toward an ethnography of a quotation‐marked‐off place

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Toward an ethnography of aquotation‐marked‐off placeJohn L. Jackson Jr. aa Ph.D. candidate in anthropology , Columbia UniversityPublished online: 05 Jun 2009.

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Toward an Ethnographyof a Quotation-Marked-Off PlaceJohn L Jackson Jr.

Iwould argue that it makes some sense thatin a time of elusive, yet emergent, cosmopoli-tanized identities, of sweatshop- and shanty-town-spawning multinational corporations,of entry-level service-sector-only employ-ment opportunities in Big City, U.S.A., ananthropologist attempting to write about thehere-and-now of post-civil rights urbanAmerica might find it fruitful to begin, of allplaces, at that quintessential locale of globalsameness called McDonalds.

That mythical space where identical mem-orized greetings ("Welcome to McDonalds,may I take your order, please?"—a capitalistcommand in the guise of a question) are of-fered up time and again by uniformed, mini-mum-wage-earning, secondary-labor marketworkers, each with that exact same perky yetdisingenuous smile etched on an otherwisedisgusted face. McDonalds, where the mass-produced logic of late capitalism duplicatesitself, with ever-so-minor modifications, onnearly every strip mall or highway or streetcorner or college campus across the country.And most directly, the place where this par-ticular story begins. On that fine line of evi-dential limbo separating the illuminatingly"ethnographic" from the merely "anecdotal."A line hardly different, conceptually speak-ing, from the one I was waiting in at a Mc-

Donalds restaurant on 125th Street when Ifirst met Dexter, a young black male cus-tomer arguing with Pam, the young womantrying patiently (but unsuccessfully) to takehis order, please.

Dexter, dressed in white-and-black fatigues,held in the palm of his right hand a colorfulcoupon, in exchange for which he was sup-posed to receive a $.99 Big Mac in every partof the city (so read the fine print) "except theborough of Manhattan," where a Big Mac—with this same coupon—would cost him$1.39 instead. Well, hearing Pam repeat thatimportant distinction, Dexter was outragedthat he was being forced to pay $1.39 for hisBig Mac sandwich. With only a dollar and adime in his outstretched left hand (the $.10was "for tax," he declared several times),Dexter made his case: "This is Harlem," hesaid, "not Manhattan! If they meant Harlem,if they meant Harlem, they should have writ-ten Harlem! Harlem is not Manhattan! So,I'm paying $1.10 for my Big Mac." OnceDexter finished his spiel and clunked themoney on the counter, other customers linedup in front of cash registers all around him(along with the brown-and-red costumedMcDonalds staff at work on the other side ofthe long silver counter) mostly chuckled,

ii. S v

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Souls • Winter 1999 23

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Toward an Ethnography of a Quotation-Marked-Off Place

giggled, and shook their heads incredulouslyat his argument, an argument that, in itsunabridged iteration, took over ten full min-utes to play out. But Dexter didn't mind theirsmirks; he was adamant, determined—eventhough his half-smiling face and exaggerat-edly playful body language clearly, if only in-directly, indicated he knew full well thatHarlem was smack dab in the borough of aManhattan Island where Big Macs (as a func-tion of, say, higher-priced rental space andproperty taxes) simply cost $.40 more than inany other part of the city. On this particularday, however, Dexter would not and did notleave that crowded McDonalds restaurant un-til Pam, poised and patient behind her cashregister, reluctantly snatched his dollar (andhis dime) and handed him a Big Mac sand-wich to go—a paper-bag-covered burger hewas munching on greedily as I jogged out tocatch up with his much heftier strides in thefast-food restaurant's wet and slippery park-ing lot.

