Urban Transformations in the U.S.A.: Spaces, Communities, Representations [1. Aufl.] 9783839431115

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Julia Sattler (ed.) Urban Transformations in the U.S.A.

Urban Studies

Julia Sattler (ed.)

Urban Transformations in the U.S.A. Spaces, Communities, Representations

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2016 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Julia Sattler, Detroit, Michigan (USA), 2014 Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3111-1 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3111-5

Contents

Acknowledgements | 9 Narratives of Urban Transformation. Reading the Rust Belt in the Ruhr Valley

Julia Sattler | 11

MODELS OF URBAN TRANSFORMATION “Federal City,” “Federal Town,” “Washingtonople.” Washington, D.C., and the Transformation of a National Capital

Michael Wala | 29 Insignificance at the Interstate. Crossroads Podunks and the Rise of a New Urban Strategy

Nick Bacon | 43 Moving Spaces. How the Space of Political Struggle for Black Freedom Moves from the Private to the Public Realm

Tazalika M. te Reh | 67 Parasitic Simulacrum. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, and the Urban ‘Creative Class’

Walter Grünzweig | 81

MAPPING ETHNICITY Negotiating Germanness after World War II. Transformations of German Culture in Postwar New York City

Insa Neumann | 101

Transnational U.S. Literature. Manhattan Music by Meena Alexander

Kornelia Freitag | 131 Barrio Spaces as Alter-Narratives. Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running and The Republic of East L.A.

Josef Raab | 163 Chinatown’s Lived and Mystified Foodscapes, 1880s-1990s

Selma Siew Li Bidlingmaier | 187 The Transformation of Manhattan’s Chinatown in Hungarian Travel Writing

Erika Mikó | 211

LIMINALITY AND THE AMERICAN CITY Detecting Chinatown. New York, Crime Fiction, and the Politics of Urban Inscrutability

Thomas Heise | 233 Lost in the Stacks. Shipping Containers and Narrative Agency in the Posthuman City

Jon Hegglund | 257 Fueling Change. The Gas Station in Urban America

Gary Scales | 275 The Urban Frontier in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day

Utku Mogultay | 299

CONTESTED SPACES Ways into and out of the Crisis. Urban Transformations in the L. A. Times’ Reporting on the 1992 Los Angeles ‘Riots’

Kathrin Muschalik | 325

Reconceptualizing the ‘Inner City.’ Blackness, Community and Urban Geography in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle

Eva Boesenberg | 341 Mapping Gentrification Processes through Film. San Francisco’s Mission District in the Documentary Boom: The Sound of Eviction

Astrid Kaemmerling | 359 “[A] freeing of myself from this life from this city.” The Queer Spaces of the Hudson River Piers in Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz

Faye Chisholm Guenther | 373

PERSPECTIVES IN URBAN AMERICAN STUDIES City Scripts. Urban American Studies and the Conjunction of Textual Strategies and Spatial Processes

Barbara Buchenau and Jens Martin Gurr | 395 Authors | 421

Acknowledgements

The project “Spaces—Communities—Representations: Urban Transformations in the U.S.A.” was the first cooperative research project by the American Studies and American History programs at the three Ruhr Universities in the context of the Ruhr Center of American Studies. Between 2012 and 2015, this interdisciplinary project examined how urban transformations in the United States manifest themselves in the physical design and usage of spaces, in the make-up and interaction of communities, in cultural practices and in urban imaginaries. The project viewed urban cultures as results and expressions of inter- and multicultural communication as well as of processes of negotiation and hybridization of individual and collective identities. This publication documents three years of cooperative research on the dynamics of urban transformation as well as the emergence of and the changes within so-called urban narratives. We would like to thank those who have generously supported the project and without whom it would not have been possible to carry out this ambitious program. First and foremost, we would like to thank the Mercator Foundation for financing the project via its Research Center Ruhr (MERCUR). The support we have received provided funding for six PhD students and one postdoctoral candidate for the past three years. Our three universities—TU Dortmund University, Ruhr-University Bochum and the University of Duisburg-Essen—have supported our efforts financially, administratively and logistically, as has the University Alliance Ruhr (UA Ruhr), and specifically its coordinator, Dr. Hans Stallmann. For the excellent support during the conferences held as part of the project, we would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen, with which the program was affiliated, and the Research School of the Ruhr-University Bochum for their generous support.

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Our work on the “Urban Transformations” project created many partnerships and co-operative ventures both nationally and internationally. We would thus very much like to thank those who have supported the project by giving input and advice, those who have participated in our conferences, those who have contributed essays to this volume, and those who are continuing to support our research at the Ruhr Universities and elsewhere. We look forward to continuing and expanding these co-operations. This publication would not have been possible without the generous financial support we received from the Science Support Center at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Dr. Blake Bronson-Bartlett, visiting instructor at TU Dortmund University, has been immensely helpful with the editing, proofreading and formatting of this work. Julia Sattler Dortmund, August 2015

Narratives of Urban Transformation Reading the Rust Belt in the Ruhr Valley J ULIA S ATTLER

In the public mind as in the literary imagination, cities around the globe are characterized by their seemingly never-ending capacity to change, to innovate and to invent and re-make themselves. Because they are in constant transformation, cities become projection spaces for people looking at them from the outside and imagining them as sites of opportunity: to become rich, to start a new life. As such, urban areas have seemingly unlimited potential for the reinvention of the self. Cities thus attract newcomers who wish for more and different opportunities than those offered by the countryside, the village, or the small town. Freedom of choice and the liberation from convention and restriction are prevalent themes in urban narratives from New York City to Beijing and back. Of course, and just as characteristically, this freedom is often not found or achieved, thus also making the city a site of immense disappointment. Representations of cities in literature, as in other art forms and in popular culture, often share an emphasis on spatial density—crowded streets, crowded living conditions, skyscrapers, a lot of traffic—and diversity—of people, of cultures, of colors, of smells, and of sounds. This diversity of impressions makes physical as well as fictional cities, urbanities as well as urbanites, interesting subjects to explore from a historical, cultural and literary studies perspective. The process of constant transformation itself can become the subject of such investigation. How does constant transformation manifest itself? What actually changes in a process of spatial metamorphosis? How is this process represented in written form? How does media deal with it? These questions must also be asked the other way around. How do processes of storytelling and, in fact, the stories themselves shape and change urbanities? Art can provide alternative renditions of urban transformations and address the complex and non-linear processes behind them. It can create awareness of

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the effects of urban transformations—the human dimensions of such developments—that oftentimes are ignored in official texts, for example in campaigns addressing and advertising desired modifications, usually from an economic standpoint. Art can also point to the narrative challenges accompanying large-scale re-development projects that are taking place in cities worldwide. A city undergoing drastic transformation may face not only questions regarding its infrastructure and sustainability, but also the challenge of narrating the new urban environment they create. Such transformation—at the scale of the city or neighborhood—requires a city to re-invent its own story of becoming from its past through its present and future: “Resilient cities need a coherent foundational narrative” and “a credible story” (Goldstein/Wessells/ Lejano/Butler 5). A multiplicity of links between the fields of urban and literary studies thus appears, leaving much space for further exploration. Research related to urban cultural studies questions how texts create density and diversity, but also local specificity at different points in time. Ethnicity and gender in urban life, the role of art for practices of place-making, and the incorporation of a location’s past into a contemporary setting are just some examples resonating throughout this publication. This introduction to the collection will briefly outline narratives of urban transformation as they appear throughout the volume. In doing so, it will contextualize the emergence of a focus on urban cultural studies in American Studies and American History departments in the Ruhr. In the second part, I will discuss the idea of reading and writing the Ruhr Valley—the area where much of this research has been undertaken—in dialogue with its U.S. counterpart, the ‘Rust Belt.’ The emphasis in this second part will be on reading and writing the processes of urban transformation that, at least at first sight, resist established narratives. Instead of dealing in growth and abundance, these narratives tell of cities that are shrinking and losing density. Nevertheless, this, too, is a story of transformation, and one that is not necessarily directed backwards. Landscapes once drastically altered by industrialization do not, as one popular story goes, return to the “rural,” but rather transform into something else altogether. Post-industrial urbanism is one key phrase that comes to mind, an abstract phrase that, on the ground, has very specific consequences, not all of which might be visible to us yet. Finding the terms to to negotiate them in different contexts—from the local to the global—is one of the great promises of narrative forms in and through which we address them, as we play with different possibilities of re-writing, re-configuring, reinhabiting, and constructing possible futures in a transforming place.

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U RBAN T RANSFORMATIONS

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U.S.A.

The idea of an urban American nation is deeply engrained in the public imaginary of the United States, from the early idea of a “City upon a Hill” to contemporary representations of the United States in Europe and elsewhere. Often, it is cities that are used to represent America.” America, at least in the European imagination, is a mostly urban nation, home to New York City or Los Angeles. These cities might in fact be exceptions to American urbanity at large, but they are celebrated in their iconicity. With regard to New York City, there are very particular buildings or built structures that play a role in such representations: skyscrapers, the skyline as a whole, the Brooklyn Bridge. In Los Angeles, such structures are much harder to make out: maybe Rodeo Drive or the Hollywood Hills offer some of the same level of iconicity. Such images are the ones students of American culture—even those who have never been to the United States— bring to the classroom their first semester. The iconicity of such images makes them useful subjects in establishing American cities as a topic of research-based learning, an activity that is regularly being conducted in American Studies classrooms at Ruhr universities. When the American Studies and American History programs at these universities agreed to co-operate on a research project dealing with the topic of “urban transformations in the USA” in the spring of 2011, it was in part the desire to investigate the iconicity and representativeness of North American urban landscapes that drove forward the initiative. One major goal of the first largescale cooperative research project conducted in the Ruhr Center of American Studies between 2012 and 2015 was to reflect on the way processes of urban transformation specifically play out in the rapidly changing urban landscape of the United States. Strengthening the link between American Studies and Urban Studies, the project investigated which key factors play a role in shaping these processes, and how these transformations in turn affect and re-write established narratives about America and its urbanities. Some of the results of the three years of research presented in this volume make evident that urban transformation drives an ongoing narrative in the American context from colonial times until today. This ongoing narrative is a major storyline in American culture that can be investigated from a multiplicity of angles. This volume therefore looks at urban transformations from transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives, as its contributors come from different national backgrounds, different university settings and different fields of research. The articles in this volume address spatial transformations as they occur in the built environment, but also the changes they cause within urban communities and the

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representations those changes in medial forms from art to film, from television series to fiction writing. The articles are not limited to one particular urban community or one specific temporal setting; rather, they outline how urban transformations in the United States impacted and continue to impact the development of specific places as well as the nation as a whole. Still, there are differrent points of connection and even productive dialogues that can be established between the articles included here, whether due to location or to the narrative strands picked up by the authors in this collection. One focus of this volume is the urban transformation of New York City, a city that is representative of such processes in the U.S. at large, but that is also shaped by its own global outlook and appeal. In her article, Tazalika te Reh shows how one specific site in New York City, the Studio Museum in Harlem with its focus on Black artists, emerged out of a unique urban community and its historical legacy in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the Studio Museum engaged in complex conversations about the meaning and identity of American artistic practice that transcended its original setting. It became a site that went on to shape the nation at a crucial time in its history: the Civil Rights Era. In a very different sense, Faye Guenther’s case study of David Wojnarowicz’s representation of the changing environment of New York City and specifically the Hudson River Piers also points to the key roles of art in processes of urban transformation. In this case, art has the potential to re-write a site and preserve it after its physical demolition. The particular is always in dialogue with its larger national and global contexts. Kornelia Freitag’s article addresses the way the globalization of U.S. cities goes hand in hand with more global perspectives in literature. The literary city becomes a place where different identities are re-negotiated; transnational renditions of American cities are shaped by migration, travel and displacement. The hybridization of urban spaces becomes specifically evident in scholarship on immigrant communities and their contributions to shaping American urbanities, specifically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With regard to this volume, this includes, among others, the German American community and the Chinese American community. The spatial and ideological battles examined in contributions by Insa Neumann, Thomas Heise and Selma Bidlingmaier address ethnic enclaves and their representations at different points in time. Bidlingmaier’s analysis of processes of othering Chinatown with foodscapes at the center of her investigation and Heise’s negotiation of the role of the urban detective in constructing this crucial setting can easily be read in dialogue with each other. Such reading shows how images from the past are carried into the present as well as how representational patterns from the nineteenth century

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linger on today. These representations and perceptions also have an impact on other settings, such as Europe, as elucidated by Erika Mikó’s analysis of representations of the same place—Chinatown—in Hungary in the course of the twentieth century. The barrio and its complexities, the Indian American community, as well as the African American communities and their spaces all shape the urban imaginary in the United States and its representations elsewhere, as demonstrated in the articles by Josef Raab, Kornelia Freitag, Eva Boesenberg, Kathrin Muschalik and Tazalika te Reh. The role of social and political factors in processes of urban transformation should not be underestimated, as both Insa Neumann and Erika Mikó point out in their analyses. This collection includes studies of urban transformations in the United States by historians, such as Michael Wala’s analysis of the origins of the changing role of Washington, D.C.—also figured prominently around the world, as a quasiglobal political capital—as well as contemporary analyses of urban processes resulting out of earlier events and constellations. Processes of change can be initiated by physical transformations, such as the emergence of new infrastructural features. This becomes very clear in Gary Scales’ study of the gas station and how it changed American cityscapes, urban commercial structures, as well as American culture at large over a process of several decades. In their articles addressing the challenges of gentrification, Utku Mogultay and Astrid Kaemmerling also point to the lasting legacy of urban transformations. In these articles, the historical is in dialogue with the contemporary; communities undergo constant shifts as narratives from earlier times are made relevant to their contemporary processes. This becomes clear in Utku Mogultay’s contribution on Pynchon’s rewriting of a frontier process, which uses vocabulary from the twentieth century. Similarly, Walter Grünzweig’s article recovers the origins of the “creative class” that surprisingly do not lie with Richard Florida, but with the “father” of American national culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In addition to the ongoing threat of gentrification discussed by multiple contributions to this volume, Nick Bacon’s analysis of the transformation of so-called “podunks” throughout the twentieth century, as well as Barbara Buchenau’s and Jens Gurr’s article dealing with the “story turn” in urban planning and the emerging dialogue between American Studies and Urban Studies demonstrate that disciplinary limits need to be overcome in order to understand America’s vibrant history of urban transformations and the narratives going along with them. The media plays a crucial role in understanding these processes and, therefore, is itself a leading agent of urban transformation as well as a subject for urban cultural studies. Jon Hegglund shows how the television series The Wire establishes relationships between the human and the non-human—in this case,

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between an individual life and a supposedly lifeless cargo container, which is made vivid nevertheless through the camera’s ever-present eye. Focusing on a different medium, Astrid Kaemmerling points out the crucial role of film in developing a counter-narrative for the ongoing gentrification of San Francisco’s Mission District. The ability of art in various media to reflect upon as well as to remember cities that have been erased or threatened by erasure restorative is a common thread that interweaves the articles in this volume. They all deal with very different spatial and temporal settings, but still share a focus on discourses of economic change that collude with processes of urban transformation and that result in economic investment or disinvestment. Despite the diversity of topics, spaces, communities, and representations addressed here, all articles share a focus on writing and re-writing the city. Processes of urban transformation are both steered and staged by way of the stories circulating in a variety of environments and shapes. Now, in the age of YouTube and Instagram, Facebook and online newspapers, with the support of the “digital humanities” and processes of “thick mapping” (Presner/Shepard/ Kawano), the relationship between stories and the city is closer than ever. Urban spaces have for a long time been considered multilayered sites in which different historical, spatial and narrative layers have collided, merged, combined, and recombined. But today these processes have become much more visible and accessible. It only takes a smartphone to compose one’s personal urban narrative and make it public through web 2.0 technologies. This has great democratic potential, but also adds further layers to an already multifaceted subject.

