Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Publication Title

Journal of American Studies

Abstract

In a series of detective novels published between 1957 and 1969 Chester Himes portrayed diverse individuals struggling for survival, wealth, and status in a fictionalized postwar Harlem, combining what Richard Wright called a “bio-social” perspective with an antiracist aesthetics that falsified simplistic racial categories. In this essay, I trace Himes’s renderings of bodily difference and transformation, highlighting features neglected by contemporaries such as Ellison and Baldwin as well as more recent critics and readers who frame Himes’s writings as protests against anti-Black violence. I conclude that Himes’s Harlem novels did not simply reflect violent realities of African American lives but instead exhibited unresolved conflicts between antiracist imperatives, namely a recognition of individual complexities on the one hand, and organized struggle against racially discriminatory institutions and practices on the other.

Funding Source

This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Cambridge University Press.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1017/S0021875825101746

Comments

First published in Journal of American Studies (2026): https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875825101746

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