Dexter's analysis served as the centralframe and organizing principle through andaround which I would toil for close to a yearand a half. I was doing an ethnography of so-cial solidarity in Harlem, but Dexter had hiton the complicatedly symbolic boundariesthat I had to engage—before anything else. AHarlem in Manhattan, but then again notquite bound there. A Harlem thought (by boththose who reside there and many more whowouldn't dare) to be a kind of world apart; aliving, breathing space whose semiotic sig-nificances inform the boundaries between thesupposedly black and white worlds of NewYork City. A place where the objective condi-tions of people's existence and their subjec-tive responses to those conditions illustratethe elaborate relationships between structuralmarginalization, cultures of poverty, and indi-vidual agency in a postindustrial context rife

with all manner of lucrative undergroundeconomies and devastatingly "savage" in-equalities.

Hearing Dexter argue with Pam about thedistinctly separate location of Harlem vis-à-vis Manhattan, of the impossibility of reduc-ing Harlem to its geographical location ex-posed my own facile assumptions aboutwhat—ethnographically speaking—made upHarlem and its borders.

According to the New York State Visitorand Convention Bureau, Harlem has thehighest name recognition of any neighbor-hood in the entire state of New York, and formy argument, this tiny bit of trivia is quitesubstantial: the most famous neighborhood inthe nation's most famous city is Harlem! It isknown the world over. But for those who livethere, who live with (and even off) that noto-riety, what does Harlem mean? What andwhere is Harlem, really? One of my firstethnographic tasks, as I saw it, was to addressjust that: how field sites like Harlem, withreified names that far precede and exceed thestretches of land they designate, operate be-yond easily demarcated and circumscribedways; how places like Harlem are discur-sively and subjectively mobilized toward var-ious ends; how a volitional rendering of placeimpacts and informs people's racialized iden-tities and class(ed) positionalities.

It is possible to fall back on Benedict An-derson's notion of an imagined community asa means of vouchsafing access to argumentsabout the mystical constructedness of placeand space and their impact on people's socialidentities. In Anderson, specific relations be-tween literacy and industrialization helpedspawn the discursive and extradiscursive foun-dations upon which contemporary nation-alisms (and nation-state solidarities) were firstmade to stand. With the advent of mass-pro-duced, print-culture capitalism, citizens be-

At right: Harlem kids. Photo copyright Chester Higgins Jr. All rights reserved

24 Souls • Winter 1999

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wmmmmmmÊÊmmmmmÊm—immmmmmmm Toward an Ethnography of a Quotation-Marked-Off Place

came better able to imagine a connection to • • •relatively unknown others across the dauntingobstacles of both space and time. Andersonian One of the first roads of inquiry into a quota-assessments of created communities can speak tion-marked-off Harlem has to do with Har-most loudly and directly to a Harlem that not lemites and their varying and prescientonly uses various discursive modes to shore up articulations of this place's taken-for-grant-the social and spatial parameters of its imag- edness—that is, those articulations theyined home but also (and more important, I choose to share with an anthropologist whothink) a Harlem possessing the uncanny ability asks. Danielle, a thirty-seven-year-old ele-to resituate itself in another time and space en- mentary school teacher who lives on a tree-tirely. In Dexter's case, this relocation carries lined street off Adam Clayton Powell/Sev-Harlem out of the borough of Manhattan alto- enth Avenue, just three blocks from wheregether and into an area that he claims "is not she teaches third graders, says that theManhattan." Any ethnographic work con- "Harlem" she knows is nothing if not in aducted in Harlem, on the hard-core issues of league all by itself:the day (deindustrialization and its links to ur-ban unemployment, institutionalized racism, D a n l e l l e : H a r l e m i s s P e c i a l - » i s a s P e c i a l

welfare-to-workfare reforms, transgenera- P l a c e" r v e b e e n h e r e f o u r t e e n y e a r s ' a n d 1

tional cultural pathologies, and so forth), must ^ w that I am lucky to be here. Because

take Dexter's cartography seriously. t h e r e i s ^ o n e H a r l e m m t h e w h o l e e n t i r e