R EADING U RBAN T RANSFORMATIONS IN THE R UHR V ALLEY In the middle of the transitory process of ever increasing media convergence impacting and re-defining urban America and its representations, the American Studies and American History Departments at the Ruhr universities began to formulate some preliminary thoughts on their research project in urban transformations. Since the early 2000s, TU Dortmund University and Ruhr-University Bochum have developed their long-standing cooperative relationship by holding an annual PhD forum, which, in 2010, resulted in the PhD program in “Transnational/Transatlantic Studies” at the RuhrCenter in American Studies. The University of Duisburg-Essen has now joined both the RuhrCenter of American Studies as well as the structured PhD-program as a third partner.

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It was not a coincidence that such a cooperation, particularly a collaborative research project on “urban transformations,” emerged in the universities of the Ruhr Valley. The region has undergone immense processes of urban change in the past two centuries—from an agglomeration of rather small towns and villages to a heavily industrialized metropolitan area with a steadily growing population to a region undergoing what is commonly termed “structural change,” or simply, de-industrialization. Beginning in the 1950s, the Ruhr gradually broke with its more traditional industries of iron- and steel-production as well as coal mining. One result—as well as motor—of this long-term process of “structural change” was the emergence of the universities at Dortmund, Bochum and Duisburg-Essen. The Ruhr universities were founded in the 1960s in order to provide a new vision for the region and to educate a population that had before, by and large, been limited to the heavy industries and related fields. They continue to draw their student body from the valley itself as well as from the adjoining parts of North-Rhine Westphalia and to consider themselves firmly located in the region. The Ruhr’s transformation initiated a turn to new industries and technologies, but also an expansion of service, culture and education. The International Architecture Exhibition Emscher Park (1989-1999) made this expansion visible. Dubbed “Workshop for Industrialized Regions,” this large and multidimensional project re-invented the Ruhr’s mines, steel plants, gigantic industrial halls, and slag heaps as parks, theaters and museums. These sites of cultural activity gave the Ruhr region, which was not exactly known for its cultural contributions, a new reputation. Heavily dependent on public financing, the approach of the International Architecture Exhibition was locally specific in that it tried to preserve the region’s original industrial sites while giving them a new meaning and converting them into post-industrial playgrounds and sites of “aesthetic contemplation” (Barndt 279). In effect, this approach also removed the idea of the working class as a source of collective identity (Barndt 277). Despite the failure to create new jobs in the region—a problem that continues to haunt the Ruhr Valley—the International Building Exhibition strengthened regional identity. This identification of the region with the population is a factor that should not be underestimated. The discussion about the identity and the possible futures of the Ruhr in the early 2000s impacted classroom discussions in a variety of fields at the Ruhr Universities. These discussions included the humanities at the Ruhr Universities, thereby steadily establishing the links between American Studies, American History and fields such as Urban Planning and Urban Geography. Such engagements included collaborative research and

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the co-teaching of classes, and, in many ways, they surpass the efforts usually debated by specific disciplines under the general header of the “spatial turn.” Another large-scale project hosted by the Ruhr Valley was the European Capital of Culture project in 2010. In the years leading up to the project, the status of the Ruhr Valley was the subject of many debates. Was it a loose agglomeration of cities connected via their industrial heritage and its uses for tourism? Or was it, indeed, a “metropolis”? Drawing heavily on the legacy of the earlier International Architecture Exhibition, this project can also be read as an attempt to put the Ruhr Valley on the “global map,” alongside London, Paris and New York City. Financially supported by the European Union, the German state, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and a large number of local and regional actors and companies, the European Capital of Culture “RUHR.2010” introduced many storylines to the Ruhr that also resonate with ongoing developments in the United States. The more or less forceful cultivation of a “creative class” and the engineered transformation of depressed urban areas into vibrant arenas through art initiatives and attempts to attract artists to the region are only two examples. Interestingly enough, many of the projects realized in the framework of “RUHR.2010” did not focus on artists already in the region; rather, the project tried to bring in “creative” people from elsewhere, in order to re-invent the region as if it were a “blank slate,” a “Wild West” or a “frontier.” These were quintessentially “American” narratives that could still gain momentum in the Ruhr, a region said to be as dependent on cars, as “new” and as “man-made” as the urban United States. “RUHR.2010” focused on local redevelopment and in these terms continued the legacy of the International Architecture Exhibition. At the same time, it claimed that the Ruhr needed new “pioneers” to bring about long-desired changes and economic progress. This narrative tried to make the Ruhr Valley resonant with developments larger than itself, to shift the focus away from local specificity and towards global visibility, and to open the region to processes of planned gentrification. Students and faculty of American Studies quickly recognized parallels to a region not entirely unlike the Ruhr, but located in a different context and on a different continent: the region known as the Rust Belt in the United States.

T HE R UST B ELT

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T HE R UHR

The perception of the so-called “Rust Belt”—the region comprising the Great Lakes states and extending into Pennsylvania, New York State and New

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Jersey—is not necessarily the most favorable; like the Ruhr, it has struggled with its public image In stark contradiction to the rising “Sunbelt” states, the “Rust Belt” in the popular imaginary signifies economic weakness, the closing out of jobs and the deterioration of formerly wealthy and well-to-do industrial cities and sites. Not unlike the Ruhr Valley in its importance for the German “economic miracle” after World War II, what is today the “Rust Belt” once was responsible for U.S. industrial and economic success, but it has since fallen from grace, literally left to “rust.” Built for a supposedly eternal industrial age, these cities and towns face the challenge of having to re-invent themselves for the postindustrial era. The “Rust Belt” city currently most present in the minds of the Ruhr’s citizens is certainly Detroit. The (in)famous coffee table books about Detroit have made its “beautiful terrible ruins” (Apel) well-known even in Germany. In 2013-14, a large-scale, publicly financed project emerged in the aftermath of “RUHR.2010 and used the slogan “This is not Detroit” to revise negative public sentiment caused by the end of auto production in the Ruhr. While the General Motors plant that produced cars in Bochum creates a genetic connection between the region and the city of Detroit, the Ruhr Valley as a whole can easily be linked to the Rust Belt. Indeed, the comparison has been made countless times before, and in a variety of contexts. In addressing the contemporary “Rust Belt” as well as the contemporary Ruhr Valley, one major challenge is to talk about the ongoing processes of urban transformation and about the post-industrial landscape that has emerged via deindustrialization. To do this productively requires a language that goes beyond lamentation, beyond requiem, and beyond blaming a perceived other, whoever this may be in each particular case. Such language needs to be sensitive towards and address the trauma of de-industrialization that disrupts the ongoing narrative of large-scale industrial production and that also provides potential for new growth that may lead the way toward a post-industrial future with economic and cultural perspectives and possibilities for a new generation. As Andrew Herscher explains, oftentimes when thinking about urban shrinkage, people think of the losses instead of being able to recognize “the possibilities and potentials that decline brings—the ways in which the shrinking city is also an incredible city, saturated with urban opportunities that are precluded or even unthinkable in cities that function according to plan” (6-7). This, of course, necessitates new ways of reading and writing the two Rust Belts, and ways of dealing with such landscapes that go beyond the paradigm and imperative of endless growth.

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W RITING D E -I NDUSTRIALIZED L ANDSCAPES In recent years, a number of American novels have emerged that resonate well with the situation in the Ruhr and its struggle with urban transformation processes. Among these are, for example, Benjamin Markovits’s 2015 debut novel You don’t have to live like this addressing the “inner life” of a large-scale investment project in Detroit as a process of quasi-colonization: Eric Lundgren’s 2013 crime narrative The Facades, a story set in the fictional city of Trude, a fading Midwestern industrial capital that has seen better days; and Philipp Meyer’s 2009 masterpiece American Rust that resonates with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as well as the stream of consciousness found in the works of William Faulkner and James Joyce. In these texts, in which the protagonists navigate economic and personal situations that are difficult at best, the de-industrialized landscape of the Rust Belt becomes a central character in the story. Often speaking from the point of view of a generation that was not yet born when de-industrialization hit the Rust Belt the hardest, these texts use narrative to open up new ways of dealing with a landscape that has been left behind by the companies that once made it rich and famous. The landscape depicted by such texts, once termed “post-American” by Rebecca Solnit (2007), is shaped by holes and gaps, by memory and by loss, which become the source of new hope. While these texts address decay, abandonment and the long-term consequences of what is oftentimes named “the urban crisis,” they do so by giving a concrete “face” to the effects that were triggered by de-industrialization. Such texts can serve as important resources for dialogues across the Atlantic, as they have the potential to reveal similarities and differrences, and to initiate processes of coping with such losses and, finally, healing the wounds of loss. As Sherry Lee Linkon states in her article on “Narrating Past and Future: Deindustrialized Landscapes as Resources,” the potential of these texts lies in the fact that they “use deindustrialized landscapes to construct the imagined past as a resource for the present” (40), and oftentimes also cast a future for these places that builds on the past: “[t]he potential for future growth, they suggest, is based on remembering the strengths of the past” (41). This becomes specifically evident in Meyer’s American Rust, which is—at least in some ways—an urban exploration novel, in which the protaganists Isaac English and Billy Poe, two young men from the imaginary Pennsylvania town of Buell—the name of the town certainly echoing the pioneer of ecocriticism, Lawrence Buell—interact with the landscape left behind by the industry. The novel can be read as a bleak portrayal of a region and as a tale about a population that has been brutally failed by the American Dream. It alludes to the economic

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and social problems that are haunting Buell, once “the center of steel production in the country, in the entire world” (8), “a place that had recently been well-off, its downtown full of historic stone buildings, mostly boarded now” (3), and a city now confronted with “small-town budgets and big-city problems” (120). American Rust productively addresses the challenges of living in an America after the American Dream and in an industrial region that has lost its industry. It can therefore be read as a haunting novel of a “post-American” landscape, of the transgression of boundaries, and of the exploration of post-industrial spaces. As the story is told by several narrators: Isaac English and Billy Poe, the young men who have grown up in Buell and remained there; Harris, the police officer, who is concerned about rising crime rates and growing instability in the population of the town; Grace, Billy Poe’s mother, who had once dreamed of a better life and had her ideas literally crushed by de-industrialization; and finally Lee, Isaac’s sister, who has left Pennsylvania for an education at Yale and a husband who cannot really understand her background. The reader is confronted with many different perspectives of the developments in Buell, as different genders, social backgrounds and age groups speak out in the novel. At one point in the story, Isaac English commits a murder and tries to escape to California on freight trains that take him across the Rust Belt, almost all the way to Detroit. Isaac soon picks up on the problems he encounters in other settings, relating them back to the situation in his hometown and making evident that Buell is not the only town severely affected by the process of de-industrialization; rather, there is a region made of towns and cities just like Buell, and all of them are suffering from the aftermath of de-industrialization. Abandonment, shrinkage and empty factories mark the landscape formerly shaped by industry. Buell’s de-industrilization is traumatic for Harris, the police officer, who compares the industrial ruins of Buell to the “abandoned temples in the jungle” (53) he saw in the Vietnam War. Grace, Billy Poe’s mother, compares the destruction of industrial facilities in the Rust Belt to the events of September 11: She remembered when everyone came out to watch the two-hundred-foot-tall and almost brand-new blast furnaces called Dorothy Five and Six get toppled with dynamite charges. It was not long after that that terrorists blew up the World Trade Center. It wasn’t logical, but the one reminded her of the other. There were certain places and certain people who mattered a lot more than others. (45)

Here, the companies who have taken charge of the process of tearing down Dorothy Five and Six are not being blamed or declared responsible for conditions in the Rust Belt; they are not even mentioned. At the same time, it

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becomes clear that the population in Buell obviously matters less than others; the demise of the industry was not televised. The younger generation in American Rust voices concerns about the fact that the jobs opening in the Midwest concern the demolition of empty industrial plants. They fear that “one day even that work would end, and there would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America. It was going to cause big problems, he [Poe] didn’t know how but he felt it. You could not have a country, not this big, that didn’t make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually” (289). There is a distinct feeling in Buell that the “glory days are over” (94), and that there is nothing better to come than the reminders of the industrial past scattered over the landscape. Buell is never going to bounce back and have the role it once had: “You wanted to believe in America, but anyone could tell you that the Germans and Japs made the same amount of steel America did these days, and both those countries were the size of Pennsylvania” (94). The steel companies were the town’s resource; there were no alternative plans or maps for a time after the end of steel production—there were no other industries and no redevelopment plans. As suggested by the analogies drawn to Vietnam and to September 11, one gets the impression that in this text de-industrialization came as a terrible surprise to the town and its population. It was an unexpected event that one would have never thought possible, much like the destructiveness of the war in Vietnam or the September 11 attacks. The authorities failed to make plans for a future after the industrial age or to insure the interests of the regional population, which are simply cast aside. The out-migration of those still able to leave is addressed throughout the novel, and not without lamentation: “More and more the population of the Valley seemed to split between the very old and the very young, it was either retirees or fifteen-year-old girls with baby carriages, there was no one left in the middle” (135).

E XPLORATIONS

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R UST

Despite its pervasive bleakness, the text makes evident that there is a lot of potential for positive change. As urban explorers, Isaac and Poe have found new ways of interacting with the landscape surrounding them by entering former industrial facilities and getting to know them intimately: The plant was half-collapsed, bricks and wood became piled on top of the old forges and hydraulic presses, moss and vines growing everywhere. Despite the rubble, it was vast and

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open inside. Plenty of souvenirs. That old name plate you [Poe] gave to Lee, pried it off that big hammer forge, polished the tarnish off and oiled it. A minor vandalism. No, think of all the people who were proud of those machines, to rescue a few pieces of them—little bit of life after death. (9-10)

Moving through these decaying structures and finding “souvenirs,” the young men discover that the plant might be abandoned, but not entirely deserted. The factory building is also a space of reminiscence; the memory of the workers lives on. What was once there serves as a reminder of the industrial past and a marker of identity. According to the British social geographer Tim Edensor, industrial ruins, such as leftover factories, constitute “marginal sites which continue to litter the increasingly postindustrial landscapes of the West, now bypassed by the flows of money, energy, people, and traffic within which they were once enfolded” (829). These places defy the idea that the industrial past can be reduced to a museum display and that the unwanted memories of the past can be forgotten. Industrial ruins constitute alternative spaces for new forms of anesthetization and interpretation; there is no organizing or structuring principle, no fixed hierarchy, but rather, these spaces are fleeting and open for appropriation. This freedom to create, and to create independent of official narratives, is the great potential of these sites. As Edensor states: [t]he lack of intensive performative and aesthetic regulation in these spaces makes evident the hidden excess of the urban order, the surplus of production, the superfluity of matter and meaning which violates order and disrupts the capitalist quest for the always new. (833)

Urban exploration is not necessarily a democratic practice; in many cases it is a leisure activity for the children of those who did not get abandoned by the industry. But in American Rust, young people from inside the community explore these ruins as they try to make sense of what has been left behind by the earlier generation with urban exploration pointing to alternative ways of seeing the de-industrialized factories of Buell as a resource. It becomes a strategy for these younger people from Buell, the children of displaced industrial workers, to understand what has transpired in the city and to engage with its past. In the text, the younger generation has also developed its own strategies of approaching the situation as a whole: The Valley was recovering. Only it would never be what it had been and that was the trouble. People couldn’t adjust to that—it had been a wealthy place once, or not wealthy but doing well, all those steelworkers making thirty dollars there had been plenty of

24 | J ULIA S ATTLER money. It would never be like that again. It had fallen a long ways. No one blinked at taking a minimum-wage job now. He had not been old enough to see it fall is why it didn’t bother him. He just saw the good parts. That’s a gift, he decided, to only see the good parts. Because we’re the first ones to grow up with it like this. The new generation. All we know. But things are improving in different ways. Right now, from where he was sitting, there were patches of woods that he remembered being overgrown fields when he was younger. Oak, cherry, birch, the land going back to its natural state. (97)

This observation by Poe is one of the most important and complex passages in the text because it makes evident that those who have grown up at the edge of the post-industrial age have their own ways of seeing the landscape around them. Of course, the dialogue between “nature” and “culture” in this passage reminds readers of ruin imagery, “assert[ing] the redemption of social ruin through signs of new life in nature” (Apel 75), and thus ruin photography. At the same time, this passage goes further. Poe understands that it is very hard to come to terms with the fact that the region has seen better days economically and to get used to the idea that there is no way the region will regain its past importance. This narrative struggle hits especially close to home for those who have witnessed the fall. Poe’s stance is different because he is removed from the industrial age: he “[grew] up with it like this” (97). His stance enables him to observe that there is no standstill despite the end of the industrial age. For him, something new is developing out of the old; nature takes back the factory complexes. Growth in a place that is considered “empty” is a sign of recovery and change: “He did not see why people would ever want to leave here” (97). To Poe, thinking about the former situation is not tragic, and neither is the current state of the land. The land is “recovering,” even without new investment. Here, the past is reconciled with the present. The post-industrial landscape in American Rust is not an empty frontier to be discovered by new pioneers; rather, it is a frontier enriched by what industry has left behind. Future developments in such a landscape can only be built on the past; the past is not erased. Out of American Rust emerges the idea of the Rust Belt as an alternative space, a post-capitalist and post-industrial space that is not a failure, but an opportunity for new discoveries and new ways of living in the future. Unlike many tales of urban exploration that can be found on the internet, American Rust provides a coherent story of what happens when a community comes undone and how it comes undone. It thus challenges similar kinds of narratives by “urbexers,” as urban explorers often refer to themselves. These narratives are not interested in the causes and social consequences of de-industrialization, but focus on the aesthetic potential of the de-industrialized landscape (Apel 60-61).

