Culture Shock

Abstract

In August 1964, Harper’s Magazine published “Harlem Is Nowhere,” an essay by Ralph Ellison commissioned sixteen years earlier by a different magazine―’47, which was named after the year it was first published and did not survive beyond 1948, when Ellison’s essay was to have appeared. The essay, originally envisioned alongside a suite of photographs by Gordon Parks, discussed the work that the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic―the first desegregated clinic in the United States―performed for residents of Harlem, a place Ellison describes in the piece as “the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.”1 Alienation had taken on a psychotherapeutic as well as an economic meaning: Ellison often overlaid urban space and the psyche. “Harlem Is Nowhere,” like Ellison’s masterwork, Invisible Man (1952), was greatly informed by his work for the Federal Writers’ Project, which involved conducting oral histories in Harlem in 1938 and 1939 that touched on Ellison’s own interest in questions of housing and urban policy―issues inseparable from the catastrophic effects the Great Depression had on a populace already subject to the psychic ruptures and crises of identity that Northern racism, violence, and segregation wrought daily. Beaten down, exhausted,