This idea of "Harlem," a Harlem snuggled . w o r l d - ^ i s Ju s t o n e- S o Ym lnc]^ t o b e

neatly within quotation marks, operates as a h e r e ' y™ kaaw'to b e m a k i n S a w a ? h e r e ' b e 'kind of place apart, functions as a geographic c a u s e i t>s e a s y n o t t 0 m a k e iL A n d t h e r e * *and iconographie space talked about with an P l e n ty o f P e oP l e i n H a r l e r a w h o ^ ^ t h a t 'almost mythical distinction, with an air of ex- ^ ^ w h o l i v e t h a t mi° a r e n > t a s l u c k ytraspecial signification. And an ethnographer ™ m e ' T o b e h e r e md haPP? w i t h t h e i r l i ves"

working here must consciously and carefully A s i a > twenty-two, a third-generation Har-wade through the mounds of excess meaning l e m i t e w h o l i v e s o n 1 0 4 t h a n d Lexington andconnected to a space imagined from within w o r k s w i t h P a m a t t h e McDonalds restaurantand without, by those who would use its w h e r e T first h e a r d D e x t e r extract "Harlem"name to either (1) index a sense of belonging f r o m Manhattan Island, offers a slightly dif-or (2) scream at a black threat seeping down f e r e n t s p i n o n Harlem's particularity:from uptown. Before writing a single wordabout the linkages between class stratifica- Asia: Harlem to me is like the real nitty-tion and racial identification in Harlem,' I gritty. Like hard and real and dangerous. Ifirst had to peel back the multilayered under- lived in Brooklyn before, for like two years,standings of place and its connection to iden- and my oldest sister lives in Long Island withtity. Indeed, these understandings cloud and her boyfriend, but none of those spots is likeobstruct any attempt at writing race, class, Harlem. They just don't feel like Harlem.and culture in a wonderfully mediated field T , „„ . . T T , ^ , ,1 n

. , 3 , John: What does Harlem feel like?site like Harlem, a Harlem where precon-ceived and continually reconfigured notions Asia: I don't know, but no other spot feelsof "the real" simultaneously and contradicto- like it. I could close my eyes and you couldrily obscure yet illuminate what is most con- take me anywhere and if you bring me backsequential about the place itself. to Harlem, I would say, I'm back home. 'Cuz

26 Souls • Winter 1999 mmmm—mmm—mmmmmm-mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmwmmm

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larlem barbeque. Photo copyright Chester Higgins Jr. All rights reserved.

no place sounds and smells like here. Or isreal and, I don't know, nitty-gritty, and roughand real like it. I can't really explain it. But Iknow I'm right.

Both Danielle's "special place" Harlem, theonly one of its kind "in the whole entireworld," and Asia's almost tactile, yet inex-plicable "nitty-gritty" Harlem, a neighbor-hood that no other place quite "feels like," aresignificantly recurring strands of a commonargument running through contemporary dis-cussions about Harlem's embraceable dis-tinctiveness. There are, in fact, many people(Harlem residents or not) with a highlyvested interest in what this peculiarly "spe-cial" place looks like and reads like, how it isto be seen and represented.

People have a stake in the space's defini-tion; they defend and police its meaning witha protective vengeance. Refracted through,

say, social hierarchies, this place called"Harlem," this Harlem idea, can work as animportant template for thinking not just aboutone's connections to place but also aboutone's relationships with others.

Cynthia, twenty-eight, a part-time securityguard for an office building on 125th andFrederick Douglass/Eighth Avenue, was bornin Virginia and has lived in New York City forthe last twelve years.

Cynthia: When I see Harlem, you know,when I look at it, I don't see any welfare orcrime or drugs. None of that nonsense. This isthe Mecca. I mean, I don't see beggars andhomeless people on the street. Or begging bythe bank. When I see Harlem, I see, like, a per-fect picture. It is just beautiful. That is Harlem.

Cynthia uses this "beautiful" version ofHarlem to justify her criticism of what the


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social science literature would call "the un-derclass"—a group that is, according to Cyn-thia, tarnishing the shiny legacy of this"Mecca" of black America and, therefore,must be denied access (at least symbolically)to its most-hallowed name. Cynthia's no-nonsense" Harlem is asserted to the exclu-sion of stereotypical representations of urbanAmerica, stereotypes that foregroundpoverty, criminality, and drug use as em-blematic and even constitutive of the placeitself. Contrary to these many negative im-ages and depictions of urban America, Cyn-thia's Harlem is a place "where you can justhave fun and feel free. No racism and thingslike that. No. Just good lives. Like what itused to be."