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The novel, by contrast, explores the reasons behind ruination and addresses the long-term tensions caused by extensive urban transformation. The novel perceives the post-industrial world as a process that always signifies a social transformation and the stratification of a community. It does not disregard the displacement of the population, but points toward processes of healing by acknowledging what has been lost in the first place. Even though the novel does not end on an optimistic note, leaving all problems solved, it still points to the idea that there is a future for the characters—one that might be different from their established plans. In these terms, the book resonates with the Ruhr’s ongoing struggle to deal with the long-term consequences of de-industrialization. It makes evident that the significance of the past cannot be ignored after the emergence of a new generation that outwardly does not have anything to do with the industry. It also makes clear that any meaningful future will have to engage with the industrial past—despite fancy slogans and the ongoing quest for visibility in the international arena. At the same time, such engagement must make sure not to silence the industrial workers who inhabited these sites in the first place.

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Narratives addressing, in a multiplicity of ways, urban transformation processes are highly complex documents that speak to the many crises resulting from change. They make visible the challenges as well as the opportunities resulting from such developments. These may not always be of the economic but also of the narrative kind. Artistic practice lends itself to exploring urban transformations, making visible processes that would otherwise remain hidden, making them bearable by commenting on them, contextualizing them. They can also help resist the imperative of economic growth, working as counternarratives to storylines investors and others may want us to believe. This is not only true for American Rust or other novels that address the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt. It is also true for the articles in this collection, whether they address New York City, Los Angeles, or even no space in particular. The essays highlight the social and narrative consequences of urban transformations, which amount to an American cultural narrative. It is a narrative that prominently defines the American nation and its potential since its beginning, and one that cannot and should not be neglected any longer.

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W ORKS C ITED Apel, Dora. Beautiful Terrible Ruins. Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015. Print. Barndt, Kerstin. “’Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures:’ Industrial Ruins in the Postindustrial Landscapes of Germany.” Ruins of Modernity. Eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle. Durham, NC: Duke UP 2010 (= Politics, History and Culture). 270-293. Print. Edensor, Tim. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and discordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 23.5 (2005): 829-849. Print. Goldstein, Bruce Evan, Anne T. Wessells, Raul P. Lejano, and William Hale. “Narrating Resilience: Transforming Cities through Collaborative Storytelling.” Urban Studies 52.7 (2015). 1285-1303. Print. Herscher, Andrew. The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Print. Linkon, Sherry Lee. “Narrating Past and Future: Deindustrialized Landscapes as Resources.” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (Fall 2013). 38-54. Print. Lundgren, Eric. The Facades. New York, NY: The Overlook Press, 2013. Print. Markovits, Benjamin. You don’t have to live like this: A Novel. New York, NY: Harper, 2015. Print. Meyer, Philipp. American Rust. London: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Print. Presner, Todd, David Shepard and Yoh Kawano. HyperCities. Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2014. Print. Solnit, Rebecca. “Detroit Arcadia. Exploring the Post-American Landscape.” Harper’s Magazine 73.7 (2007). 65-73. Print. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939. London: Penguin 2011. Print.

Models of Urban Transformation

“Federal City,” “Federal Town,” “Washingtonople” Washington, D.C., and the Transformation of a National Capital M ICHAEL W ALA

When the British Colonies declared their independence from the Empire to become the United States of America, this was just the beginning of a narrative to unfold. The introduction to this narrative had already been written more than two centuries before that, and now, after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783 had established the new nation on the global map, the United States did not only have to create a political system but would also have to choose a seat of government, a symbolic center for this union of states. The decision to create a new city as the seat of government—Washington, D.C.—was based on a political compromise but also on different and differing imaginations of the future of the new nation. The new capital, to be named after George Washington, was to be inscribed onto the rural area at the border of Virginia and Maryland. It was to transform the countryside into a city that proclaimed the bright future of the United States while also exhibiting the political ideology of its founders. The script for Washington, D.C.,i envisioned it as a bustling city with the splendor of a capital of a great empire. But the process that was to transform the meadows and woodlands into this commercial and political metropolis met the resistance of those in power in the early nineteenth century. Pierre L’Enfant’s grandiose design, fostered and supported by George Washington, was not implemented until the Civil War half a century later because Thomas Jefferson, the first American president to be inaugurated in Washington, D.C., did not follow the original script but rather blocked its implementation and created a country town,

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a symbol for his democratic-republican concept of a nation based on small farms, widespread ownership and franchise, and on independent voters. He based his political concept on his reading of the colonies’ history. The colonies had prospered by attracting a large number of immigrants willing to take the risk of an uncertain future. Built upon the homesteads of increasingly displaced Native Americans, the colonies’ wealth was also generated through the man- and womanpower supplied by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and African-Americans. Contemporary means of communication made it impossible to micro-manage the colonies, and the British Crown and Parliament decided early on to give the colonies a long rein in their internal affairs, a policy that has been termed “salutary neglect.” This might also have been a shrewd and conscious decision to foster the Empire’s foothold in North America through limited self-government, thus strengthening the British outpost against French and Spanish competition on the continent. While Spanish possessions were, with the exception of Spanish Florida and parts of the Pacific Coast, yet a long way off, Nouvelle France and the French sphere of influence in the British colonies’ hinterland posed a direct threat to the territorial expansion that was sure to result from the increasing demographic pressure along the eastern seaboard. The population in the colonies had doubled every twenty-five years and increased from about 250,000 in 1700 to almost 2.5 million by the time of the American Revolution (Breen/Hall 257). Benjamin Franklin’s “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.,” described North America as a demographic safety valve for an overpopulated England while arguing for an increase of British migration to America. The “Observations” also targeted the “Palatine Boors” by constructing a rather unlikely threat of “germanization” in Pennsylvania. Increased English immigration would “dilute” the social and political impact of the German-born ethnic group in his native colony (234). But Benjamin Franklin also had the future of the American continent in mind when he penned his “Observations.” In 1754, he drafted a plan for a common inter-colonial government, “The Albany Plan,” to enable the colonies to fight the French and their Native American allies, so that a first step could be taken towards a united and more independent colonial foreign policy, which was, for him, the logical extension of the fruits of the salutary neglect policy. It was obvious that what served as a natural border between the colonies and the French sphere of influence west of the Appalachians could not endure at a time when the scarcity of resources and land in the demographically increasingly strong colonies had already resulted in unrest. The territory dominated by the French and her allies in the north along the St. Lawrence—from the Great Lakes

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southward along the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, and all the way from the western foothills of the Appalachians to the eastern slopes of the northernmost Rocky Mountains—was a huge swath of land. The French thus held a dominant portion of the continent, and their territory was secured with a number of forts and trading posts, though devoid of large numbers of settlers. France was increasingly perceived as having an iron grip on the continent and thus holding the colonies in check. By contrast, the colonies were weak militarily, but not so in terms of manpower and economic might. The tension inbuilt in this disparity played out in the French and Indian War, starting in 1754 when George Washington unsuccessfully tried to oust the French from a fort in the Ohio Valley to clear the way for settlers from Virginia. The ideas of conquest, displacement of Native Americans and gradual settling of the vast hinterland of the colonial heartlands was thus imbedded in the imaginary vision of a future nation that was still colonial and not yet independent from early on. The leaders of the colonial rebellion after the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 had wished to return to salutary neglect, signaled first with protests against the Sugar Act and prevalent even during the Stamp Act riots. And even then, their battle cry became “representation,” not “sedition.” Trying to exactly locate the point of no return on the colonists’ path from protest to rebellion and then to revolution would be moot; decisions to give up the cherished identity of “freeborn Englishmen” for the precarious and most uncertain future of independence simply rested on too diverse reasoning and were not made by all individuals involved—only about 30% of the colonists actually were in favor of independence, about 20% remained loyal to the King. Obviously, a grand narrative of the future of a united colonies was not yet written when the colonies declared their independence; if there was what we may call a conceptual framework for future nation independent from the British Empire, it existed only in sketches, ideas that often were in conflict with each other. The Articles of Confederation speak volumes to these haphazard beginnings imbued with idealistic ideas as well as with anxieties about an uncertain future, with mistrust of each other, and of future generations’ abilities to uphold the founders’ ideals. What they came up with when it became obvious that the Articles were unable to sufficiently bind this new entity, the United States of America, into one political body, turned out to be one of the greatest political inventions in history: a political system of checks and balances, a machine based on reason and enlightenment theories tempered by the experience of self-government: the American Constitution. This was to serve as a set of rules delimiting scripts of envisioned realities to ensure that they would be reliable and sustainable by si-

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multaneously providing ample flexibility. Even then, the United States was perceived as the land of futurity, as the mid-nineteenth-century journalist John L. O’Sullivan was to phrase it decades later in his article “The Great Nation of Futurity.” This perception is already evident at the end of the eighteenth century in numerous letters and pamphlets, and it is part of the succinctly phrased claims in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. That this nascent nation needed to develop rituals to construct a national identity was, besides all the other issues they had to deal with, clearly on the minds of the members of the contemporary political class. The signing of the Declaration, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail on 3 July 1776, “will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more” (Massachusetts Historical Society). Adams’s idea took years to catch on, and, even after the end of the Revolutionary War, it had to compete with New England’s Muster Day or the celebrations of Washington’s Birthday. Independ-ence Day was by no means universally cherished, but rather a matter of party affiliations. Into the nineteenth century, Federalists stuck to celebrating the first president of the United States, while those leaning towards the Democrat-Republicans and their leader, Thomas Jefferson, celebrated the 4th of July just as Adams (a Federalist) had envisioned it. This dichotomy is even obvious in the toasts (always as many as states in the Union) they drank: the first toast of the day at Federalist meetings was always drunk in honor of Washington, and with the Democrat-Republicans it was always to “the Spirit of 1776” or “Congress.” Thus, while the pattern of these celebrations may have been quite similar, the differently arranged content displayed ideological disparities in interpreting the rules of the constitutional machine. Both political groups, however, would have subscribed to Adams’s vision that the celebrations would take place from one end of the continent to the other. Eventual domination of the whole North American continent by the United States was perceived as almost unavoidable. In their attempt to incorporate the fourteenth British colony in North America, Quebec, to join the rebellion, the revolutionaries had met stiff resistance from the Francophone population that shied away from a union where they would be but a small minority; and the Roman-Catholic church in Quebec put a stop even to an earnest discussion of independence by threatening to ex-communicate its proponents. Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion to make the secession of the entire

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northern part of the continent part of the peace terms had come to nought (Horsman 3). Still, the threat of an incursion in the American territory from the north seemed unlikely, and Spanish controlled parts of the continent west of the Mississippi were far away. In the late eighteenth century, the American government, still too weak to contemplate changing the territorial landscape by force, had to integrate the individual states into one union. Given the deeply held and broadly based local or, at most, regional identities in these times of uncertainty, integration would be a difficult task. Congress was the only viable body that could provide political input into the process of constructing this sense of belonging on a national level. Here, the checks and balances framed the discourses of dissent, interest, common goals, and unity that informed the first chapters of the national narrative.ii. As a symbolic fixture for this process of nation building, however, Congress was hardly a reliable entity as long as it remained an elusive body of men meeting at this or that town or city. It may have been envisioned as a body of enlightened citizens keeping the nation afloat in the precarious waters of the immediate postwar years, warding off any attempts to destroy the hard won fruits of the revolution by keeping the republic in that uncertain balance between a semi-democratic system and a tyrannis that the Hellenistic historian Polybius had determined would automatically follow one another. That Congress was to be an institution that would only meet when in session, helped to limit popular anxieties about its exertion of too much power over the daily lives of the people because this forced its members to concentrate on issues to be debated and resolved before returning home to their constituents. Here the representatives could be informed about their constituents’ worries and demands, hopes and thoughts, and senators could realize what the individual states expected from them in protecting their interests. For a body of men to meet, no permanently fixed location was necessary, so Congress met in small towns, such as Princeton, Trenton, and in Annapolis in 1783 and 1784 before moving to New York City in 1785. Nonetheless, while meeting in different cities might not have been much of a problem for members, the increasingly voluminous files led to an increase in costs, and transportation risked the loss of valuable and unique documents. Thus, Congress debated early on to settle in a permanent seat of government. The choice of Trenton, contested by southern states, led to the compromise between two seats, one at Trenton, the other at Georgetown, Maryland, with Congress meeting alternately at each location for one session. This compromise never materialized, nor did the capital at the Delaware near Trenton or the decision by the House of Representatives to place it close to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the Susquehanna River.

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The problem became an obvious one after Congress felt threatened by veterans of the Continental Army protesting in Philadelphia. Aside from the earnest attempts to find a solution, this problem provoked a number of not quite serious technical solutions including the proposal to put the whole capital on a platform that, drawn by horses, could indeed become a transitory capital. This concept of a town on wheels “would avoid the trouble and confusion of packing and unpacking, arranging and deranging, their books and papers at every adjournment” (“A summary of some late proceedings in a certain great assembly,” Freeman’s Journal, quoted in Arndt 94). A more serious backroom deal then was responsible for finally deciding on the site where the capital of the United States is located now, a deal in which the southern states accepted federal payment of wartime debts in exchange for placing the capital in the South. It was a deal that also satisfied George Washington. He was well aware that the capital was to be named after him, and, pretending to be impartial, he never mentioned the name of the city. But he had long favored that place just ten miles distant from his plantation (Bowling/Gerhard 34-35). Washington and Jefferson, as his secretary of state, hired Pierre L’Enfant, an engineer and architect. Drawing on his knowledge of the French capital, of garden architecture and of plans of other European cities, L’Enfant began drafting maps that would not only specify roads and places, public and private, but that would also serve as a visible—at least from a bird’s-eye view—pattern inscribed onto the wilderness and plantations along the Potomac River. Before this period, a number of different terms had been used for the future capital. It was referred to as a “residence of Congress,” the “seat of government,” a “federal town” among other things. Now, terms such as “federal city,” “capital,” “imperial seat,” and “imperial city” (Meyer 23) entered the public and political discourse, thus marking the rough outlines of competing visions not only of the capital itself, but also of the anticipated future of the United States. L’Enfant had written to the President to offer his services to plan the capital of what he termed the “vast Empire” of the United States. He called the capital “Washingtonople,” a name that matched his visions of grandeur while paying tribute to the great general and first president (Reps Monumental Washington 9).iii It was to display broad streets and avenues, circles and parks, “Grand spaces,” an equestrian figure of George Washington that Congress had voted on in 1783, a “historic Column” that would serve as the point from which all distances throughout the continent would be measured, a national church for public prayer, five grand fountains to sprout water, and lots for houses neatly lining the streets.

