‘A Slightly Different Sense of Time’: Narrative Temporality in the Literature of Harlem from 1900 to the Present

Over the course of its history as a Black neighbourhood, Harlem has simultaneously been described as ‘scene and symbol’, ‘dream’ and ‘reality’, ‘heaven and hell’. This thesis argues that Harlem’s paradoxical identity both demands and creates a unique sense of temporality. Harlem has long straddled multiple temporal planes, with its identity complicated by the tension between imposed symbolic narratives—which often position Harlem as a symbol of the future or the past—and its material environment. This thesis contends that Black authors, artists, and thinkers have approached this tension by engaging with narrative temporality when theorising and writing about Harlem. I also argue that the works included in this thesis function as literary chronotopes through which Harlem’s temporalities are not simply represented, but actively generated. The four chapters of this thesis will consider James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1930), Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Ralph Ellison’s ‘Harlem Is Nowhere’ (1948) and Invisible Man (1952), Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2021) and Crook Manifesto (2023), Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), and Radha Blank’s film The Forty-Year- Old Version (2020), in order to examine how Harlem’s temporal paradox has been addressed through four distinct iterations of its identity. In doing so, this thesis contributes novel research to the field of Black temporality: very few critical studies have read Harlem’s longstanding exceptionalism through the lens of temporality, and fewer still have aligned the narrative temporalities of Harlem’s literature with both its material setting and paradoxical identity. Ultimately, this thesis will underscore the importance of nuance in any discussion of Harlem, and promote active contemporary engagement with its temporalities.