From prophecy to preservation: Harlem as temporal vector

Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Harlem has proven to be a durable symbol of black life in part because the idea of Harlem has been used as a temporal vector, a means of charting the historical position and trajectory of black Americans. Artists and writers have frequently imagined Harlem as a metonym for black America and, in doing so, have presented the neighborhood as one of the major epochs of modern black life, investing it with equivalent temporal weight to “Africa,” “slavery,” or “freedom” in black historical consciousness.