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Source: Library of Congress

Figure 1: L'Enfant's plan for the national capital, 1791

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L’Enfant soon lost his commission when the strong-headed engineer was unable to accept that limited funds prevented the commissioners responsible from putting all the features of his plans into reality. He was dismissed by Washington and Jefferson; and Andrew Elliot, who had helped to survey the area where the capital would be built, took over, modifying L’Enfant’s plans. The sheer size of the city was revealed when this modified plan was engraved and distributed to attract investors, who had to be convinced to buy lots along the grand avenues to fund the buildings that were to be the seat of Congress and the president’s house. Landowners at the Potomac were taken aback when they realized the size of

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what was to be built at their doorsteps, encompassing the small towns of Carrolsburg and Hamburg. President Washington had to calm the spreading unease by proclaiming that the capital overshadowing Georgetown would be “of uniformity and beauty” and, a selling point for many: a commercial empire. It would be a smaller city than London with its close to one million inhabitants— the whole of the United States had no more than three million citizens—but would be “of a magnitude inferior to few others in Europe” (Bowling 54). Quite obviously, Washington envisioned the capital to be the seat of an empire, not simply a place where Congress met and government was located. Thomas Jefferson’s ideas differed widely from what L’Enfant envisioned and George Washington cherished. He communicated frequently with L’Enfant, mentioning his ideas about the capital and its buildings. He also discussed these ideas in a number of letters to his friends. When L’Enfant had asked him for maps of European cities, Jefferson supplied him with a score of city plans. From the beginning, however, he had developed ideas on a much less magnificent scale than L’Enfant, suggesting that 1,500 acres would be sufficient for the capital. He conceived a grid of streets, a common layout for most newly planned cities in North America, which was to be, with 40 feet, less broad than the French engineer had planned. He proposed that the capitol and the President’s house would be built on a west-east axis but apart from one another. They would be connected via “public walks,” an idea that might have inspired L’Enfant’s own design and today’s layout. In contrast to L’Enfant, he suggested that the houses should not all be uniformly aligned along the streets because this would produce “a disgusting monotony” (Reps 4). Jefferson sketched a small town, not much larger than Georgetown. It was to encompass the area from its southeasterly tip to the Tyber, a creek that was named when the area was known as the “Rome” plantation and that would today line the Mall. He anticipated that the capital would eventually encompass an area stretching farther south and to the east, so that it reached the size of contemporary Philadelphia (the dotted area in the chart). In the meantime, however, at the end of March 1791, President Washington had reached an agreement with the landowners that would cede about 5,000 acres for the future city, allowing for L’Enfant’s grandiose design; this was three times the space Jefferson had calculated to be necessary (ibid. 13). It was probably at this point in the evolution of plans for the national capital that Jefferson had become fully aware that the president was planning on “concentrating the political authority of the federal government in the design and components of the Federal City,” (Harris “Washington’s Gamble” 529) a design that he began to subtly undermine. In particular, he began to obstruct plans to build the Capitol above a tomb of George Washington’s earthly remains, a

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scheme President Washington had approved of as a political symbol of central governmental power and as a strategy to once and for all prevent the seat of government from being moved again. For Jefferson, this scheme was unacceptable. Instead of stabilizing the nation, it would hamper the rapid development of the still young nation by adding an additional weight to the constitutional machine of checks and balances guiding this process. It would legitimize a predominance of the Executive Branch, which was unthinkable to Jefferson. Behind the scenes, he successfully strove to prevent the tomb and to save the seat of Congress from the inroads of this historical artifact Washington and his Federalist friends had proposed as a constant reminder that Congress was quite literally built on the bones of the first president: the embodiment of the predominance of executive power. A little more than one hundred brick houses had been built by mid-1800 when Jefferson was inaugurated, not even 300 wooden structures were strewn across the vast territory. The District of Columbia remained a rural area, something John Adams had done little to change during his term as President. After becoming President, Jefferson did even less to change this, and, by reducing government spending on federal buildings in D.C., he prevented the connection of the several small communities that had sprung up in the district. He was convinced that republican virtues could hardly be preserved in a bustling city that acted as a commercial center. Thus, when plans were drawn up to build wharfs on city lots along the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, he simply declared that the federal government lacked the constitutional powers for granting this and thus precluded the establishment of shipping industry and commerce in the area. This did not prevent him from spending considerable time and effort, however, on all stages of building of the Capitol and of the president’s house, a building that resembled a large country villa under his guidance (“Washington’s ‘Federal City’” 49, 51-52). During his tenure he worried about planting trees, cattle and hogs running loose, but he also voted against fencing in city ground to preserve common open pastures. Collecting seeds for vegetables and fruits from foreign nations through the diplomatic missions of the United States, he made sure that gardeners in the District planted them (Nicolaisen 114).

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Figure 2: Jefferson’s [Proposed Plan of Federal City], March 1791

Source: Library of Congress

This is the setting Jefferson wanted to create: the calm serenity of a smaller town composed of a few houses and public buildings surrounding the seat of Congress and governmental buildings. This would provide for quiet contemplation away from the corruptions of a metropolis, which distracted fellow politicians from the

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altruistic policies of a citizen-president. His hopes for attracting a community of like-minded thinker-politicians to provide guidance for his fellow countrymen, however, did not materialize to the degree he seems to have been anticipating, and at times the town he helped to shape and preserve as a country town offered too little to suit his wishes and tastes for company (Harris “Washington’s Gamble” 529, 553). Charles Dickens, who visited Washington, D.C., in 1842, quite possibly had seen one of Elliot’s maps that had been engraved in other languages than English and distributed in Europe in large numbers to attract investors. “It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances,” he wrote in his American Notes, quite obviously disenchanted with these sales pitches, “but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird’s-eye view of it from the top of the Capitol, that one can at all comprehend the vast designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features.” (116). While this might have been taken as a scathing indictment of incompetence and a sure sign of groundless American boasting at the time, what he saw was by no means that. It was the result of Jefferson’s sabotage of Washington’s script for an imperial city and the implied concept of a centralized and powerful federal government it was supposed to symbolize. Washington’s vision of the nation’s future may have been carved into the hills and pastures along the Potomac, but from the ground, the vantage point of the small farmer—the foundation of Jefferson’s republican ideology and vision—this could hardly be discerned. Both men had envisioned the capital as a symbol for the nation and its future. Both were fearful that the United States might not endure and invented the city on the Potomac as a focal point for the republic—President Washington as a power that flowed from top down, precluding local and regional interests to neutralize the great national experiment he had made possible. His Secretary of State Jefferson, rather, regarded the capital as a symbol for horizontal power: a vision that was anathema to the strong center of power George Washington had believed to be necessary. Jefferson’s suggestions for the design of the principal buildings, the capitol and the president’s house provide a strong indication of what he had in mind: “For the Capitol, I should prefer the adoption of some one of the models of antiquity, which have had the approbation of thousands of years, and for the President’s House I should prefer the celebrated fronts of modern buildings, which have already received the approbation of all judges. Such are the Galleries

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du Louvre, the Gardes meubles” (Padover 59). This architecture pays tribute to a republican political ideology, and even the houses were to be built low to keep “the streets light and airy” (Arndt 111). When British forces invaded the United States during the War of 1812-1814 and destroyed public buildings in the undefended capital of the United States, this was of much less significance than it would have been for other nations. Jefferson’s reaction to this act of violence supports this argument and is well in line with his attitude as President: he worried most about the books of the Congressional Library that had become victims to the flames when the British burned down the Capitol, and he offered his own library to make up for the loss. The terms “Federal city” and “federal town” used by Washington and Jefferson were ciphers for conflicting narratives of the future political system of the United States. While Washington believed that an expanding commercial metropolis, a central place to signify the power of the empire the United States, would be necessary, Jefferson was content with a small town and a country residence, “free from the noise, the heat, the stench, and the bustle of a close built town” (quoted in Ketcham 409). Until the Civil War, when the capital by necessity became the seat of power in a struggle for the Union and a symbol for the nations’ unity, the streets and avenues, great places and wide spaces, were mere useless props for a political narrative that was staged elsewhere for half a century after Jefferson was inaugurated in the city named after the first president of the United States.

W ORKS C ITED Adams, John. Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776, “Had a Declaration...” [Electronic edition]. Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Massachusetts Historical Society, n.d. Web. 18 Sept. 2015. Arndt, Luzie-Patricia. ‘Imperial City’ versus ‘federal town’: Die Vision einer Hauptstadt. Berlin: LIT Verlag 2008. Print. Breen, T.H., and Timothy Hall. Colonial America in an Atlantic World: A Story of Creative Interaction. New York: Pearson/Longman 2004. Print. Bowling, Kenneth R. “A Capital before a Capitol: Republican Visions.” A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic. Ed. Donald R. Kennon. Charlottesville, VA: U of VA Press 1999 (= United States Capitol Historical Society). 36-54. Print.

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Bowling, Kenneth B., and Ulrike Gerhard. “Siting Federal Capitals: The American and German Debates.” Berlin—Washington 1800-2009: Capital Cities, Cultural Representations, and National Identities. Eds. Andreas Dahm and Christof Mauch. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2005 (= Publications of the German Historical Institute). 31-50. Print. Dickens, Charles. The Complete Works of Charles Dickens. Pictures from Italy and American Notes. New York: Cosimo 2009. Print. Franklin, Benjamin; ed. Leonard W. Labaree. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 4. New Haven: Yale UP 1959. Print. Harris, C.M. “Washington’s Gamble, L’Enfant’s Dream.” William and Mary Quarterly 56.3 (1999): 527-564. Print. Harris, C.M. “Washington’s ‘Federal City,’ Jefferson’s ‘Federal Town.’” Coming into the City: Essays on Early Washington D.C. commemorating the Bicentennial of the Federal Government’s Arrival in 1800. Special Edition of Washington History 12.1 (2000): 49-53. Print. Heideking, Jürgen. Die Verfassung vor dem Richterstuhl. Vorgeschichte und Ratifizierung der amerikanischen Verfassung 1787-1791. Berlin: DeGruyter 1988. Print. Horsman, Reginald. “The Dimensions of an ‘Empire for Liberty’: Expansion and Republicanism, 1775-1825.” Journal of the Early Republic 9.1 (1989): 1-20. Print. Jefferson, Thomas. [Proposed Plan of Federal City]. 1791. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Web, n.d. Web. 18 Sept. 2015 Ketcham, Ralph. James Madison: A Biography. Charlottesville, VA: U of VA Press 1990. Print. L’Enfant, Pierre Charles. Plan of the City of Washington. 1791. http://www.loc. gov/resource/g3850.ct000091/ Computer-assisted reproduction of Pierre Charles L'Enfant's 1791 manuscript plan for the city of Washington. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1991. Meyer, Jeffrey F. Myths in Stone. Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C. Berkeley: UC Press, 2001. Print. Nicolaisen, Peter. “Thomas Jefferson’s Concept of the National Capital.” Washington, D.C.: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Eds. Lothar Hönnighausen and Andreas Falke. Tübingen: Francke 1993 (= Transatlantic Perspectives). 105-115. Print. O’Sullivan, John. “The Great Nation of Futurity.” The United States Democratic Review 6.23 (1839): 426-430. Print.

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Padover, Saul K., ed. Thomas Jefferson and the National Capital, 1783-1818. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office 1946. Print. Reps, John W. Monumental Washington: The Planning and Development of the Capital Center. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1967. Print.

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Scripts are understood in this context as written directions, textual explications and directives that frame imaginations about the future urban layout and social as well as political function of the US capital. See Heideking’s detailed account of the efforts to sell the Constitution to the states: Jürgen Heideking, Die Verfassung vor dem Richterstuhl. Vorgeschichte und Ratifizierung der amerikanischen Verfassung 1787–1791. DeGruyter: Berlin 1988. Print. See also Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia, 3.9.1791, p. 3

Insignificance at the Interstate Crossroads Podunks and the Rise of a New Urban Strategy N ICK B ACON

In the immediate days following the massacre of twenty-seven children and teachers at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, second amendment activists traveling from far and wide bused into a parking lot about an hour away from the bloodshed. The site was a popular store dedicated to camping, hunting, and firearms. In fact, East Hartford’s 185,000 square foot Cabela’s franchise was effectively the largest firearms retailer in the state. On this day, the store, in partnership with the National Rifle Association (NRA), offered free parking and shuttles between the superstore and the Connecticut State Congressional Building in Downtown, Hartford (Kovner A1). At the store, customers bought up arms before any law could be passed to restrict their purchase. At the capitol, the same gun rights advocates joined together to protest the assault rifle ban, which had driven them to buy up guns in the first place. To the naked eye, these events seem to be in line with contemporary gun politics in the U.S. What is perplexing is that this particular Cabela’s is located in one of the most anti-gun towns and anti-gun states in the country. After all, Connecticut has just been ranked second out of fifty in terms of gun restriction (LCAV). And the assault rifle ban that brought Connecticut to this point was supported by all three of East Hartford’s state representatives—representatives for a town which has long been registered in the gun control advocacy organization Mayors Against Illegal Guns. If the store had been privately funded and developed in its entirety, the fact that right wing politics had been centered in East Hartford and Connecticut might be an ironic coincidence. But in fact, the very state and municipality that had long promoted gun control are not just happenstance locations for Cabela’s. About a decade earlier, East Hartford and Connecticut had used lucrative subsidies to attract the massive Nebraska-based camping and hunting retailer to

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build a new location at Rentschler Field—a recently abandoned post-industrial airfield with an ideal regional location at the intersection of southern New England’s most trafficked highways. Formally nicknaming itself the “Crossroads of New England,” since the beginning of the second millennium, East Hartford has made its name by capitalizing on its convenient accessibility to often far off places down the interstates. Cabela’s is one of many emergent instances of crossroads urbanism—a municipal economic redevelopment strategy used by struggling urban municipalities in well-connected metropolitan peripheries. This strategy is used in hopes of generating investment and tax revenue by means of investment in externally owned businesses that cater to extremely specific regional consumer bases located outside this community. In contrast with traditional urban theories that write off transportation infrastructures as socially static nonplaces that are at best utilitarian means to move from one place to another and at worst instruments of outright sociospatial destruction (Augé; Relph), in this article I examine a strategy that explicitly recognizes highways and the locations produced alongside them (e.g. strip malls and outlet centers) as potential infrastructures of new social relations (Dalakoglou, Harvey), though not always in the expected way. Through a discussion of the history of crossroads oriented development at the national scale, in conjunction with a detailed historical examination of the development of urban policy in my case study of East Hartford, my article will address ‘crossroads urbanism’—an emergent urban strategy with enormous but underresearched significance that is being deployed in a variety of peripheral urban sites throughout secondary and tertiary North American metropolitan areas. My article begins with a historical and lexical analysis of transportation infrastructure and its historic connection to urban development, before launching into a theoretical explanation of how old and new urban strategies have been oriented around the ‘crossroads.’ To illustrate the structural transformation of crossroads urbanism, what follows is a detailed analysis of the particular case study of East Hartford, Connecticut, which over the past four hundred years has embodied (1) an insignificant and out-of-the-way podunk, (2) a center of industrial production and transportation infrastructure, and (3) a struggling and essentially post-industrial suburb desperately experimenting with crossroads urbanism in order to generate investment. Focusing on this last period in particular, I examine the logic(s) and implications of crossroads strategies that capitalize on transportation infrastructure in paradoxical attempts to valorize a local place by funding regional uses that are sometimes at odds with local interests. I close with a discussion of the unexpectedly significant influence that

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these deceptively local projects can have at local, regional, national, and inter– national scales, focusing in detail on the aforementioned example of gun politics.