Carl, thirty-one, more securely in the so-calledblack middle class than Cynthia, is a financelawyer who has lived in Harlem for some fif-teen years now. He grew up with "dirt-poor,broke parents" who moved here from theCaribbean in the 1950s, before he "was closeto being born." Waving to a waitress as hewhips out a credit card to cover our fried-chicken lunch at a new soul-food spot in mid-town Manhattan, Carl offers a picture of"Harlem" that locates its validity and realityeven more specifically in a past that, as Cyn-thia put it, "used to be":

Carl: Harlem is history. And I don't know alot about all of it. I'm just starting to reallyknow it. I've been focusing on my stuff, youknow. I've seen some tours. The grange.Not many, but that is Harlem. It is history,the history of an entire people. Sure thereare bad things, but Harlem isn't just that.Troublemakers here are people who don'tknow what Harlem should be like. That's allthey've seen, you know, the nastiness, thepoverty. They haven't seen better and don'tknow no better. Maybe if they knewmore of that history, you know, they wouldtry to fly right.

Harlem vendor. Photo copyright Chester Higgins Jr. All rights reserved.

Ms. Joseph, fifty-five, a Seattle native whomade collegiate pit stops in Southern Califor-nia and Omaha, Nebraska, before settlinginto a Harlem brownstone with her architecthusband some twenty years ago, considersHarlem "the center of the world."

John: Is it a bad place to live?

Ms. Joseph: It ain't bad at all. I mean, noworse than any place else, right? The crimeand stuff is not Harlem. If anything, that isgonna make Harlem not be Harlem anymore.You know?

John: No. What do you mean?


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Ms. Joseph: The more crime and violenceand drugs . . . means we got less and less ofHarlem every day. Every time somebody getskilled or something, Harlem is dying, too.That kind of thing is not Harlem. Its justkilling Harlem—little by little, bit by bit. Ittakes away from Harlem, like as if one daywe'll wake up and there won't be any Harlemanymore and people would be looking aroundasking, "What happened? what happened toit?" It would just be gone.

Ms. Joseph's Harlem, to be Harlem at all,presumes the exclusion of violent death and

crime. It is a Harlem that flies in the face ofvicious murders and drugs, the kinds of ac-tions that don't just kill people, Ms. Josephargues, but kill place as well.

Ms. Joseph: I just get tired of all of it. Likewhen, when, when Jeffrey's sister—my hus-band, Jeffrey—got held up right around thecorner, that wasn't more than a month ago. Idon't usually have no problems here. I see thepeople doing what they doing, but I usuallyjust go about my business. I go right pastthem like they weren't there. Because for me,they are not there. I don't see them. They justlike ghosts: you know, the drug dealers and,and, and things. These people aren't part ofmy community. They aren't from here.

John: Where are they from, do you think?

Ms. Joseph: I mean, maybe from the Bronx,or some other state, but even if not, they stillain't from Harlem. Even if they from here, ifthey live here. Maybe you could say theyfrom upper Manhattan, or from 155th Street,but that don't mean they from Harlem. Thatjust mean they live on 155th Street. NotHarlem. Not if they doing that kind of stuff.Harlem don't want them.

Ms. Joseph, too, has neighbors, like Cyn-thia's "beggars at the banks," who may sharethe same physical surroundings but who areexcluded from a valid social place. Socio-economic status functions as one of the crite-ria used to sift through the social landscapeand separate the legal/legitimate form of so-cial citizenship from the illegal/illegitimate.Just as Ms. Joseph and Cynthia can lookdown the socioeconomic ladder at undesir-ables who don't belong, some "Harlemites"look up the social ladder to challenge theirupper-class race mates' rights to call"Harlem" home.

