming from Red Rooster and the beautifully draped dresses scraping by as I wait for my halal food at the cart. Yet another wave of remember crashes over me, attempting to drown me in its calling. To swim afloat the currents of the work of remembering, to soothe and nurture my curiosity, I will borrow a feather from the cap of Franco La Cecla’s (2012) Against Architecture and write, as “writing is the most honest way to deal with the city and with space, because writing does not kill magmaticity, nor presume to invent it, not expect to exhaust it. Writing keeps in step, it cherishes the stones and the people who live with them, it speaks of the process through which the stones and the people mingle with one another. That which elsewhere I have called “local frame of mind,” a personal and collective history where spaces and territories are indistinguishable from the experience one has with them over the course of time. That is, it is something that can be defined only by storytelling” (p. 3).
Reference
Agamben, G. (2000). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone
Books.
Carlson, E. S. (1996). I remember Julia. Temple University Press.
Glass, Ruth. 1964. Introduction. London: Aspects of Change. London: Centre for Urban Studies
and MacGibbon & Kee.
Ellsworth, E. A. (2005). Places Of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. Psychology Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1967). Of Other Spaces. Diacritics, Vol. 16, No.1. Retrieved from
http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf
La Cecla, Franco. (2012). Against Architecture. California, USA: PM Press.
Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire. Representations, (26,
Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory), 7-24.