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Linguists note that terms like ‘gateway’ and ‘crossroads’ emerged alongside the industrial city, which became a transit hub that maximized travel to/from as many potential points as possible during the nineteenth century (Allen 253). Cities grew to bustle with middle-class consumers and vast pools of laboring immigrants who had emigrated from dispersed points all around the nation and the world. For this reason, and because of industrial needs to efficiently export to and import from as many points as possible, the term ‘crossroads’ developed a specifically urban connotation, signifying the city’s contradistinction to the small town as an important central place at which many paths converged productively. In sharp contrast, overly rural towns were derided for at best only being a stop on the way to one other destination. One example of a designation of such a place is the American colloquialism ‘podunk,’ signifying an insignificant or outof-the-way town. As Allen discusses, a podunk was literally the inverse of a crossroads for urban writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (252). The term is simultaneously a pejorative condemnation of a particularly insignificant place, and a stand-in for ‘everywhere’ and ‘all places without importance or character.’ It expressed precisely the anxieties of increasingly restless and industrious Yankees who lived in places that could be considered podunks. These people desired depodunkfication, and faced two choices: either (a) leave the town for a city, or (b) transform the podunk into a crossroads, i.e. a city. And so, efforts at reversing a place’s insignificance would focus largely on transportation. Even in places or regions that were particularly unknown, transportation infrastructure became the key ingredient to success. For instance, in 1924, an article in the Electric Railway Journal argued that politicians could promote towns and railways alike by advertising what is special about “Podunk to Squeedunk and vice versa” (Schade 513-514). Once people had a reason to go to Podunk and knew how easy it was to do so, Podunk would cease to be a podunk. At a macro-scale, the idea of the crossroads strategy was that integration into rail, canal, and road systems would do more than just put places on the map—it would make those places worth reaching in the first place. With time, knowledge that a place was relevant and that it could be reached—that it was ‘in-the-way’—would give new investors confidence, leading to a podunk’s eventual integration into the national industrial economy and thus an end to

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backwardness and insignificance. The results of such projects were often quite mixed, and expenses rarely justified costs. However, the nineteenth century depopulation of New England farming regions alongside the industrialization and urbanization of America’s landlocked rust-belt is testament to the magnetic power of man-made crossroads to industry and labor. Scores of Northeastern cities truly became crossroads with booming commercial hubs and downtown commuter stations, while scores of satellites became connected enough to throw away their podunk status. But the ultimate crossroads project did not come until the 1950s, when the Eisenhower interstate highway system was erected, effecttively democratizing the ‘crossroads’ and providing access to the hinterlands. Thus, twenty-first century crossroads urbanism comes after the last ‘true’ rural podunk is perhaps long gone and the designation of crossroads has become less special. In fact, one could argue that contemporary suburbanization and downtown redevelopment projects alike are both a product of cities having lost their “monopoly on accessibility” as Edward C. Banfield noted as early as 1968 (45). In a post-suburban United States, where density converges across everexpanding and overlapping metropolitan areas, even the most seemingly undeveloped and rural town is basically on-the-map and significant. Today, the decline in inner cities of department stores, entertainment districts, manufacturers, and even white-collar offices, has arguably caused many formerly dominant city districts to become insignificant. And the integration of most suburbs into regional transportation networks, along with an exponential increase of free parking in evermore attractive and convenient autocentric developments, has meant more than just taking away the city’s monopoly on accessibility. In fact, the additional inner city problems such as parking shortages and traffic surpluses now make urban centers essentially ‘out-of-the-way,’ i.e. inaccessible in comparison to their suburban extensions. Still, cities continue to function symbolically and geographically as regional centers. And they even function practically as such when we account for their continued national and global significance as corporate and touristic centers. Yet, this is less true of the places that surround them, many of which have experienced analogous bouts of deindustrialization, devaluation, and population exodus. In fact, it is these inner ring suburbs and industrial satellites that are currently experiencing the most profound devaluations in urban areas throughout the country (Hackworth). Thus, the crossroads form of development is becoming especially popular in historically peripheral portions of currently secondary and tertiary American cities that are well integrated with urban services and regional transportation infrastructure, but which lack the symbolic capital by which to develop themselves.

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C ROSSROADS U RBANISM D EFINED Crossroads urbanism is a specifically contemporary form of urban renewal through which local governments attempt to generate investment at and around large dis-invested or otherwise vacant urban sites that are conveniently close to key interstate intersections. This focus on sites that are particularly accessible to regional and interstate transportation systems is foundational to crossroads strategies, which always operate beyond the local scale despite their narrow municipal goals. Rather than develop sites according to local needs or interests, crossroads strategists deliberately ignore the desires of residents and instead spearhead and finance extremely specialized projects that rely on interstate infrastructure to attract consumers from a wide and dispersed regional market. These regional projects are speculative investments designed by struggling urban localities with the goal of increasing local investment and tax revenue so as to ensure the sustenance of basic urban services. Apart from the fact that these investments rarely see a return, the major problem with crossroads urbanism is that municipalities may actually end up subsidizing projects that are not just anachronistic, but which are also often silently but virulently antagonistic to local interests. Crossroads urbanism shares much with other common contemporary urban strategies that scholars like David Harvey contrast with mid-twentieth-century planning approaches. However, the specific context of peripheral satellites presents complications for dualistic characterizations such as that put forth by Harvey, who distinguishes between contemporary entrepreneurial strategies (through which struggling city governments compete without state assistance to create branding projects that generate sustained local investment by drawing suburban consumers and foreign tourists into dis-invested cities) and ‘managerial’ strategies used during the mid-twentieth century (through which national governments develop, redevelop, and manage the urban environment at a grand scale, with a particularly strong emphasis on common infrastructure for residents and businesses alike: from housing, to transportation, to welfare). In fact, since the 1970s, cities have practiced municipal planning without the oversight and funding of federal technocracies; and they have increasingly focused on the tourist—on making cities more attractive to visitors (Eisinger 319). Stadiums, convention centers, concert venues, and even malls have sprouted up in just about every North American post-industrial city with a planning department. However, most forms of visitor oriented developments are considered place-making projects (Harvey 7). Even the most speculative, solipsistic, and artificial urban malls built in the most deindustrialized cities, such as Harborplace in Baltimore, are in the end part of broader attempts to reinvigorate

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an entire city’s image (14) by getting the public to associate metonymically a well-received development project with the city itself (and thus to encourage the appropriation of the entire city by the middle class). While this place-making strategy may or may not work for core cities, it is far less likely to be effective for peripheral urban satellites. Hence crossroads urbanism is designed for places with less symbolic, political, and economic capital than core cities. For instance, we cite the “burbs of the burgh” campaign (Dieterich-Ward), in which several shrunken post-industrial cities of the Upper Ohio Valley abandoned strategies that built on their longstanding identities as regionally central cities, and instead re-branded themselves as suburbs of Pittsburgh. Thus, a city like Wheeling, West Virginia—which had once been so keen to become a major metropolitan crossroads city that it actually tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to steal away Pittsburgh’s trade (by erecting a low-hanging bridge that would block large trade ships from getting beyond the port of Wheeling)—essentially resigned as a city and claimed the dubious status of a cheaper alternative suburb of Pittsburgh. While Baltimore and Boston engaged in entrepreneurial placemaking by building up their waterfronts with attractive malls, Wheeling and other Upper Ohio Valley cities like Steubenville, Ohio attempted to attract revenue by deconstructing their sense of place—by steering money away from downtown redevelopment plans and into new highway infrastructure (64). By rebranding themselves as the accessible but less-expensive Pittsburgh periphery, the plan of these ex-cities was to capture some of Pittsburgh’s business, from which they would generate the tax dollars they needed simply to exist. While the competitive, project-based, orientation of crossroads urbanism certainly is entrepreneurial, I stress the critical importance of managerial elements such as state support, funding, and leadership, along with regionalism, slightly increased attention to local needs, and reliance on Fordist infrastructures—most notably highways. Moreover, while crossroads strategies are just as speculative as any other project in entrepreneurial urbanism, they diverge widely in form from what is seen in larger central cities. Rather than capitalize on existing urban identity to re-signify declining historical commercial districts and neighborhoods, crossroads strategies capitalize on a periphery’s placelessness and accessibility—requiring large open (but well serviced) spaces and access to suburban and exurban markets. Moreover, rather than aiming to leverage entrepreneurial projects in order to change the physical and demographic composition of a place’s existing neighborhoods (into e.g. a wealthy global metropolis), crossroads strategies are not meant to give the city a recognizable independent brand or attract new classes of residents. Rather, such urban ‘crossroads podunks’ stress their lack of identity and advertise the ease

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with which potential customers can get in and out—often without disturbing local residents. Finally, I hypothesize that because of the alienation required in crossroads urbanism, projects are so detached from local consciousness that a natural conclusion of this urban strategy is the uncritical and active subsidization of retailers that are not only locally irrelevant, but that contain or represent something that is literally at odds with local values—and which may surreptitiously act against these values at an unseen, e.g. national scale.

F ROM P ARADIGMATIC P ODUNK TO C ROSSROAD C APITAL : T HE C ASE OF E AST H ARTFORD , CT Founded as an obscure outskirt of Hartford in the 1630s, what is now the town of East Hartford is the outcome of contradictory attempts to transform an inaccessible and out-of-the-way podunk into an important crossroads location. East Hartford gained crossroads status in the mid-twentieth century as a manufacturing center for the aerospace sector of the military industrial complex where every major highway in the region intersected. Immediately after achieving this status, the same production and transportation infrastructure that had allowed the town to function as a crossroads would doom the city to devaluation, middle-class white flight, and perceptions by locals and outsiders alike that East Hartford was essentially a non-place. Increasingly, as a reaction to this perception, the town has explicitly drawn upon its disinvested industrial infrastructure along with its underutilized highway access to initiate crossroads urbanist strategies. These strategies revalorize the city as a place by promoting activities that only outsiders can appreciate. In the more than two-hundred-year stretch between East Hartford’s Puritan colonization and the industrial revolution, East Hartford was the definition of an inaccessible and out-of-the-way place—a paradigmatic podunk. Not least because of its indigenous Native American population, the Podunk people appear to have been the source for the term (Read). Separated from the bulk of agrarian development in the Connecticut River Valley by New England’s largest river, East Hartford remained an effectively uninhabited supply of surplus farmland and falling water mill production to be run only by rebellious pioneers who settled in small numbers beginning in 1636, in spite of a number of policies seeking to keep colonists in central villages on the other side of the river. It took half a century until East Hartford would be marginally connected to the larger emerging region and state, when in 1681 the first ferry across the Connecticut River opened to limited and expensive trips (Goodwin 194). Far from any cross-

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roads, East Hartford did not even have a bridge to connect to Hartford and the remainder of the region until the beginnings of the industrial revolution in 1810 (Paquette 319). It was only after this moment that the municipality began to become famous for its Yankee entrepreneurial spirit. It finally had a bridge installed, even if a road bridge meant nothing in an industrializing era where transport became more and more dominated by railroads. In 1834, the town’s Pitkin brothers conceived and manufactured the first machine-made watches (Woodward 79). Through their composition of interchangeable parts, these watches would help set the ground to revolutionize the industrialization of timepieces (and timekeeping). While the Pitkins were certainly emblematic of a rising Yankee entrepreneurial class that commonly took the first steps to industrialize podunk towns, the Pitkin brothers themselves would soon move operations to New York and London— legitimate crossroads locations in which access to markets, labor, capital, and— of course—transportation allowed them to popularize their product. East Hartford was quite simply too much of a podunk and too little of a crossroads to mass produce and market this kind of technology. East Hartford’s transformation from a podunk into a legitimate crossroads was put into motion at the midpoint of the nineteenth century. In 1849, Irish immigrant laborers working for the New York & New England Railroad finished building the town’s first train tracks, creating a vast infrastructural base that would forever change East Hartford (Paquette 320). While the town would primarily remain a small agricultural place with limited manufacturing until the twentieth century, it was soon to become a very different sort of podunk. The shrinking of distance through the rapid connectivity of rail broke down the local identities of hitherto unique and particular places (Schivelbusch), but in East Hartford the idea of becoming a privileged point within the new transit system attracted speculators and modernists alike. Precisely because East Hartford was a quintessentially insignificant place, the town seemed to have nothing to lose and everything to gain. After railroad construction, East Hartford was no longer completely inaccessible, but the town was in many ways still simply a stopping point between the other industrial centers of the time—a heavily vacant or poorly developed way to somewhere else. The viability of the crossroads was generally put ahead of other concerns. In 1881, the New York & New England Railroad built its freight yard in East Hartford and used legal maneuvers to secure private property rights over paths that crossed with rail-lines inside neighborhoods, enforcing ‘no trespassing’ rules that effectively closed local roads, banned travel, and displaced local social networks (Paquette 142). Largely due to the town’s

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train routes, the factories built alongside their tracks, and the increasingly transient proletarian population that was now immigrating, East Hartford was redlined and yellow-lined to a greater extent than even Hartford. HOLC’s 1937 report says of one of the redlined zones that it “suffers from soot from the railroad yards. Dwellings throughout the area include everything from shacks to two family and an occasional triple. All are in poor condition and evidence no pride of ownership. The entire area is shunned by lenders and may be classified as hazardous” (HOLC D5). Even HOLC’s brief remark on the tiny section of the town granted an A, ends with the ominous suggestion: “This is the most desirable area for those who must remain in East Hartford” (my emphasis). Industrialization as begotten by railroad centralization had not sprouted prosperity. But, to make matters worse, the railroad company that had helped to generate these problems opted to shift operations over to Hartford in 1925 (Paquette 216). Nevertheless, the dangers of nineteenth century crossroads development strategies would pale in comparison to those of the twentieth century. During the early 1940s, East Hartford was a center of the Great Defense Migration, during which hundreds of thousands of workers coming from across the United States moved en masse to a few industrial centers in order to meet defense-related manufacturing needs during World War II (Bolles 464). In 1929, Pratt & Whitney, a Hartford area machine tools company, opened a massive new facility on 600 acres of former tobacco fields in East Hartford. Thereafter, Pratt became the largest producer of engines for military aircraft for both the U.S. and its allies during World War II (Chen, Shemo 207). The dramatic socio-spatial implications of Pratt & Whitney soon manifested during the 1940s as tens of thousands of rural farms were replaced by autocentric streets, dense pre-fabricated housing, and a flurry of state-planned housing projects that persisted for long periods of time, although they were designed as temporary structures (Mumford 28-29). From 1940 to 1943 alone, East Hartford’s housing stock increased by 2,500 units (70%) largely thanks to eleven such projects (Haus-mann 2-4, 13-14). But, in fact, this evidence of federal and state support is mis-leading. East Hartford’s growth was privately managed and often perilously hap-hazard. In 1947, a dozen fatal car accidents on the poorly developed roads made the town technically the most dangerous municipality in Connecticut (Paquette 333). Subsequently, East Hartford began taking more care to manage its defenseled spatial production. By 1949, the town was able to set up the East Hartford Development Commission—the first such development commission in the United States—which would tout its municipality as the fastest growing town east of the Mississippi River (Paquette 274). In that year, Paul DeLahunta made the first recorded reference to East Hartford as the “Crossroads of New England”

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to attract businesses to the area (“DeLahunta Gives” 19). As the defense industry evolved, crossroads infrastructure was tantamount. In fact, Pratt & Whitney adopted close interstate access as a critical criterion for choosing where to place distribution facilities (Markusen 133). This need for highway access was equally important for the labor force. In fact, state studies published in 1949 point to East Hartford, rather than the far more populous neighboring city of Hartford, as having the largest geographical range of commuters of any town in Connecticut (McKain 37). By 1954, “Crossroads of New England” had been adapted into a slogan and referred to the town’s equal distance between New York City and Boston— about 100 miles into both directions (Torpey F1). Two years later, President Eisenhower would make this fact really count, when he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that created and funded the Interstate Highway System. By 1968, East Hartford was the site of the largest highway crossroads in Connecticut. After the completion of an interchange connecting I-84 (to Boston and New York), I-384 (to Providence), I-91 (to New York City), CT Route 2 (to New London and the sites that would become the two largest American Indian Casinos in the United States), and CT Route 5 (leading to New York’s extensive regional parkway system), East Hartford was quite literally the crossroads of New England. However, this connectivity came at a price as the town became engulfed in highways. Destined to foster the growth of new suburbs to the east and south, the new highways would further upset the town’s already fractured landscape by splitting it in two. City representatives proposed an alternative highway plan for which they generated 10,000 supportive resident signatures (Plikunas 18), but protests were ultimately futile. Responding to the controversial construction of what became I-84, Mayor Atwood opined that “it would be a sad day if we ultimately had to include on our town signs ‘the town having more square footage of expressway than all other New England municipalities’” (“Atwood Concerned” 21A). As with hundreds of cities and towns throughout the U.S., this unprecedented instance of highway development majorly disrupted East Hartford’s status as a place. Disruption ensued not just because the infrastructure fragmented the entire town into artificial bits and pieces but also because such interstates paved the way for newer and shinier suburban development at highway exits down the line. Just when social networks were shattered in East Hartford, new towns that were smaller and more coherent promised the sense of community that was lost here.