"Harlem is what I know," says Sheila,twenty-seven, unemployed, and trying to getinto a GED preparation program. We are


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Toward an Ethnography of a Quof ation-Marked-Off Place

walking and talking on Frederick DouglassBoulevard as she points out places she's livedin, or been to, or heard tall tales about.

Sheila: The people I know, the people whohave to work and struggle to make it everyday, we here and we real. Real life. There arepeople who want to come in here and don'thave a clue, but they come cause it's cheaprents and stuff, and they want to be here andact like they better than any of us, but they re-ally need to be someplace else. They not fromhere, not belonging here. They the ones thatthink they can do whatever they want up here,that they can do whatever they want andwon't nobody do nothing. But that ain't true.And most of them gonna learn, too.

For Sheila, as for Cynthia and Ms. Joseph,there is vast space separating residency fromreally belonging. David, Sheila's twenty-year-old on-again, off-again boyfriend, talksemphatically about where Harlem "is reallyat":

David: Harlem is from the left side to theright side of Manhattan. Uptown. Period.Good and bad. Take it or leave it. Harlem islike a ghetto like everywhere else, whereblack people live and work and play and die.People kill each other and they go to church.And they, sometimes, some of them work,and some of them stay home and do drugsand wait for a welfare check and don't donothing else except watch TV and movies.All of that is what is going on here every day.That's what's happening.

To hear David tell it, listening to him cap-ture the series of divergent experiences dur-ing any average, ordinary day in a Harlem"where black people live," a "ghetto like any-where else" (no more or less special and spe-cific than other any neighborhood), we get arepresentation of Harlem's value as a socio-logical idea that becomes more and morecomplex and compelling. David's "Harlem"

shows the ease with which a globally recog-nized Harlem-concept (that most famousneighborhood in all the United States) slideseffortlessly back and forth between (1) Black"Mecca" hyperspecificity and (2) an easycollapsibility into a stereotypical representa-tion of contemporary black urbanity. Ms.Joseph's explicit exclusion of a 155th Streetresident/drug dealer/crack addict from herpristine Harlem and Sheila's dismissal of theBuppie without-"a-clue" pragmatists whothink they belong but really don't both speakto the subtle kinds of ways in which any com-munity and its residents, not just those inHarlem, apply the litmus test of desirabilityto define locals/residents who are supposedlyjeopardizing, in different ways, the sanctityand solidity of the collective social space.

All the understandings of this place called"Harlem" (and there are many more besidesthe few offered here) lead to one centralpoint: that the importance with which"Harlem" is imbued does not negate its statusas a stand-in for black America. Harlem canbe both "special" and "ordinary" at one andthe same time. But what does this mean foran anthropologist trying to make sense of theplace itself? What should the ethnographicgaze behold when it casts its eyes upon aquotation-marked-off place like Harlem?

To answer this I want to backtrack a bit, to agenesis story of sorts. The early strands of thediscipline's lineage are debatable, but in oneorigin story of anthropology's early years,there was an armchair. And in it sat the eth-nologist, a person who supplied an analyticaleye (or two) to the raw materials of others'observations. It was someone else who didthe ethnographic dirty work (say, a travelingmerchant with a trusty journal or a proselytiz-ing missionary, diary in hand), and the mas-terful ethnologist pulled these sordid and mo-tivated tales together into some universally


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explanatory schema. But this armchair brandof anthropological inquiry gave way as thediscipline flung itself full swing into an insti-tutional and accredited distinction betweenits methodologically honed scientific empiri-cism born of firsthand participant-observa-tion versus what was considered the shoddy,grossly unscientific and relatively inadequatewritings of nonanthropologists. The anthro-pologist's expertise came from a scientifi-cally trained vi-sion that couldpierce throughthe many detailsof a seeminglyincomprehensi-ble culture andprovide a scien-tific formulathrough which tomake sense of itall—be it evolu-tionism, struc-

tural-functionalism, transmissionism, struc-turalism, cultural materialism, and so on.

The primitive's village became the sitewherein rested the anthropologist's authority.A long visit to that "Promised land" as RogerSanjek put it, coupled with a mastery of thenative language, meant a scientifically holis-tic view of an entire people. But there is re-ally so much more behind the scenes.

