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Focusing on the representation of Harlem, I examine how Wallace Thurman's 1929 The Blacker the Berry explicitly challenges the notion of "the emancipatory city" while emphasizing the spatial aspect of subject formation. Thurman underscores both the city's liberating potential and its simultaneous tendency to reinforce dominant normative schemes.
"There was no place in the world for a girl as black as she," Emma Lou, the protagonist of Wallace Thurman's 1929 The Blacker the Berry, despairingly laments. Indeed, Emma Lou is very black, "too black," as she learns growing up in Boise, Idaho in an African-American community that desperately hopes to get "whiter and whiter every generation" (29). Her grandmother is the founding member of the Boise "blue veins," an elite circle of black Americans who are fair-skinned enough for their blood to be seen "pulsing purple through the veins of their wrists" (28). But to Emma Lou's great misfortune-and as a result of her mother's disastrous marriage to a "full-blooded Negro"-she has been born dark (30). She consequently becomes the ostracized member of her family and their exclusive social set. Due to her skin colour, whose hue is constantly invoked with disdain, her grandmother, mother, and the rest of the blue veins isolate Emma Lou and she, in turn, eventually rejects her family and sets out on her own.
Thurman's novel traces Emma Lou's various attempts to escape the virulent intra-black racism of her hometown and its psychic effects. Her flight leads her first to Los Angeles, where she enrolls as a student at the University of Southern California. But collegiate life in Los Angeles turns out not to be as radically different from Boise as Emma Lou had hoped-at least not in terms of the middle-class African-American community's colour consciousness and racialized gender hierarchy. This realization propels Emma Lou to move on to Harlem. She is, we are told, absolutely determined to "escape the haunting chimera of intra-racial color prejudice" (70) and believes that in the "world's greatest colored city" life will be more cosmopolitan and the people more civilized (187). Harlem does indeed prove to be vastly more heterogeneous but, to her dismay, Emma Lou discovers that though the largest black metropolis is indeed unlike any other space, it is not, by...