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If early transportation-oriented strategies had largely backfired, there was still a possibility that highways might be reimagined in urban strategies stressing different qualities. Even before neoliberalism and entrepreneurial urbanism gripped the nation at its core, East Hartford began reimagining urban redevelopment in terms of crossroads style strategies. In 1968, urban strategists asked a sample of the town’s 55,000 residents to draw maps of the town from memory. Despite the municipality’s small size of about nineteen square miles, not one participant in the experiment referenced the Connecticut River, which hugged and constituted the town’s entire western border (“South Meadows” 8B). With not one resident indicating the presence either of New England’s longest river or the lands that abutted it, the planners concluded that this made the riverfront perfect for new development. The plan promised to make its way smoothly through the planning approval process, given how clearly insignificant the lands in question were to town residents— half of which were new migrants (Neyer 32). Moreover, the space was also among the most convenient places to develop in all of Greater Hartford—if not New England. Situated as it was at the intersection of every major highway in the metropolitan region, East Hartford was the most accessible destination possible for commuters from every other conceivable location. It was a highly developable vacancy at the center of a regional crossroads. The planners had recognized an important fact: if East Hartford’s crossroads infrastructure catastrophically disrupted the municipality’s status as a coherent place in itself, its centralization at the town’s core would forever maximize its accessibility to a growing region that it linked together. But the crossroads strategy would become the norm only after deindustrialization and urban shrinkage put the municipality at risk of losing its ability to offer basic city services. When the cold war ‘ended,’ this fact combined with the global outsourcing of much remaining employment, meant that Pratt & Whitney—the manufacturing giant that justified the development of these infrastructures in the first place—drastically downsized its local manufacturing employment from the 1970s onward (Rayman, Bluestone). Transportation infrastructures that were created as the town was booming had displaced the town. But even more importantly, the massive highways that had been built to connect a devastated local defense industry still existed—fragmenting the town into disconnected pieces while connecting unused areas to the outside. As Pratt & Whit-

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ney abandoned certain departments, clustered vacancies skyrocketed, while the town’s grand list plummeted. Gone were the days when traffic filled local interstate lanes, exits, and onramps with commuters from suburbs from beyond. Soon, the highways that had cut through the town were filled with moving vans. From one direction, these were operated by former aerospace employees forced to move away to find new work. From the other direction, lower income immigrants from inner city Hartford came to fill many of the emerging vacancies. To many, this latter demographic trend symbolized downward municipal mobility. It was seen as confirmation that East Hartford had deglobalized, and was at best being recycled into the regional structure as a residential way station for lower-class immigrants with section 8 vouchers and subprime mortgages (Bacon 56). Starting in the late 1990s, hoping to get new malls built and to retain middle-class residents, East Hartford initiated a policy of demolition (57-58). The town in fact destroyed so many housing complexes, historic buildings, and institutional small businesses, that it earned a place on a national ranking of the twenty worst government abuses of eminent domain in 2006 (Castle Coalition 6-7). As none of these demolitions led to projected redevelopment, East Hartford had succeeded only in effectively increasing vacancies and further reducing the grand list. The municipality would need a new strategy if it wanted to regain true crossroads status. The impetus to change directions came in the early 2000s, after Pratt & Whitney decided to cease using the East Hartford site for aviation testing. Rather than keeping about 2 million dollars of the town’s grand list in its possession and paying for a space it was not using, the company donated its seventy-five acre Rentschler Field to East Hartford. This move, which more than doubled the percentage of vacant space in East Hartford to about 15% (Clough 47), forced the struggling municipality to find ways to make up the lost tax revenue. The question of who would fill this space was irrelevant. The only important question was how. As prime vacant land increased exponentially, the town began speculatively developing properties at public expense and justifying the financial viability of such projects to interested companies explicitly by reference to the highways. Thereby they attempted to optimize local conditions by explicitly subsidizing developments that catered primarily to outside networks.

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Figure 1: Crossroads Urbanism in East Hartford. Rentschler Field and its two development projects in relation to the major interstate and state highways and their ramps.

Source: Map created by Nick Bacon, with base road and town border data sourced from Uconn MAGIC.

East Hartford’s crossroads urbanism was in fact initiated not by the town itself— but by the state. The original plan, championed largely by Governor John Rowland in the late 1990s, called for a stadium in downtown Hartford. This stadium would put Hartford on the map by hosting New England’s sole NFL football team—the New England Patriots. This was crucial to many people in the area because the city’s only national sports team—the NHL’s Hartford Whalers—had moved out of the city to North Carolina a few years earlier. However, the Patriots backed off from the idea early on (Delaney, Epstein). Meanwhile, environmental regulations in Storrs had prevented the University of Connecticut from building a stadium to launch their own football program. With construction problems in Hartford that no longer made the city a viable option and with a highly accessible and prime development location opening up in East Hartford, Rentschler Field was chosen as the stadium’s location.

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Construction began in 2000, and plans were for UConn to join the Big East conference in 2004. This larger goal would justify construction costs of over 90 million dollars. Rentschler would not just be a new field—it would be the place where UConn would find its foundation to compete at the highest levels of college football (Finley D1). Locally, the hope was that buzz around the project and infrastructure rehabilitation around the area might lead others to come into other vacant parts of the field and develop new establishments. In particular, there were hopes that the surrounding area—which residents and onlooking writers characterized as a “hodgepodge”—might gain some form (Pelham E4). For a moment, East Hartford even funded a campaign, in which the entire town was reimagined as the embodiment of UConn football (Hamilton B3). From designating participating businesses as ‘dog tags’ to putting up a massive banner over Main Street that read ‘Huskyville,’ East Hartford briefly attempted to capitalize upon its newest megaproject and to draw in more revenue by literally re-branding itself in the image of UConn’s mascot—the Husky. But even with ticket sales doubling in the first year of the stadium’s existence—before the team had even entered the Big East—the costs were difficult to justify. Today, almost fifteen years after construction, the team has failed to become a big name in college football. Attention to the team, moreover, has been limited in part because UConn has already achieved national fame for its consistently competitive basketball program (which constantly ranks first in the country). With the state already in the national spotlight in another sport, investing in football is less of a concern. Thus, the football program and, consequently, its stadium at Rentschler Field have remained far too minor to generate a return on the gargantuan cost of investment by Connecticut. Even looking beyond such economic concerns, the social value of the stadium is dubious. For a stadium hosting a team that seeks a much larger fan base, it is remarkable that social activities here are severely limited. Tailgating, for instance, is so heavily regulated that grilling, tossing balls, and frisbees are all excluded from the scene (Finley D1). But if Rentschler has not led to an economic or social return on investment to Connecticut, its failure is even worse for East Hartford and its residents who keep consistently subsidizing it. UConn statistics from 2011 record that out of the school’s 119,372 alumni residing in Connecticut, only 1,187 (less than one percent) reside in East Hartford. Moreover, this means that only about 2% of East Hartford’s 51,252 residents are UConn Alumni—a figure which is amongst the smallest of any municipality in the state, let alone Greater Hartford—while a town like West Hartford (population: 63,268) has about five times as many UConn alumni (5,277) and four times the proportion of alumni that are residents

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(8.3%). So given that East Hartford is home to so few ‘Huskies,’ its identity as Huskyville is to some extent a socio-spatial injustice. Since 2000, residents have had no choice but simply to live with drastically increased levels of noise, traffic, and tax burdens (Keating 1). Before its opening, then Mayor Timothy Larson notified the State that the town had calculated that traffic from the stadium might very well be disastrous for the town residents. The complaint was to no avail. Moreover, because public property does not have to pay property taxes in Connecticut, even though Rentschler Stadium is owned by the State, it does not have to pay taxes to the municipality. While Connecticut does choose to pay East Hartford payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTS), the rate is far lower than what the property is worth in regular tax dollars and the annual PILOT rate paid to the town has gone down rather than up since the establishment opened (Polanco A2). This is important, because the purpose of crossroads urbanist practices is first and foremost to raise money to keep up crucial urban services. But, keeping in mind that East Hartford did not ask for Rentschler Field and it is thus the state’s crossroads strategy, it is nevertheless ironic that no financial gain was made through this particular project. Thus, after stadium-related traffic levels far exceeded planned estimates, East Hartford was forced to ask the State of Connecticut for $10.3 million to support costs for necessary traffic control and road maintenance to simply break even (Gosselin A14). Mere moments after its first crossroads megastructure was put into play, East Hartford was in many ways back at square one. However, given the timing of UConn’s expansion and the exceptional developability that Rentschler Field presented, even if the stadium had been a financial or social success, it could never have come close to replacing the value of the aerospace productivity it supplanted.

C ABELA ’ S In 2000, East Hartford commissioned the private planning consulting firm, Clough Harbour & Associates to assist with a strategic economic development plan. Facing increasing ‘blight,’ a declining middle-class white population, mediocre retail options, significant vacant space, shrinking industry, and general placelessness, the firm was called upon to help generate a master plan. This plan was built around the fundamental goal of increasing economic development (Clough 115). In order to generate tax revenue, planners advocated building upon the infrastructure of Rentschler Field and setting the site up as a central node of diversified productive activity. They advised that Rentschler Field, if properly managed, could serve as a sort of crossroads magnet through which

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further investments in valuable real estate might be attracted. East Hartford quickly designated Rentschler Field as their central planning area, placing it at the center of the town’s business-friendly enterprise zone. It was at this moment that crossroads urbanism became the town’s central urban development strategy, which was built around the idea of developing a specialized center of outlet stores that would attract people from afar, rather than traditional shopping centers that would serve the local or even the immediate regional population. Soon, East Hartford was bidding for projects devoid of local relevance. Instead, planners sought to maximize taxable value by attracting regional specialty and outlet stores looking to be conveniently accessible from highway networks. A decade and a half later, however, Rentschler Field’s only completed acquisition is a heavily subsidized Cabela’s franchise—a massive (185,000 sq. foot) desti– nation store selling supplies for camping, hunting, and shooting. Cabela’s visibly embodies a convergence and botched reversal of the nineteenth-century podunk-crossroads dichotomy. On the one hand, Cabela’s is a crossroads project to its core. The company requires that all store sites are onthe-way enough to be accessed by a highly dispersed market of potential consumers living mostly in suburban and exurban areas across multiple regions. The high cost of subsidizing a Cabela’s also means that, practically speaking, store sites must have sufficient (read: urban) political significance to access hefty funds. On the other hand, Cabela’s models all its stores as wild and out-of-theway ‘podunks.’ Cabela’s does not just sell the outdoors—it is a destination store considered worthy of urban renewal funds only because it is ostentatiously themed to embody the act of urban escape through a rural simulacrum. Inside every Cabela’s, customers find that the store is designed as a sublime if heavyhanded reproduction of a wilderness that simultaneously approximates a nostalgic, untouched American landscape and an African safari. At the center of each Cabela’s complex is a mesmerizing and grotesque artificial mountain adorned with the expertly crafted and arranged taxidermist remains of several dozen wild animals. The remainder of the store is made to look wild as well, while the few spaces that suggest a human touch exude a rustic podunkness. Most commodities are thus separated from the main floor by being placed into shack-like quarters resembling mom and pop country stores reminiscent of—and consequently nostalgic for—out-of-the-way nineteenth-century rural America. But while Cabela’s may present itself as an enclave of rural culture, we must stress that the store is fundamentally an urban space. Store officials report strong preferences for store locations within a thirty-mile radius of at least one million people and within twenty miles of a metropolitan area. Otherwise, there is not enough of a market to sustain profitable consumption. While the most successful

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locations are found in urban spaces, they are rarely found in central cities. This is because another requirement by Cabela’s is that all store locations are sited on at least twenty-two acres of vacant land (Ogden 3). Thus, rather than built-up urban cores, it is the spacious but well-connected and serviced peripheral corners of urban areas that are ideal sites. Moreover, not only are markets smaller around non-urban locales, but Cabela’s stores are too expensive for smaller municipalities to fund on their own. Cabela’s does not build stores without subsidies, so that by 2008 Cabela’s had received around half a billion dollars in total subsidies (LeRoy 7). Thus, polities seeking a Cabela’s essentially require urbanscale financial mechanisms and infrastructures. And this is especially true given that many financial strategies, such as Tax Increment Financing (TIF) (which gambles on future appreciation in the value of property within a small geographic area), are extraordinarily risky—so risky that supra-municipal governments such as the state often help with the cost. Because of the combination of these facts, Cabela’s has ironically become integrated into paradoxical urban renewal strategies. This has been particularly true in struggling or peripheral areas of secondary or tertiary city regions that are well integrated into regional transportation networks. In fact, one of Cabela’s’ additional requirements for potential sites is that they have easy access to and even visibility from an interstate highway (Ogden). It is the accessibility to visitors from the outside and the visibility from exit routes that are so essential to Cabela’s. Thus, Cabela’s is not like a convention center or other entrepreneurial urban projects that are appealing because they lead potential consumers to other businesses within a given city. Cabela’s is quintessentially sub-urban in form and content. The crossroads it desires is one with a claim to urban benefits like maximized customer accessibility and a robust infrastructure, but one which is also stripped of any claims to cityness—a crossroads podunk. And, as I have discussed above, the merging of crossroads and podunk that Cabela’s requires extends beyond the site selection process. The store commodifies a rustic rural podunkness for a market of consumers it can only reach because of the democratization of the crossroads—once the divide between the city and the country—between podunk and crossroads—has been silently breached. The jumping of this divide was sold in a different way to town residents and their government, who saw a way to capitalize on their own crossroads status without changing their town identity. Cabela’s would showcase the value of the town’s vast and accessible land to potential investors. However, while Cabela’s—which makes a massive amount of its revenue directly off firearms and firearm accessories—does not directly force itself upon East Hartford’s largely anti-gun residents, its existence does fly in the face of local values. Cabela’s is

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an expensive urban strategy that, as a side effect, increases the gun supply. Yet, in another recent urban strategy, East Hartford justified the demolition of hundreds of low-income apartments on Burnside Avenue in the 1990s with the promise of reducing the blight, poverty, and the surging rates of gun-assisted violent crime concentrated there (Dempsey B1). And this was not the only example of proactive legislation by East Hartford against gun violence. In 1999, about three years after the demolition arguments began, the town attempted to ban guns on all public property and was dismayed by how difficult it was to pass the legislation into law (Bennett CT3). Thus, a town anxious about guns paradoxically chose an urban renewal strategy that would increase the supply of guns. They had good reason to be anxious—the murder of a cashier by an armed robber at a Burnside convenience store in 2011 was committed with a model that court experts declared was being sold at Cabela’s (Owens B4). What is even more bewildering is that while there was no demonstrable resistance to Cabela’s by politicians or residents in East Hartford, by the time I began writing this article Cabela’s had become a battleground for right-wing gun activism—and not just of the visible sort described in my opening paragraph. The political significance of Cabela’s in the gun rights debate comes down to funding. Most directly, the late founder Dick Cabela used profits made possible by crossroads urbanism to contribute some of the NRA’s largest single donations (Vardi). And this pales in comparison to the myriad of smaller donations that are funneled out of Cabela’s through the NRA’s primary funding mechanism—the round up program, a program whereby customers can automatically opt to give a token donation to the organization upon completion of every firearm purchase. Cabela’s additionally furthers the NRA by hosting annual ‘NRA Weekends’ at all of its locations. At NRA weekends, participants can learn how to defend their property using guns they already own, while being offered a free Cabela’s gift card (funds they can use toward buying guns and ammunition) if they decide to join the NRA before leaving. Thus, Cabela’s does more than just sell regulated firearms at an exit in a town that happens to lean left. The active financial and political activities of Cabela’s resist barriers to firearm consumption. Meanwhile, East Hartford has consistently demonstrated its commitment to upholding existing gun restrictions and even extending them to disarm town residents and regulate weapons as much as possible. By supporting Cabela’s, then, East Hartford is funding an organization that seeks to undermine its own goals.

