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Looking down and looking around: Two travelers portray and present Harlem

In the 1930s and 1950s two white Dutch writers, Mary Pos (1904-87) and Rosey Pool (1905-71), visited the New York neighborhood of Harlem. They reported on these journeys in letters, newspaper articles, monographs, and lectures. Jointly, this material offers us a valuable contemporary portrait of Harlem, and is a source for reconstructing the ways in which these women acted as cultural mediators between the Netherlands and the black community in New York. In their work Pos and Pool demonstrate rather different responses to Harlem. But they appear to be similar in their (partial) confirmation of contemporary racial and ethnic discourses, and in their questioning and even rejection of some of the gender conventions of their time.