Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, Editors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, Editors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.In a new collection, entitled Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem, Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani bring together an array of brilliant scholars and writers who successfully take their readers on a historical journey that makes the familiar unfamiliar. Building from and expanding the discussion beyond Harlem, beyond the 1930s, and beyond the accepted narrative of the "New Negro," the collection adds layers of analysis, depth to the academic discourse, and an expanding horizon of the historic index we rely upon in our current moment.Centering the Harlem Renaissance, the growing racial assertiveness that was commonplace in the early part of the twentieth century, especially among black artists, intellectuals, and activists, Escape from New York works to expand the parameters of the center. "At best, we are expanding the frame, of the New Negro experience temporally, geographically, and conceptually in specific ways" (19), writes Baldwin in the book's introduction. Thus, to understand the "New Negro Movement" mandates moving the discourse outside of New York, beyond the 1920s and 1930s and into a myriad of spaces and sites that resulted in articulation and realization of "freedom dreams." This was a movement that took hold in a range of places, from a range of voices.According to Baldwin,The New Negro analytic asserted a new race consciousness that was sometimes explicit but also felt through individualized rebukes or reimaginings of long-held traditions and even new expectations. This new race consciousness was profoundly shaped by class position, gender identity, geographic location, and sexual orientation. Ultimately, a wide range of political and cultural mediums brought the New Negro to life, from the pages of literary magazines and step ladder protests to storefront churches and military battlefronts, touching down and taking off from points all over the world. (19-20)Taking their cues from this framework, the authors included within this powerful collection highlight how the heterogeneity of the New Negro reach is neither surprising nor arbitrary but reflective of the historic moment. "The New Negro Moment was the product of a particular convergence," writes Robin D. G. Kelley in the book's Forward. "The expansion of US and European Empires, settler colonialism, an increasingly industrialized racial capitalism and their attendant processes, expropriation, proletarization, massive migration, urbanization, rapid technological development, and war" (ix) not only shaped these movements of struggle but also helped understand the diversity that defined this moment. That is, the expensive framework of the collection "to escape New York" is not simply a project of historical revision but instead an effort to anchor the conversation in the historic moment.The significance and success of Escape from New York rests with its ability to provide readers with a familiar point of entry, with the known history of the Harlem Renaissance and the Garvey movement, yet expand our historic imagination from within and beyond these canonical signposts of (African) American history. For example, with "An Inter cultural African Opinion: Amy Ashwood Garvey and C. L. R. James in Black Radical London," Makalani offers an important essay, which reveals a transnational black radicalism at the turn of the century. Pushing back at periodization and a narrative that inadvertently reinscribes American exceptionalism, Makalani narrates a history of "a New Negro experience beyond the confines of civil rights, racial uplift, black migration and community formation, and modernity in which USbased scholarly discussions tend to be rooted" (79). To understand the "New Negro Movement," the black radical imagination of this moment, and early twentieth century black activism and transformative cultural productions is to look at the Diasporic black communities of London, Paris, Cuba, Tokyo, and Manila. …