Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article explores the theoretical contours of Ralph Ellison's 1948 essay, "Harlem Is Nowhere." I argue that Ellison's text theorizes space in a way that enables resistance against the geopolitical constraints of urban black modernity. In his essay, Ellison explores the underground halls of the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic in Harlem - "the only center in the city wherein both Negroes and whites may receive extended psychiatric care" (Ellison 295). His study thus situates racial politics within a specific institutional milieu. At Lafargue, Ellison works as a kind of ethnographer, and records that the utterance "I'm nowhere" was commonly used by patients as an answer to the simple question, "How are you?" Of course, this response articulates the emotional and psychological severity of life in Harlem at midcentury, but it does so in fascinating and complex ways. The phrase "I'm nowhere" not only acknowledges the constraints working against an individual's subjectivity, it also shows the respondent taking hermeneutical control over the terms of her or his existence. The respondent actively construes an ontological question and, in turn, gives it geographical and phenomenological consideration. He communicates a personal condition in expressly spatial terms. Further, by embracing "nowhere" as a category of lived experience, the Harlemites circumvent the center/periphery binary that perpetuates social marginality; they thereby construct an alternative space filled with potential. The concept of being "nowhere" provides a new way of articulating displacement as a central moment in the history of the black Atlantic, and the function of "nowhere" as a potentially liberating signifier provides a unique opportunity to view the black vernacular through the lens of spatial theory.
Repository Citation
Bosse, Walter. "'Oh, man, I’m nowhere': Ralph Ellison and the Psychospatial Terrain of Mid-Century Harlem." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1–12. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss4/10