Psychology Comes to Harlem

Jay Garcia is an associate professor of comparative literature at New York University.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Richard Wright Writing: The Unconscious Machinery of Race Relations2. Richard Wright Reading: The Promise of Social Psychiatry3. Race and Minorities from Below: The Wartime Cultural Criticism of Chester Himes, Horace Cayton, Ralph Ellison, and C. L. R. James4. Strange Fruit: Lillian Smith and the Making of Whiteness5. Notes on a Native Son: James Baldwin in Postwar AmericaConclusionNotesEssay on SourcesIndex

Garcia does an amazing job of condensing a topic and clearly sparking the dialectic for continued expansive discourse. This volume fills a void in exposing the psychologically informed critical vision vis-a-vis literary artists in the mid-20th century. Choice Psychology Comes to Harlem stages an acute and potentially highly productive intervention in scholarship on the history of representations of African Americans. -- Daniel Matlin Journal of American Studies Garcia provides a compelling narrative of the changing uses of psychological discourses in literary and critical social analyses from the 1940s to the 1960s. A strength of the book is the deftness with which Garcia moves across genres... The research for this monograph is clearly rigorous and thorough and Garcia handles a large body of secondary sources skillfully... Psychology Comes to Harlem is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of any student or scholar interested in the intellectual context of mid-20th-century antiracist novelists and social commentators. -- Gavan Lennon Journal of African American History