Urban Ephemera

I’ve been thinking a bit about the work of Chester Himes and the relationship between Black crime novels and certain trends in the archaeology of urban areas. In particular, I’ve been fascinated by the methods that Himes and other Black writers create “carceral landscapes” in mid-century US cities. Their attention to detail, for example, reinforces narrative themes that stress the limits that Black citizens experienced in urban life. 

Over the last week, I dug a bit deeper into these ideas partly because I became curious how Himes’s work may have influenced writers in the late 1960s and 1970s such as Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines who produced similarly gritty, if less literary, visions of urban life in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit. Recently several scholars have engaged critically with the works of these Slim and Goines published by the infamous Holloway House publishers. Kinohi Nishikawa in his Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (2018) argued that the Iceberg Slim’s earliest and best known book Pimp was initially intended for a white audience who sought to transgress racial and sexual boundaries through the fetishization of Black women and the violence, street language, and poverty of inner city locales set apart from middle class White life. (To be completely honest, I was initially drawn to Iceberg Slim’s work as a graduate student because of his transgressive language and the seemingly underground nature of his literary status, which contributed to another form of fetishization with more conventional middle class intellectual and academic roots.) It is only after Slim’s work became popular among Black urban (and often incarcerated) men that Holloway House recognized the potential of selling books to middle and lower class Blacks. Donald Goines work continued this tradition by combining scenes of tremendous violence, poverty, and despair with twisted morality tales to create a view of cities that was both familiar and dramatic at the same time.

Justin Gifford’s Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing(2013) argues that Goines and Slim (as well as later Holloway House writers such as Joseph Nazel and Odie Hawkins) set their morality tales against the urbanism of the 1970s that actively constrains the actions and potential of its Black characters. Efforts by Slim’s semi-autobiographic characters to escape the world of violence, drugs, poverty, and exploitation repeatedly fail despite the ingenuity of the hustle. Goines’ characters — especially the radical figure of Kenyatta in his popular series of books — meet an end as tragic as Goines himself who was murdered in his Detroit home (although apparently not at his type writer as it is sometime poetically assumed).

It is not until Nazel’s more fanciful, and, at least for Nishikawa more formulaic, Iceman series where Black characters find ways to escape the constraints of carceral cities. In Nazel’s best known series, the main character turns his fortune gained through pimping into a desert utopian resort know as “the Oasis” where surrounded by ninja-prostitutes he manages to outsmart and often outfight enemies. Gifford notes, however, that even situated in a landscape that owes more to fiction and fantasy than to the gritty realism of Goines’s Detroit, Iceman’s scope of action remains circumscribed and constantly challenged.

As an archaeologist of the contemporary world, I’m deeply curious about how works by Goines and Iceberg Slim created urban realities replete with the kind of ephemera that Sarah Wasserman celebrated in her recent work. Moreover, the publishers initially conceived of these books themselves as ephemera, and their continued printing (unlike Nazel’s output) owes itself to their emergence as “Ghetto Classics.”

It is interesting to consider how novels like these produced recognizable spaces that shaped both the lived urban environment of Black communities, but also the literary spaces of later Black art (especially in hiphop music, but also in certain forms of Afrofuturism and Afropessimism) and in material narratives embraced by urban archaeology. Recent academic interest in the “grit” that form the grittiness present in Black fiction, which in the pulp narratives of Holloway House novels, or in the more refined works of Himes, Ishmael Reed, and other urban writers, traces a recursive path that reifies urban landmarks ranging from the ephemerality of homelessness and protest spaces to the more fixed points offered by music venues and businesses.

Both Gifford and Nishikawa emphasize how the white ownership of Holloway House sought to syndicate a view of Black urbanism that embraced a range of effects from those relying on the familiar material reality of the American city to aspirational or stereotypical embellishments designed to signify Black urban culture to a more diverse, middle class, white, or even non-urban audience. The so-called “reality effect” created by the range of devices used by Slim, Goines, Nazel and other Holloway House authors relied on readers’ familiarity not with urban spaces per se, but at least with the markers of Black urbanism produced across a wide range of media which sought both to reinforce the carceral character of post-war Black cities and the plausibility of characters present in these authors’ narratives.

For an archaeologist relatively unschooled in high level textual analysis (much less post-war and contemporary American urban culture), these texts seems to traffic in type fossils similar to those used by scholars to recognize the ancient world on the surface of the ground. One could imagine a kind of intensive survey of the urban landscapes preserved in these novels as the basis for a catalogue of post-war urban ephemera. Many of the objects and relationships that contribute to the reality effect in these novels mark out strategies of urban life that economic change, efforts at reform, and the changing technology of urbanism have made far less visible. More than that, the material character of urban life presents a kind of backdrop to both Afrofuturist and other utopian imagining that has become so celebrated in the 21st century.