As many have argued, this perfect, scien-tistic picture of cultural critique elides asmuch as it illuminates. First of all, the "field"wasn't as isolated, discreet, and monolithicas (explicitly or implicitly) assumed. In fact,this reified field site, the empirical groundupon which the discipline stood, was evensaid to be a kind of fabricated region, amade-up space—and in more ways than one.A fabrication that resonates most directlywith Dexter's attempts at dislodging Harlemfrom its Manhattan moorings. (Or ever bet-ter, with Columbia University's pamphle-

"Hariem is from the left side to the right side

of Manhattan. Uptown. Period. Good and had.

Take ¡t or leave it, Harlem is like a ghetto like

everywhere else, where black people live and

work and play and die. People kill each other

and they so to chnrcn."

teering two-step that maneuvers its thou-sands of dollars and tons of material in andout of "Harlem" into the sunnier site of"Morningside Heights"—except, of course,when recruiting students of color to its"home in Harlem.")2

The anthropologist can be said to createboundaries where there are none, to force andforge distinctions between here and there inan effort to pin down and circumscribe

the space within!~^---*-rrT~^-r*^r^*^™^l which fieldwork

will take place. Inorder to see "theother" better, theethnographer hastraditionally hadto condense anddownscale theamount that wasto be seen. Andthat downsizinghas often meant

an overly rigid gerrymandering of socialspace. But for the anthropologist to see this inperson, of course, was not the ultimate point,and the published monograph distilled the an-thropological gaze into a narrative form that,according to Jim Clifford, solidified theethnographer's unassailable authority while,as Johannes Fabian puts it, freezing the otherinto a perpetual past distinct from the West-ern world's much more modern present. Andso, in that overly surefooted discursive field,a moment—a meta-ethnographic moment—opened up that would allow, using the toolsof literary criticism, for ethnographic texts tobe "looked at" as well as "looked through" tosome overly reified and supposedly transpar-ent other.

Critiques of the ethnography as a textabound. What ethnographers see and whatthey think they get are both fair game forcritical engagement. Ethnographies, it is ar-gued, are not just pure and unadulterated re-


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flections of what has been observed butrather are crafted and constructed worlds thatstand in for the jumbled reality from whichoften indecipherable field notes are alchem-ized into realist narrative accounts. And ifthat was true in thepast for BronislawMalinowski's West-ern Pacific or Mar-garet Mead's Samoa(or, more self-con-sciously so, forZ o r a N e a l eHurston's Eaton-ville), how muchmore so is it now?And even still, in aplace like Harlem,"that Mecca of blackAmerica," the NewWorld center of thefabled African dias-pora, "the queen ofall Black belts." Andhow much more so in-the-here-and-now ofthe late twentieth century and its new-fan-gled transnational trade agreements, interna-tional immigration shifts, and First Worlddeindustrialization?

The head-in-the-sand, cultural-village an-thropologist of yesteryear was a fiction (Clif-ford calls it an "allegory") created to, amongother things, justify the discipline itself. An-thropologists must look up, out and beyondwhat easy borders we are quick to create, be-yond the arbitrary parameters we translateinto and project onto our anthropologicalfield sites. We must open up the ethnographicview to include international connections thatlink places through the flow of never-endingand mobile peoples and capital. And manytheorists are arguing for just such an openingof the field site—for looking past our as-sumed, hard-and-fast boundaries. Man Paige

"Harlem is like a person you got to takethe time to know. When you knowHarlem, she will treat you right. And ifyou don't take the time to, she won't.She'll lie to you and you'll be stupidenough to believe it. Cause people doeveryday. They think Harlem is this but itain't. It's that. And they don't get it. Andwon't believe you when you tell themthey wrong." —chuck

asks for an ethnographic engagement withblack people and cultures that takes mass me-dia stereotyping seriously as obstructions toany ethnographic understanding of AfricanAmericans. Faye Harrison lobbies for an

opening up ofethnographic in-quiries and fieldsites into an analy-sis of how televi-sion, radio, andmotion picture im-ages inform andcocreate our per-ceptions of theworld. Arjun Ap-padurrai pleads fora transnationalized,t r a n s c u l t u r a l l ysavvy understand-ing of societiesthat links the lo-cally specific toits global context.

