In Rewriting Literary Blackness in Harlem, Tammie Jenkins provides us with a fascinating study and sweeping historical grounding of Harlem’s Black intellectual life during one of America’s most seminal periods (1920—1930s) for Black political thought, cultural expression, and activism. Through the double-barreled academic approach of intertextuality theory and narrative inquiry, complex organic intellectuals and towering literary and socially-engaged figures, such as Hubert Henry Harrison, George S. Schuyler, and Wallace Thurman, are refracted through the kaleidoscopic lens of Jenkins’ prodigious insight, where in her hands, the malleability of Blackness is like a Rubik’s Cube where there are no fixed patterns or definitions. In this book we see the convergence of Black peoples’ quest for freedom through the ideological trains—Black Radicalism, Black Conservatism, Black Nationalism, Pan Africanism—that to this day are still running. Jenkins offers us a concise history of Black identity and framing along with the various naming and struggle for dignity beyond racial constructions, constrictions, and the ongoing antagonisms of capitalism. It is the nimble work of a Black Deconstructionist and diasporic detective that describes how we got here. And like those trains, it’s right on time.

Tony Medina, Howard University