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C ONCLUSION For the towns that fund them, Cabela’s and similar crossroads projects are never the ends; they are the means. East Hartford never aimed to become the gun retail capital of southern New England, but rather aspired to maximize local tax revenue and investment by encouraging regional consumption. However, despite a public cost of tens of millions of tax dollars, there has been no demonstrable financial return on investment since the store opened in 2007 (Polanco A2). Though the financial benefits of Cabela’s have long been thought lost, new plans may change things. In March 2014, a Michigan-based developer called Horizon Properties officially announced its intention to develop a 350,000 sq. foot regional outlet mall in East Hartford (Slechta). As an outlet mall, the Outlet Shoppes at Rentschler Field would consist of specialty stores designed explicitly to tap several specific regional markets that intersect at the unique major crossroads location in East Hartford. Moreover, so far, there has been no public talk of any state subsidies at all. Rather than a speculative project that might cost something for nothing, the Outlet Shoppes is being billed as a completely private development that will bring the town and the state millions of dollars in tax revenue. In theory, this latest project points to the possibility that East Hartford’s crossroads strategy may be working—that the investments taken to attract specifically regionally oriented business might finally be attracting revenue and justifying these subsidies, albeit a tad later than expected. After all, this mall is coming to East Hartford because the site has already been tailored for regionally oriented consumption. Of course, as a project at an optimistic and uncommitted stage of development, the possible completion of Outlet Shoppes is difficult to evaluate. However, the speculative possibility that crossroads urbanism can meet with success at least forces us to ask what success might mean. As we saw with East Hartford at other moments of its history—such as in the mid-twentieth century, when booming employment, rapid construction, and maximum transportation integration led to social disintegration—depodunkification and growth does not necessarily mean development. In fact, crossroads oriented uses can close up or preclude the very socio-spatial paths and connections that turn out to be necessary for communities to function. And this question is all the more important because East Hartford is not necessarily unique. Crossroads strategies are all the rage. In fact, the nearby Hartford County municipalities of Enfield, East Windsor, Somers, and Suffield jointly advertise their location “at the crossroads of New England,” and even mimic East Hartford’s long touted claim to be “approximately 100 miles from Boston and New York” (Peterson E1C). And an

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eerily East Hartford-like project is being erected about an hour and a half away at a highway intersection in the shrinking post-industrial city of Bridgeport, where gun crime is so high that the city once sued gun manufacturers for negligently originating ‘legal’ firearms that end up on crime-plagued streets illegally. Here, the city government has joined with the state of Connecticut in plans to subsidize a new location for Bass Pro: another regionally marketed destination retailer of camping, hunting, fishing, and shooting products whose detailed description would almost match word for word my above delineation of Cabela’s. Meanwhile, Cabela’s itself has announced that in 2015 they will open a new 88,000 sq. ft. store about an hour northeast from East Hartford in Berlin, Massachusetts—an extremely small and minor crossroads town between Worcester and Boston. This all implies that despite crossroads strategies being built around creating extraordinary uses, they are becoming an increasingly everyday occurrence. Indeed, it is clear that there has been an exponential increase of places promoting themselves as ‘crossroads’ in order to attract projects that—beyond the possible financial benefits of investment and tax generation—are antagonistic to local interests. The signifier ‘crossroads’ is applied so frequently in slogans and strategies pertaining to places of every conceivable variation that it seems to stand in for any place in need of development—just as ‘podunk’ once did. Whilst in the nineteenth century, the lack of regional or national significance, connection, and opportunity in rural podunks could only be solved through transportation infrastructure (with mixed results), in a suburbanized postinterstate America the democratization of access to regional transportation routes in and across metropolitan areas has perverted the benefits of the crossroads, especially in places with the infrastructure, but without the status. Thus, it is because East Hartford is not a traditional crossroads like New York City, Chicago, or even Hartford that something like crossroads urbanism can occur there in the first place. Though some of what crossroads urbanism implies about contemporary American urban planning may extend to those major cities as well—e.g. the survival of Fordist or managerial infrastructures and strategies alongside entrepreneurial or neoliberal policy frameworks—it is only in these well-connected but peripheral, vaguely insignificant ‘urban podunks’ that a nonplace-based entrepreneurial strategy can exist uncontested. The similarity between the nineteenth century rural podunk and the twenty-first century crossroads has its limitations—insomuch as the latter are still sites of major significance beyond the local scale. But unlike crossroads of the nineteenth century, the names and interests of twenty-first century crossroads are little known and their power is almost nil. As a result, in these twenty-first century

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‘crossroads podunks,’ local interests are silently subverted as local governments fund regionally oriented businesses that, in turn, fund locally antagonistic movements at the national scale and beyond. Under the deceptively local camouflage of municipal economic development, seemingly banal ‘crossroads’ projects of little interest are silent multi-scalar hubs of potentially significant social and political transformation.

W ORKS C ITED Allen, Irving Lewis. The City in Slang: New York Life in Popular Speech. Oxford University Press, 1995. Print. “Atwood Concerned Over Town Land Being Taken for Use as Highways.” The Hartford Courant 11 July. 1968: 26A. Print. Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 2008. Print. Bacon, Nick. “Podunk after Pratt: Place and Placelessness in East Hartford, CT.” Confronting Urban Legacy: Rediscovering Hartford and New England's Forgotten Cities. Eds. Xiangming Chen and Nick Bacon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004: 46-64. Print. Banfield, Edward C. The Unheavenly City Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1974. Print. Bennett, Jacqueline. “Towns Learn Banning Guns is Not Easy.” New York Times 12 Dec. 1999: CT3. Print. Bolles, Blair. “The Great Defense Migration.” Harper’s 183 (1941): 460-7. Print. Castle Coalition. “Redevelopment Wrecks: 20 Failed Projects Involving Eminent Domain Abuse.” Arlington, Virginia: Castle Coalition, 2006. Print. Chen, Xiangming and John Shemo. “Shifting Fortunes: Hartford’s Global and Regional Economic Dimensions.” Confronting Urban Legacy: Rediscovering Hartford and New England’s Forgotten Cities. Eds. Xiangming Chen and Nick Bacon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004: 193-218. Print. Clough Harbour & Associates. Strategic Economic Development Plan and Land Use Plan Update Recommendations. Apr. 2000. Print. Dalakoglou, Dimitris and Penny Harvey. “Roads and anthropology: ethnographic perspectives on space, time and (im) mobility.” Mobilities 7.4 (2012): 459-465. Print.

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“DeLahunta Gives Town Real Boost.” The Hartford Courant 11 October, 1949: 19. Print. Delaney, Kevin and Rick Eckstein. “The devil is in the details: Neutralizing critical studies of publicly subsidized stadiums.” Critical Sociology 29.2 (2003):189-210. Print. Dempsey, Christine. “East Hartford Renewal is Planned Downtown Merchants Have Mixed Reactions.” Hartford Courant 2 Jan. 1996: B1. Print. Dieterich-Ward, Allen. “From Satellite City to ‘Burb of the Burgh.’: Deindustrialization and Community Identity in Steubenville, Ohio.” After the Factory: Reinventing America’s Small Industrial Cities. Ed. James Connolly. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. 49-86. Print. Eisinger, Peter. “The politics of bread and circuses building the city for the visitor class.” Urban Affairs Review 35.3 (2000): 316-333. Print. Finley, Bill. “At Uconn, New Stadium, New Doubts.” New York Times 30 August. 2003: D1. Print. Goodwin, Joseph. East Hartford: its History and Traditions. Hartford: Lockwood & Brainard, 1879. Print. Gosselin, Kevin. “Rentschler Road Project Advances.” Hartford Courant 8 December. 2009: A14. Print. Hackworth, Jason. The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Print. Hamilton, Kelsey. “‘Huskyville Marketing Plan Moves Forward.” Hartford Courant 10 July/ 2003: B3. Harvey, David. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geogriska Annaler 71.1 (1989): 3-17. Print. Hausmann, Norm. “Wartime Housing in East Hartford: 1940-43 and its impact on the Town.” Hartford Studies Project. Hartford: Trinity College, 1995. Print. Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). “Residential Security Maps and Area Descriptions for Hartford area, Connecticut. 1937.” Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, box 64, City Survey Files, Record Group 195: Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, 1937. Print. Keating, Christopher. “Some Residents Wary as Stadium Construction Progresses.” Hartford Courant 30 Apr. 2001: 1. Print. Kovner, Josh. “Gun Owners Decry Legislation.” Hartford Courant 4 Apr. 2013: A1. Print.

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Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (LCAV) “Gun Laws Matter— Understanding the Link Between Weak Laws and Gun Violence.” 2012. Print. Markusen, Ann R. The rise of the gunbelt: the military remapping of industrial America. Oxford University Press, 1991. Print. McKain, Walter. “Occupational and Industrial Diversity in Rural Connecticut.” Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station 263 (1969): 1-54. Print. Mumford, Eric. “National Defense Migration and the Transformations of American Urbanism, 1940-1942.” Journal of Architectural Education, 61.3 (2008): 25-34. Print. Neyer, Constance. “This Suburban Life: East Hartford’s Yesteryears.” The Hartford Courant 6 Sept. 1976: 32. Print Ogden, Denise T. and Lehigh Valley. Cabela’s: A Case Study in Destination Retailing. Pennsylvania, 2004. Print. Owens, David. “Jury Views Video of East Hartford Clerk’s Slaying.” Hartford Courant 4 June 2014: B4. Paquette, Lee. Only More So: The History of East Hartford 1783-1976. East Hartford: Raymond Library Company, 1976. Print. Pelham, Teresa M. “Hodgepodge East Hartford Neighborhood Seeks Identity.” Hartford Courant 27 March 2007: E4. Print. Peterson, Deborah. “Booklet Promotes ‘Place for All Reasons.’” The Hartford Courant 24 March 1983: E1C. Print. Plikunas, Marita. “Oppose I86.” Hartford Courant 31 Oct. 1970: 18. Print. Polanco, Monica. “Cabela’s Hasn’t Drawn Retailers as Officials Had Hoped.” Hartford Courant 23 Feb. 2009: A2. Print. Rayman, Paula M., and Barry Bluestone. Out of work: The consequences of unemployment in the Hartford aircraft industry. Boston College: Social Welfare Research Institute, 1982. Print. Read, Allen. “The Rationale of Podunk. American Speech.” 14.2 (1939): 99108. Print. Relph, E. C. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976. Print. Print. Schade, J.C. “Railways could profitably undertake joint advertising campaigns.” Electric Railway Journal 58.13 (1924): 513-4. Print. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. U of California P, 1986. Print. Slechta, Gina. “Horizon Group Properties to Develop Outlet Center in East Hartford, CT.” Michigan: Horizon Group Properties Press Release, March 12, 2014. Print.

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“South Meadows Urban Renewal Project To Take River Resource into Account.” The Hartford Courant 22 Dec. 1968: 8B. Print. Torpey, John W. “Town Builds With Vigor In Era Of Expansion.”The Hartford Courant 31 Oct. 1954: F1. Print. Uconn. “University Alumni Distribution in Connecticut as of October, 2011.” Storrs: Uconn Office of Institutional Research, 2011. Print. Vardi, Nathan. “How the Obama Gun Boom Pushed the Fortune of Two Brothers to $1.2 Billion.” Forbes 21 May. 2013. Print. Woodward, P.H. Hartford, Connecticut as a Manufacturing, Business, and Commercial Center. Hartford Board of Trade, 1889. Print.

Moving Spaces How the Space of Political Struggle for Black Freedom Moves from the Private to the Public Realm T AZALIKA M. TE R EH

When the Studio Museum in Harlem opened its doors in 1968, it was the beginning of an unprecedented enterprise for many reasons. First of all, in the U.S. there had never been a museum that devoted itself exclusively to the Black voice in the fine arts. Secondly, the museum would respond to current events in the art scene by addressing the community in Harlem and the artists of the African Diaspora.i The formation of the Studio Museum was a collaboration between Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) affiliates, Harlem community members, and culturally interested stakeholders (Wylly 2). Creating this new Space for the arts in the urban setting of New York City, filling the gap of Black cultural representation, and appearing on the stage of the international art scene, the Studio Museum in Harlem satisfied the demand for an institutionalized, professionalized Space for the Black voice in the fine arts. In the 1960s, the Space where political struggle was negotiated moved from the private to the public realm. Focusing on the idea of a spatial practice between strategic disappearance and demanding appearance, between deliberately stepping out of and into public Space for the sake of survival, this essay dis– cusses how Architecture is used to support this very specific spatial practice of moving and shifting Spaces, and what role the racial plays in designing these Spaces. In the struggle for Black Freedom, I will anatomize the physical, literary, and architectural schemes of making Space.ii Understanding aspects of their personal lives as deeply politicized, outraged Black citizens took action to shape and to transform public, urban Spaces. Before focusing on the Studio Museum in Harlem, I will illustrate how the motif of political struggle shifts from the private to the public in other contexts, giving two examples—two from

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American history and one from African American literature. The first example is the eyewitness account of a then young woman from the nineteenth century, and the second is a short story by Richard Wright from the twentieth century. The third example unfolds the contextual, historical soil out of which the Studio Museum in Harlem arose. Taken together, these three moments illustrate the changing practices of using Space to claim a voice—a voice that speaks increasingly louder and that increasingly gains public ground.

H ARRIETT ANN J ACOBS , 1813-1897 Harriet Ann Jacobs was not an architect. How could she, being in her early twenties? How could she, as a woman? And how on earth could she, being a Black woman born into slavery in North Carolina in the nineteenth century? Yet, despite her adverse living conditions, she designed a living Space for her family and herself, which under the given circumstances provided the best conditions of survival for her nuclear family. In her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym of “Linda Brent” and usually classified as a slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs recounts her struggle from her life as an enslaved girl to a free woman in the United States in the antebellum nineteenth century. Jacobs’s struggle is marked by her shattering eyewitness account of her stay in a narrow crate-like garret. For a period of almost seven years, she endures the climatic extremes of summer and winter nearly unprotected under a thin layer of shingles, she gets by without daylight and fresh air, and she exposes her body to this agonizing condition, only to hover over her children and watch them grow up through a peephole. She describes her hide-away as follows: A small shed had been added to my grandmother’s house years ago. Some boards were laid across the joists at the top, and between these boards and the roof was a very small garret, never occupied by anything but rats and mice. It was a pent roof, covered with nothing but shingles, according to the southern custom for such buildings. The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide [ca. 2.75 x 2.15 m; TtR]. The highest part was three feet high [ca. 0.90 m; TtR], and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air. (Jacobs 69)

What had happened? Subjected to her master’s despotism, Jacobs bore years of sexual harassment. At the age of nineteen, she was a mother of two children by another White man (Jacobs 48). During both pregnancies, she tried to evade her

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married master’s incessant harassment, but she remained his object of desire. His attention toward her grew violent in response to her resistant and quick-witted character. He threatened her with flogging and even death, as well as the sale of her children and the refusal to manumit her. The fear of loss hovered over her, overshadowing the mother-child relationship in chattel slavery. Young children were being sold away into the unknown, or taken from mothers and fathers to be given to their White masters. Jacobs understood that her affection for her children was the key to her long-attempted escape. When she learned that her children were about to be broken in, she decided to disappear. Jacobs’s disappearance left her masters feeling helpless. All efforts to find her failed. She was assumed to have escaped to the far north, whereas she actually was nearby in her grandmother’s confined attic. As a runaway slave by law who ought to be captured on one hand, and as a sexually desired chattel guarded jealously on the other hand, her agitated master would not stop pursuing her for the rest of his life. Jacobs’s disappearance created complex living Spaces. In her case, the parameters of these Spaces were marked by the confidants she depended on and by her two young children (who were in hearing distance and limited field of view, yet out of reach). Those who marked the parameters of Jacobs’s confined circumstances were impacted in turn. In the case of her confidants, the new situation meant risking their lives should the undertaking be detected. And in the case of her children, the initial reason for Jacobs’s move, a missing mother and hope for her return characterized their new living Space. Despite the fear infusing these new circumstances, her strategic disappearance protected her nuclear family’s life. For the time being, Harriet Jacobs vanished; she became physically non-existent not only for her children, but also for her master. Moving her Black body out of the public sphere into the architectural Space of a hide-away with inhumane dimensions, Harriet Ann Jacobs employs a spatial practice as a matter of survival. The moment she disappears, her children become too important to be removed—they become bait for their mother. Within the disturbing power dynamics of chattel slavery, their lives are protected. When the children’s lives finally seem to develop toward a hopeful future, and the prospect of becoming a free woman quickens her spirit, Jacobs decides to leave her confines, and she survives.

