Martha Jane Nadell, the author of the “Writing Brooklyn” chapter of the Cambridge Companion, is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. Martha received both her bachelor’s degree in Afro-American Studies and her doctorate in American Civilization from Harvard.
Martha is the author of Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (Harvard UP, 2004), which explores the relationship between the literary and the visual in African American literary culture. At the heart of the book’s analysis are works from the 1920s through the 1940s that used visual elements in tandem with literary texts, such as the magazines and anthologies published by Alain Locke and Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston’s investigation of Southern folk culture, Mules and Men, which featured illustrations by Mexican caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias.
Martha is presently at work on a literary and cultural history of Brooklyn that examines the rise of Brooklyn as a central site in the American cultural imagination.
Here’s the opening of Martha’s chapter:
In an 1862 article in the Brooklyn Standard, Walt Whitman imagined, less than four decades hence, Brooklyn’s prominence among the cities of the world. At the time of his writing, Brooklyn was the United States’ third largest city. Home to more than 260,000 people, Brooklyn rivaled New York, its neighbor across the East River, in size, industry, and population. Residents lived and worked densely on streets designed in 1839 as a grid; they rode the numerous ferries that daily crossed the East River. In an earlier article in the six-month series entitled “Brooklyniana,” Whitman envisioned among future generations a widespread interest in the narratives of Brooklyn’s diverse inhabitants, their stories of daily life, “personal chronicles and gossip,” and most of all their “authentic reminiscences” and “memoirs” of urban life. Whitman was prescient. Although it is no longer its own city – the consolidation into Greater New York City occurred in 1898 – Brooklyn’s inhabitants and landscape are a recognizable and indeed iconic element of American arts and letters. Yet although Whitman foresaw the prevalence of Brooklyn memoirs, he did not anticipate the range and complexity of Brooklyn’s literary history, one that both complements and complicates that of New York City as whole.
Next: Lytle Shaw.
Tags: Cambridge Companion
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