Rah's Research

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Real Talk: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts on Space and Place

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Good interview of Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts author of Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America by dream hampton. It touches on a concept I've been meditating on for a while - building cultural institutions in the absence of physical space and freeing our cultural expressions from the confines of physical space. Technology gives us the freedom to create these 


as a people, our relationship to space has always been fugitive, always threatened. And that we’ve always had to claim space in other creative ways. 

I've been reading "Harlem Is Nowhere" for almost 3 months - it's a book that I should have been able to knock out in a weekend. As I confront the realities of my own existence in Harlem I think I have developed some kind of block with finishing it, but am vowing to see it to the end. I'm already more than half way done and can definitely say that Rhodes-Pitts did a wonderful job capturing Harlem in all its glory and complexities. 

The dope pic for this article is from Laylah Amatullah Barrayn’s current exhibit “Her Word As Witness: Portrait Of Women Writers Of The African Diaspora“ on view at Skylight Gallery in Brooklyn until March 31, 2012.