Harlem

Harlem is a neighborhood in New York City which was historically populated by black communities and was the center of a lot of art production, music production, and performance by members of those communities. Harlem is important in Morrison's book because it was the subject of a failed exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art whereby a white museum curator sought to showcase 'black' art from Harlem but unwittingly failed to adequately incorporate black artists' thoughts on their work, or even to include a fair and decent range of art by a variety of different artists. Instead, Morrison says that Harlem was depicted in this exhibition purely in a socio-political sense in which black people were made out to be the 'other' in New York City society: a population to be photographed, examined as a curiosity, and then returned to the streets of Harlem. She rages against...