e-18 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S tod linafelt is professor of biblical literature at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He has been the Cardin Family Chair in the Humanities at Loyola College in Baltimore (housed in the English Department) and the Alexander Robertson Fellow at the University of Glasgow. He is an author or editor of nine books, most recently A Very Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible as Literature (OUP, 2016). He has published some three dozen scholarly articles and essays, including articles in the Journal of Biblical Literature, Vetus Testamentum, Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Interpretation, and the St. John’s Review, and book chapters in volumes published by Oxford, Chicago, Blackwell, and others. The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. By Adrienne Brown. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 262 pages. Hardcover. ISBN: 1421423839. AU: Please provide this authors affiliation needed. Reviewed by Anthony Ballas In The Black Skyscraper, Adrienne Brown surveys an entire constellation of racial perception in America grounded in the architectural paradigm of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Brown’s magisterial work focuses on both the vertical and horizontal registers of architectural space, identifying the coded racial perspectives that followed from the advent and construction of the skyscraper in modern American Cities. Remarking on the way steel-frame technology altered the very way bodies and racial signifiers were perceived in the period between 1880 and 1931 (from the construction of the Home Insurance building in Chicago to the Empire State Building in New York), Brown probes deep into the white and black literary imagination for instances of racialized perceptions of the skyscraper. By visiting little known works of weird, speculative, and apocalyptic science fiction, as well as more conventional works of realism such as The Great Gatsby, Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner,” Nella Larsen’s Passing, the romance novels of Faith Baldwin and others, Brown offers a detailed view of the urban skyline from a complex blend of literary theory, critical race studies, architectural theory, and historical analysis. Responding to the recent spatial turn in the humanities, The Black Skyscraper situates what Brown refers to as the “architectural life of race,” tracking a veritable “material history of race,” in the surfaces and structures composing urban life in America (6, 17). For Brown, “all architectures are, CLS 56.1_10_Online Book Reviews.indd Page 18 03/12/18 10:45 AM ONLINE BOOK REVIEWS e-19 inevitably, racial architectures, producing and maintaining site-specific phenomenologies of race” (3). From this architectural foundation, Brown examines the disorienting and vertiginous first appearances of skyscraper architecture in America, detailing the ways in which these sites both shocked and inspired awe; their size and scale in budding metropolises following the rapid industrialization of America and the production of urban space after the downfall of Jeffersonian agrarianism ushered in a new epoch of racial perception and phenomenologies of race which have largely gone underrepresented in scholarship (4). According to Brown, “the skyscraper appeared at a particularly inconvenient historical moment for those looking to codify classifications of racial difference,” at the end of the reconstruction era and the rise of Jim Crow institutionalization in the south (5). This period of American life was marked by changing codifications of racial identity, which precipitated numerous survival strategies on the part of whiteness in order to endure the changing racial compositions of modern American cities (31). Brown examines these strategies in the second chapter of her book, commenting on what she refers to “the visual fate of whiteness” in urban life, and the attitudes of white authors commenting on skyscraper architecture in the face of what might have been perceived as a “spectral white diaspora” (57). Brown turns to two obscure works of fiction, George Allan England’s “The Last new Yorkers,” and Murray Leinster’s “The Runaway Skyscraper, which she describes as “frontier skyscraper fiction” (47). Both of these narratives are set in the Metropolitan Life Building in New York, and feature tropes of time traveling and survival in the face of an apocalyptic scenario, commenting the preservation of whiteness during a period of perceived “white insolvency” (40). Chapter 2 closes with an extended critical account of race implicitly informing Henry James’s essay The American Scene and his short ghost story “The Jolly Corner.” Brown claims that “James re-collects the fractured vantage points dispersed by the skyscraper,” which, she argues, “reifies white metropolitan affiliation and counteracts the skyscraper’s abstracting optics” (76). Brown digs deep into the rhetorical and perhaps unconscious motivations permeating these narratives, successfully developing a sound account of white paranoia and the somewhat frantic literary responses to skyscraper architecture during this fraught period of racial indeterminacy. The third—and arguably most successful—chapter of The Black Skyscraper, Brown shifts our attention toward racial perception as a product of embodied phenomenologies of race, such as those found in Nella Larsen’s Passing. Brown explores “the rhetoric of seeing in Passing,” identifying how urban space, confinement, and ultimately skyscraper architecture implicitly guide both the visible and sensuous accounts of race in Larsen’s short novel (106). CLS 56.1_10_Online Book Reviews.indd Page 19 03/12/18 10:45 AM e-20 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S Although there are no explicit references to skyscraper architecture in Passing, Brown analyses the roles of high-rise apartment buildings and hotels in Chicago which perhaps influenced Larsen’s narrative, detailing everything from their shifting optics to the shadows they cast on the street level, commenting on the “exterior chaos of urban congestion” which disables Passing’s narrator Irene’s orientation toward race in the novel (113). By separating the “lived experience” of race from its “material grounding” as “discrete phenomena,” Brown concludes that race operates “more like a ghost—something immaterial yet present, intangible yet visceral,” providing an extraordinary account of the complex nature of racial identity and embodiment in city life (118, emphasis original). The book’s fourth chapter, entitled “The Black Skyscraper,” goes systematically through several works by prominent black American thinkers, focusing largely both the fiction and nonfiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, while paying special attention to Du Bois’ sociology. Whereas in previous chapters Brown analyzed the vantage point of white skyscraper narratives, this chapter focuses on the skyscraper as an object looked upon in different ways from the vantage points of black authors, including James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry and Melvin Mitchell’s The Crisis of the AfricanAmerican Architect. Brown’s reading of Du Bois in particular demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the relationship between late sociologist’s nonfiction and fiction, describing how Du Bois’ penchant for speculative science fiction grated against the “narrow definition of realism” proposed by other Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukacs (127). Brown argues that Du Bois “finds a use for the skyscraper’s capacity for abstraction and perceptual disorientation . . . temporarily disrupt the urgency of racial differentiation that normally organizes urban perception” (128). Though this chapter largely deals with Du Bois’ short stories “The Princess Steel” and “The Comet,” and his unpublished essay “Sociology Hesitant,” more familiar works are examined as well, with brief appearances from Du Bois’ Darkwater and The Souls of Black Folks. The second section of Chapter 4 contrasts Du Bois’ view with that of Wallace Thurman, whose theory of racial solidarity differed from Du Bois’. Whereas Du Bois proposed a more universal view of racial identity, Thurman’s novel Infants of Spring expresses “individuality” as the crucial component for racial solidarity, writing “let each seek his own salvation” (145). In the book’s final chapter, Brown returns to white narratives from more conventional realism, such as F. S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Mary Borden’s Flamingo, and Faith Baldwin’s romance novels. This chapter as well features a short section on modernist architect Le Corbusier’s When the Cathedrals Were White, within which Brown claims that Le Corbusier as “one CLS 56.1_10_Online Book Reviews.indd Page 20 03/12/18 10:45 AM ONLINE BOOK REVIEWS e-21 of the world’s most famous architects [. . .] shares deep affinities with the modernist prose of Fitzgerald and Borden” (159). For Brown, Flamingo, The Great Gatsby and When the Cathedrals Were White “depict the skyscraper as a foil to the white metropolitans’ capacity to feel himself to be white in the outsized city” (163). For instance, in Flamingo, Brown observes, “the affective hallmarks of whiteness yoked to an inherent sense of bodily and emotional control are increasingly difficult to attain in the skyscraper’s shadow” (165). Brown’s thesis surrounding Baldwin’s novels is particularly striking, as she claims that the skyscraper became a symbol of empowerment for white working-class women, functioning as a safe haven for a particular kind of white labor and desire, and paving the way for later symbolic instances of whiteness and skyscraper architecture such as those found in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead published in 1943. The Black Skyscraper is a huge achievement in the confluence of architecture theory, literature and history, developing new vectors of possibility for thinking these disciplines together toward the critique of American Modernism and capitalism. Brown’s text takes the reader from the ground floor to the rooftops and every level in between real and fictional skyscrapers, providing lucid and often surprising parallels between written narrative and architectural form. The strengths far outweigh the weaknesses of Brown’s book, and one would be hard-pressed to find inconsistencies in The Black Skyscraper. There is one curious omission in the book, being the film King Kong which was released in 1933 following the construction of the Empire State Building. King Kong has often been read for its racist overtones, and since the Empire State Building is featured prominently in the narrative, the film would have been a welcomed inclusion ripe for analysis in The Black Skyscraper. Although—and understandably so—Brown’s book is concerned primarily with literary instances of race and skyscraper architecture, it would certainly have made sense for her analysis to explore the cinematic apparatus, as it was (and is still) intimately linked with the production of architectural and narrative space alike. This does not in any way diminish the importance of Brown’s work, but perhaps ought only inform the possibility of future correspondences between the author’s scholarship and other discursive visual practices such as film. Brown’s book contributes crucially to the ongoing interdisciplinary project of thinking architecture and race together, joining the pantheon of works dedicated to unpacking the racialized textures of architecture, art history, literature, and the built environment more generally. Recent works such as Mario Gooden’s Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity (2016), William A. Gleason’s Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature CLS 56.1_10_Online Book Reviews.indd Page 21 03/12/18 10:45 AM e-22 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S (2011), and The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture, and Music (2007) by Craig Wilkins share a common thread with The Black Skyscraper, insofar as these authors are dedicated to understanding the “architectural life of race,” and in the process, demonstrate the racial parallax extant in historic and modern architectures alike. For these reasons, The Black Skyscraper’s influence and impact will assuredly be felt in the coming years, as Brown has produced a commanding and indispensable work of utmost importance to contemporary scholarship. The Black Skyscraper breaks new ground on old themes providing a lasting account of the racial divide in America which, in sum, could not have been more timely as a critical intervention to responding to the ongoing struggles of black and African American citizens facing ideological and physical barriers alike in contemporary America. anthony ballas is a graduate of the University of Colorado at Denver where he studied philosophy, English, and religion. Ballas has recently contributed to a volume on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return which is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently editing a collection on cinema and liberation theology. The Afterlife of Al-Andalus: Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives. By Christina Civantos. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. Xii + 362 pp. Hardcover $95. Reviewed by Majd Al-Mallah, Grand Valley State University This book examines al-Andalus in contemporary Arab and Hispanic narratives with a focus on the “crucial role of coloniality and the linked issues of migration and gender” and “how al-Andalus, as a site of cultural contact, is presented and used today.” It is not, as the author points out from the beginning, “a search for al-Andalus per se but for what people make of it a millennium later” (3). This is an important distinction because of how al-Andalus can and has been invoked by “diametrically opposed ideological positions”—the author cites, for example, Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri who “vowed that the tragedy of the fall of al-Andalus would not be repeated” and former President Barack Obama who, in a famous 2009 speech in Cairo, “cited al-Andalus, and specifically Cordoba, as an example of religious tolerance in the Muslim tradition” (2). The book begins with an extensive and excellent introduction that frames the discussion theoretically and historically. The author has done substantial research and CLS 56.1_10_Online Book Reviews.indd Page 22 03/12/18 10:45 AM