| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 161 words from this article are provided below; about 398 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century. By Sara Blair. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xxi, 353 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-13087-3).

Sara Blair's impressive study positions photography at the center of discussions about twentieth-century black writers' aesthetics and politics. According to Blair, writers have employed photography, both in practice and in concept, from the 1930s to the 1970s as a means of engaging with the politics of representation and as a vehicle for artistic experimentation. Paying particular attention to overlooked texts by canonical writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry, Blair unsettles critical frameworks that offer music as the dominant trope in much midcentury writing; she argues that in photography's mediation between evidentiary documentary tradition and modern concern for affective and disruptive potential, writers discovered a way to negotiate both the pressure to be "representative" of cultural identity and the desire for a modern expressive sensibility.

. . .

There are about 398 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.