Where they all agree is in the understandingthat field sites must be opened up into othersites (even "multisited"). But how far open?And where does the opening end? Wheredoes it close? Should we open the anthropo-logical gaze into just other nearby neighbor-hoods? Into contiguous nations? Into a blackAtlantic paradigm that recognizes the analyti-cal bankruptcy of the nation-state's bordersas valid cutoff points for social and culturalanalyses? Even into Wallersteinian-influ-enced world-systems theories that ask forcenter-periphery models of the entire planet'splayers on the global stage? A Derridean in-vocation of signification means opening "thefield" up into textuality and intertextuality, allof which could be interpreted with Geertzian-thick descriptions galore. I would say yes tothese recommendations. But I want to go fur-ther, especially in a place like "Harlem." I


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Hurlent diner. Photo copyright Chester Higgins Jr. All rights reserved.

want to argue for an opening up of the fieldsite (as politically irresponsible as it mightsound at first blush) into the ethnographicland of make-believe, into the ethnographicimaginary, where fact and fiction, true andfalse, chip away at the walls of demarcationthat separate their shadowing and mutuallyconstitutive worlds. An opening up into theideas we hold and are taught to have aboutplaces like Harlem, places whose boundariesare magically malleable and whose peopleare stereotypically assumed.

Chuck, twenty-five, a part-time student at acommunity college in the middle of 125th

Street, says that "Harlem is like a person yougot to take the time to know. When you knowHarlem, she will treat you right. And if youdon't take the time to, she won't. She'll lie toyou and you'll be stupid enough to believe it.Cause people do everyday. They thinkHarlem is this but it ain't. It's that. And theydon't get it. And won't believe you when youtell them they wrong." Chuck's decidedlygendered Harlem is a place that, first andforemost, misrepresents itself. It is a Harlemthat might be said to make itself up as it goesalong. A Harlem able to fictionalize itself andkeep its pursuers off its hidden tale.

And it is, of course, the artisans who arethe first ones there in that make-believe,


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made-up land of a camouflaged, quotation-marked-off "Harlem" that "is not Manhat-tan." The artists. Particularly, the actors: theprofessional pretenders. The ones trained torecognize the inevitability of that constitu-tive intermingling oftruth with falsehoodwhen it comes to loca-tion and identity. Assuch, an ethnography ofthe cinematic is in or-der. Ethnographicuscinematicus. In thiscase, movie star DenzelWashington's carefullymeasured advice to rap-per-turned-actor WillSmith—and the ap-proach Denzel thinksWill should take to hisrole in the film Six Degrees of Separation(1993), where Smith plays Paul Poitier, ablack, homosexual, Walter Benjamin-quot-ing con artist who lies his way into thehome of a wealthy art dealer on Manhat-tan's Upper West Side by falsely claimingto be Sidney Poitier's son. Pretending to bethe child of a black film icon, Paul is indeedHarlem's prodigal, if still unclaimed, off-spring. In fact, Harlem, as a very characterin the film, is right there (off-camera, ofcourse) portentously in the background allthe while—playing itself and providing thedistant, aerial-shot backdrop to this tale ofclass-based posing, passing, and performa-tivity. The separation point, the borderline,is an Upper West Side apartment of gullibil-ity (an apartment off Central Park no less,that last landscaped border post protecting aposh middle-classness of double Kandin-skys and English hand-blasted shoes fromthe presumed anarchy raging uptown).

But Six Degrees is based on only one realstory made into a stage play and then adapted

"Harlem is no poverty, no immi-

grants, no trash on streets.

