The definitional “nowhere” of Utopia was inverted in Harlem into a dystopian reality of lost souls. Harlem was “a ruin,” Ellison went on to admit, and it was the city’s “bowels.”
—Thomas Heise, Urban Underworlds
Is this not the shared common ground of progressives and conservatives? But it is also witness to the shared affinity of Utopias and Dystopias, their quick ambivalence by virtue of being “nowhere” together…
Chris Moffett, Harlem, 2011