Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Loving the Other in 1970s Harlem: Race, Space, and Place in Aaron Loves Angela

Loving the Other in 1970s Harlem: Race, Space, and Place in Aaron Loves Angela SANDHYA SHUKLA In the 1975 film Aaron Loves Angela, two teenagers--a young Puerto Rican woman and an African American man--fall in love in Harlem. Their love becomes a primer for encounters: between different forms of racial otherness, between regions of Harlem (east and west), between worldviews, and between communities that live together as much in conflict as in intimacy. Their crossing resituates the Romeo and Juliet script for big unruly emotions that refuse to respect traditional boundaries of family into an even messier world of modern social formations and territory, one that is the American city, perhaps the City writ large. That city is simultaneously balkanized--cut up by race and class--and capacious, fragilely holding multifarious differences together. The film's setting, of 1970s Harlem, is a place that is in the midst of economic crisis and social flux, and a space that contains the linked histories of diverse peoples; as such it offers both context and backdrop for explosive affect. Harlem carries a great deal of symbolic weight: representing the enduring problematic of race in America, the global question of the claims of blackness, and the modern dilemma of how different peoples exist together. The registers in which Harlem http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png symploke University of Nebraska Press

Loving the Other in 1970s Harlem: Race, Space, and Place in Aaron Loves Angela

Shukla, Sandhya Rajendra.
symploke , Volume 18 (1) – May 18, 2011
Download PDF
18 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-nebraska-press/loving-the-other-in-1970s-harlem-race-space-and-place-in-aaron-loves-bfqQbAJGKi

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © University of Nebraska Press
ISSN
1534-0627
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

SANDHYA SHUKLA In the 1975 film Aaron Loves Angela, two teenagers--a young Puerto Rican woman and an African American man--fall in love in Harlem. Their love becomes a primer for encounters: between different forms of racial otherness, between regions of Harlem (east and west), between worldviews, and between communities that live together as much in conflict as in intimacy. Their crossing resituates the Romeo and Juliet script for big unruly emotions that refuse to respect traditional boundaries of family into an even messier world of modern social formations and territory, one that is the American city, perhaps the City writ large. That city is simultaneously balkanized--cut up by race and class--and capacious, fragilely holding multifarious differences together. The film's setting, of 1970s Harlem, is a place that is in the midst of economic crisis and social flux, and a space that contains the linked histories of diverse peoples; as such it offers both context and backdrop for explosive affect. Harlem carries a great deal of symbolic weight: representing the enduring problematic of race in America, the global question of the claims of blackness, and the modern dilemma of how different peoples exist together. The registers in which Harlem

Journal

symploke – University of Nebraska Press

Published: May 18, 2011

There are no references for this article.