Harlem is not any of that. That is

not what I think about. I don't. I

don't at all. Harlem Is nothing

bad. Nothing bad like that. And

nobody can't tell me any differ-

ent. Nobody." —Margaret

to the silver screen. The other real story, theother real-life story, has Denzel Washington,another icon, the next Sidney Poitier (somesay), who's played many a Harlemite on-screen, passing on some acting wisdom to

Will Smith: an arguablyhomophobic admoni-tion that Smith not, ascalled for in the script,kiss a white, male actoron-screen; that Willfeign the two kisses(one set in a Boston stu-dio apartment, the otherin a stage coach ridingthrough that very sameCentral Park borderland).3 Denzel main-

tains that Will shouldobstruct the kiss from

view, fake it (by turning his back away fromthe screen/the audience and pretending thathe and his white, male costar's lips touch onthe other side of the back of his head). Smithmust conceal the act, Denzel argues, becausethe black audience wouldn't be able to readthat action as just made up; wouldn't see thekiss as acting; couldn't distinguish betweenthe "real" and the "make-believe" of thething. Denzel's rather patronizing assessmentof black people's mass-media decoding capa-bilities is a provocative and interesting (how-ever condescending) model, I believe, forlooking at an ethnographic field site, espe-cially when that site is a place like Harlem, aplace where the line between fiction and non-fiction, as people talk about the neighborhoodthey know, is fuzzy indeed. Maybe Denzel'spoint helps to unpack the truths and fictionsof Cynthia's beggarless and Ms. Joseph'sdrug-dealerless Harlem, U.S.A. What if,Denzel's homophobia and provincialismnotwithstanding, people in that black audi-ence he talks about can't tell the difference


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'They come up here, they don't know us. Think they know Harlem;they think they do, but they don't. They could never know us. Theyjust think they know us from what they been taught from TU and shitfor all these years. Nothing but lies." —Dexter

between fact and fiction because they recog-nize the often equivalent effects of theshadow and its act. That is, they know aworld where stereotyped unrealities have animpact on people's lives that disproves anyeasy argument for the power of some sup-posed real over the unreal. Indeed, the unrealassumptions about places like Harlem (as-sumptions that impact the decisions, say, ofbig businesses about whether to move thereor that inform where people choose to eat,shop, and so on) have been powerfully deter-mining factors in the very real lives of thepeople who reside there.

Moreover, in a place like Harlem, "What is'real'" (what is Harlem, really?) becomes atricky question. Margaret, thirty-three, goesto school at City College, fifteen minutessouth, by foot, from where she lives with hermother, three sisters, a brother, and twonephews in a two-bedroom apartment. Sheoffers yet another take on Harlem, a take veryreal in its unreality:

Margaret: Harlem is no poverty, no immi-grants, no trash on streets. Harlem is not anyof that. That is not what I think about. I don't.I don't at all. Harlem is nothing bad. Nothingbad like that. And nobody can't tell me anydifferent. Nobody.

What people think about Harlem and itsboundaries, whether true or not (even a trash-free Harlem xenophobically and unrealisti-cally peopled, as Margaret asserts, withoutimmigrants and the poor), has true enoughconsequences, especially when depictions ofblacks, in or out of Harlem, carry the stereo-types of many generations on their backs.4 AsDexter put it: "They come up here, they don'tknow us. Think they know Harlem; theythink they do, but they don't. They couldnever know us. They just think they know usfrom what they been taught from TV and shitfor all these years. Nothing but lies."

Notes1. This article was written for and presented at Co-

lumbia University's Institute for Research in African-American Studies during the spring of 1998 as part of asemester-long series on the Harlem community. This isan excerpt from a longer piece entitled "White Harlem:How to Do Ethnography with Your Eyes Closed."

2. I know from my own recruitment that ColumbiaUniversity is strategic about when and where it mobilizesthe quotation-marked-off notion of "Harlem" in its re-cruitment and admissions literature.

3. Will Smith has retold this story about DenzelWashington's advice many times, both in TV interviewsand in print.

4. Ethnicity falls out of this equation, especially asethnic differences are strained against the power of blackoverdeterminism in Harlem.


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toward an ethnography of a quotation‐marked‐off place

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