For The New York Times, Prof. Kaiama Glover reviews "Harlem: A Century in Images"

For The New York Times, Assistant Professor of French Kaiama Glover reviewed the book Harlem: A Century in Images. 

An excerpt:  About midway through Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s slim, enchanting volume we are introduced to rather an odd figure, L. S. Alexander Gumby, proprietor of the Gumby Book Studio and motive force behind a 1920s Harlem-based literary salon. The studio and salon both evolved, Rhodes-Pitts explains, out of Gumby’s singular passion for scrapbooking — his “impulse to compile, collect and curate the detritus of his reality.” Gumby’s efforts ultimately produced an apartment’s worth of materials about the so-called black experience, culminating, we are told, in a “brilliant and strange production.” These words well describe Rhodes-Pitts own achievement in “Harlem Is Nowhere.” Her happily disparate text blends the historical and the personal, the exceptional and the ordinary, adroitly communicating the multiplicity of Harlem itself.

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Prof. Glover is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, published by Liverpool University Press.