Digital Commons Network^™

From Sociability To Spectacle: Interracial Sexuality And The Ideological Uses Of Space In New York City, 1900-1930, Elizabeth Clement

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper addresses inter-racial sociability and sexuality in New York City before and after the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to northern US cities. Using space and the arrangements of objects in space as my primary evidence, I argue that spatial relations both reflected and created race relations in the urban North and that these practices shifted dramatically over the course of a twenty-year period. While the black proprietors of clubs in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1910s used space to make transgressive interracial sociability possible, by the 1920s, the white-owned clubs of the Harlem Renaissance did the …