“T HE M AN W HO L IVED U NDERGROUND ,” 1944 Wright creates a male persona, straying between strategic public appearance and disappearance. In Wright’s short story “The Man Who Lived Underground,” a

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fictional Black prisoner escapes from custody and uses an urban architectural Space to disappear into invisibility and to survive adverse living conditions. Mistakenly convicted of murder, he inhabits the underground sewage system of an unnamed city, in order to survive, to strategize, and, ultimately, to confront those who persecuted him. After escaping a brutal police questioning during which he signs a confession extracted under torture, the man decides to slip under a manhole cover he catches sight of while hiding in the streets. In the sewage system with “walls that rose and curved inward some six feet above his head to form a dripping, mousecolored dome,” he soon merges with his environment (Wright 21). He finds himself in a complex network of connecting canals, and familiar sounds lead him to encounters with unexpected sites: a church, an undertaker’s establishment, a movie theater, a grocery, a jewelry store. The longer he stays underground, the bolder he gets, as he meanders freely in these unexpected Spaces, including the world aboveground. Using their facilities, services, or supplies, he survives underground. Operating in the shadows, the man designs his very own living Space, despite the inhospitable environment where he “breathed with aching chest, filling his lungs with the hot stench of yeasty rot” (21). Disconnected from the world above, he begins to decorate his cave with items gathered from his explorations, such as his collection of dollar bills, jewelry, a typewriter, and a gun, all of which take on new value underground. Here, in stark contrast to the world aboveground, he can move freely, and he has agency. This newly gained freedom surprises him, so that being independent, “everything seemed strange and unreal under here” (21). Finding a typewriter, the man writes his name—“freddaniels” (47). Due to these initials, F.D., the literary scholar Carla Capetti suggests a reference to Frederick Douglass, among others, “whose name is synonymous with the quest for freedom of the fugitiveslave narrative tradition” (63).iii The escapee freddaniels remains safe as long as he stays underground where he has strategically disappeared. When he reappears to confront the police officers that tortured him, he puts his life at risk. This story, in contrast to Harriet Jacobs’ account, does not provide a hopeful ending. The protagonist dies. Shot by the police, his body is washed away with the current of the sewer. Becoming one with the underworld, “[h]e sighed and closed his eyes, a whirling object rushing alone in the darkness, veering, tossing, lost in the heart of the earth” (Wright 84).

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T ALKING R ACIAL —“W HAT “B LACK P OWER !” iv

DO YOU WANT ?”

The driving force of the Black Freedom Struggle in the 1960s was the will of every Black citizen to become legally, socially, and visibly recognized as an equal citizen of the U.S. Especially in the South, where public life still was racially segregated, the sheer presence of Black people gathering in a White public sphere already articulated a demand. In 1966, at a student conference at the University of California at Berkeley, Stokeley Carmichael made the speech during which he famously coined the slogan “Black Power”: I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. (applause) For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn’t know that. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man, “He’s a human being; don’t stop him.” That bill was for that white man, not for me. I knew it all the time. (applause, cheers) I knew it all the time. (Carmichael Black Power)

At the time, Stokely Carmichael was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinate Committee (SNCC). Representing the junior stakeholders of the Black Freedom Struggle, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes Stokely Carmichael as “the link between the civil rights movement, as headed by Martin Luther King, and the radical black movement that emerged from within the civil rights movement through the younger generation” (Lee). Though he was a controversial figure in the Civil Rights Movement in terms of gender issues (Wallace), omitting Carmichael “impoverishes our understanding of the most important movement in [U.S.-American] history” as the historian Peniel E. Joseph writes in the preface of his 2014 biography of Stokely Carmichael (Joseph). In 1960, four years before the Civil Rights Act and five years before the Voting Rights Act were to be enacted, students used non-violent spatial practices that soon would spread like wildfire. During so-called sit-ins, people, initially students, would sit down in strategically important locations in public Space to challenge the segregating Jim Crow laws in effect at that time. In the mobile version of the sit-ins, the freedom rides, Black and White activists would take desegregated buses between the North and the South. They would sit in exactly those seats that were not assigned to them, thus, the Blacks in the front and the Whites in the back. The challenge was obvious and when the buses stopped, the protesters were met with violence. In one case, due to a heavy beating by Ku-

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Klux-Klan members, an activist remained paralyzed for the rest of his life (Finzsch 484). Hence, the strategy of appearing in groups of people in public Spaces, of alluding to and of clarifying the consciousness of social inequality, and of provoking and calling for a reaction, demanding appearance, as a nonviolent spatial practice, culminated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The historian John Hope Franklin describes this event in the following words: “[M]ore than 200,000 blacks and whites from all over the United States staged the largest demonstration in the history of the nation’s capital” (537). Joined by an interracial group of important activists, Dr. Martin Luther King, as one of the prominent ambassadors of non-violent protest, delivered his famous speech “I Have a Dream” at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed and enacted desegregation of public facilities and public education (Civil Rights Act of 1964 Titles II-IV). In the following year, 1965, the Voting Rights Act stipulated the equality of all U.S. citizens in their voting rights (Voting Rights Act of 1965). While the protests in the early 1960s had been non-violent, the protesters were met with severe aggression. During the summer the bill was enacted, incidents of violence against Black people rose at an alarming rate. In the South, people were murdered, physically attacked, houses were burnt down. Due to the killing of a 15-year old Black boy by the police in Harlem, there was unrest in several Northern cities (Finzsch 498-501). Bypassing the new law, “many dining places removed their ‘White Only’ signs and declared themselves private clubs and therefore not affected by the law in question” (Quarles 268). The scene of this open racist terror was the public Space, and the citizens were reminded of the segregating powers that ruled U.S. civil life. Fighting for equality, the atmosphere changed and activists in the Black Freedom Struggle turned toward a more radical attitude. With Black Power, Stokely Carmichael popularized a concept that addressed a Black cultural self-image full of pride in African heritage. Detached from any reference to White culture, Black Power was a call for self-definition and agency (Carmichael “Black Power”). The historian Benjamin Quarles critically observed that “[t]he emphasis on black control and white withdrawal looked much like a policy of racial separation and self-segregation” (276-77). In 1968, two years after the Greenwood rally, the call for Black Power had become more militant and Roy Wilkins, leader of the NAACP, criticized this radical approach: “Separatism is not the way of the future” (277).v The Black Freedom Struggle in the 1960s developed in different directions, ranging from a peaceful incorporating strategy that addressed human sense and

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sensibility to a confrontational Black tactic based on agency that set new boundaries between Black and White. The Black Freedom Struggle left an important spatial legacy, one example of which is the Studio Museum.

T HE S TUDIO M USEUM

IN

H ARLEM

The opening of the Studio Museum in Harlem happened not only in the midst of turbulent years, but also in a significant spot. Promoting a demanding appearance, the creation of the Studio Museum in Harlem is the spatial manifestation of the changes reflected in, for example, the creation of new curricula focusing on the Black experience. Revolts following both, the fatal shooting by police of a teenage boy in 1964 and the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, two crucial events taking place in Harlem, displayed the shatteringly brutal side of the Black Freedom Struggle. In April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Representing different approaches to protest, the two most prominent spokespersons of the Black Freedom Struggle were dead. Five months later, in September 1968, the Studio Museum opened its doors. Similar to the novel effort of establishing Black Studies in education, the opening of the Studio Museum in Harlem was the logical extension of Black Power. “[T]he black pride that a reorganized curriculum could stimulate would compensate for the disillusionment and despair that years of frustration and embitterment had produced” (Franklin 555), and the Studio Museum would facilitate this pride beyond revised curricula. Located in an apartment on the second floor of 2033 Fifth Avenue, the Studio Museum in Harlem was to be found between strips of narrow neighborhood stores. An inconspicuous entrance door led to the rented loft. Before Architecture came into play, the Harlem Museum, as it was called initially, had arisen as an idea. The concept of the museum became mirrored in its new name and its founders decided that “[i]t will not form a permanent collection. As the word ‘studio’ implies, it is a museum in which work takes precedence over storehouse” (Wylly 2). A group of visionaries, consisting of members of the Junior Council of the MoMA, artists, and community activists came together to find a Space flexible enough to respond to “events in the art world as they occur” (Wylly 2). In the January/February 1969 issue of the Members Newsletter, MoMA staff member Campbell Wylly, the Assistant Curator from the Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Irene Gordon, the Special Assistant to the Director, informed MoMA members about the newly inaugurated museum and its activities. In terms of flexibility, the museum already could prove a prompt reaction to the

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New York art scene. The Whitney Museum had excluded Black artists from its newly opened exhibition “The 1930’s: Painting and Sculpture in America.” In response, the Studio Museum changed its program on short notice by responding with the show “Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 1930’s.” While the museum did arise out of times of turmoil, times of struggle for Black pride, cultural consciousness, and emancipation, its concept departed from the separatist notion Black Power implied: “[t]he intention of The Studio Museum in Harlem is to provide a forum for communication within the contemporary arts for the entire community, black and white” (Wylly 3). Moving beyond the local boundaries of the local community toward a global level, the museum addresses the African Diaspora. Thelma Golden, the Director and Chief Curator, who joined the museum in 2000, states on the website: “The Studio Museum in Harlem is the nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally and internationally and for work that has been inspired and influenced by black culture. It is a site for the dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society” (The Studio Museum in Harlem). After 10 years run-time in the rented loft on Fifth Avenue, the Studio Museum moved to a new location on 144 W 125th Street/Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The facility was donated to the museum by the New York Bank for Savings, which in the words of Mary Schmidt Campbell, the then executive director of the Studio Museum, “signaled a new era for The Studio Museum in Harlem” (6). The new building was needed, almost overdue, since the museum “was widely accepted as the premiere institution of its kind […] and as such, needed to assure its permanence,” while it had also begun receiving “major works from patrons of the arts” (Schmidt Campbell 5-6). Apart from this geographical change, the museum had to undergo conceptual transitions. This meant that its policy of not setting up a permanent collection was transformed. In the 1983 catalogue entitled The Permanent Collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem, Schmidt Campbell sums up: “As the collection grew, so, too, did the Museum’s awareness of the need to formalize the collection process” (5-6). With J. Max Bond, Jr., as the designing architect, the building was renovated and converted into Spaces appropriate for the museum. The spatial practice used to create the Studio Museum in Harlem can be characterized as a two-stage process. First, the institution appeared on the local scene of museums with the support of the Museum of Modern Art, yet another institutional giant it had to compete with. Focusing at that time on art by Black artists with the tailwind of Black Power, the Studio Museum took on a big challenge and managed to fill the gap of Black artistic representation. Demanding public attention, the second step equaled a cementing and an expan-

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sion of the first one. In a transformative stage, the Studio Museum had to respond spatially to influences from the outside—gifts and donations from affiliated artists, and later contributions and grants from affiliated patrons. “Black visibility was hardly the same thing as black power” (Quarles 281). Following that line of thought, beyond creating visibility, the Studio Museum became an agent of its own mission, it realized exhibitions and got engaged in education by teaching courses to young students. The museum communicated directly with its surrounding community, giving back the memory of an environment rooted in the cultural riches of the Harlem Renaissance.

C ONCLUSION Strategic disappearance and demanding appearance have been used as spatial practices since the early days of Black resistance. In the three examples presented in this essay, spatial practice is executed through the use of architectural Spaces. Anatomizing first, the strategic disappearance of Harriet Ann Jacobs, and then the somewhat bolder venture of “tThe Man Who Lived Underground,” I contextualize the spatial practice of a demanding appearance as performed during the Black Freedom Struggle in the 1960s. Using this approach, I retraced the contextual soil out of which the formation of the Studio Museum in Harlem arose. When Harriet Ann Jacobs strategically disappeared, she moved her body out of sight into a secret hide-away. She physically vanished and thus became visually non-existent. Hiding from her master with the intent to escape sexual abuse and to save her children, Jacobs created a situation of potential survival, a living Space, for her nuclear family and herself, by disappearing physically. The precondition for this promising situation was her use of an architectural Space. This residual slot in her grandmother’s cabin was of inhuman dimensions, and lying quietly in it for years damaged her body for life. In terms of literature, Jacobs still creates a Space that permeates at least two genres. For one, her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl from 1861 is classified as a slave narrative. Secondly, against the historical and cultural background of her time, she literally embodies the plurality of nineteenth century African American women writers. With regard to “The Man Who Lived Underground,” the physical and architectural aspects of making Space are intertwined. Similar to Jacobs’s strategic disappearance, “the man” has reason to vanish physically behind the scenes for the sake of survival. While he likewise moves his body out of sight

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into visual non-existence, his corporeal experience with the surrounding Architecture, however, differs with regards to his range of mobility and selfdetermination. He not only leaves his hiding place to penetrate the urban surface toward the above ground, but he also creates his own (architectural) reality by decorating his secret cave. In the story, Richard Wright constructs a persona that encounters the sewage system of an unnamed city as a Space of undreamed-of possibilities. As the agent of his temporal living Space, he suddenly becomes the author of his life. And beyond his own living situation, he finds himself in the position of manipulating the life of others. The sudden possibility to shape reality motivates his unexpected freedom of movement and action. Escaping assaults by violent policemen, the man learns how to maneuver through the complex subterranean architectural Space of the sewers. Despite the fact that the story ends with the tragic death of the man and is fictional, it recalls the literary genre of the slave narrative. Recounting the life of a man who is captured in an urban sewage system, Richard Wright reminds us not only of the physical, but also of the societal boundaries that determined the life and death of an enslaved person. Entangled in the power play of White hunters (policemen) chasing the victimized Black man to death, he is doomed to stay within his confines (underground—reminiscent of the “Underground Railroad” and of the hiding of Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man). His effort of moving beyond the segregating boundaries of his assigned Space (the sewage system), appearing aboveground, and confronting his hunters, is penalized with his execution. Subjected to a segregated living Space of escape, captivity, and victimization, the Black bodies of Harriet Jacobs and “the man” are racialized. In some ways the examples presented here seem to allude with prophetic foreshadowing to the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1960s. Disclosing the struggle for freedom of two different personas (non-fictional and fictional) in two different centuries (the nineteenth and twentieth century) and of different genders (female and male) both the autobiography and the short story tackle the segregating character of the racialized Spaces the Black bodies live in. Between life and death, the fight for freedom in these accounts is a matter of personal survival. The daring act of stepping into the public sphere as displayed by “The Man Who Lived Underground” becomes the key strategy during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The personal fight for equal rights turns political. Fighting for equal rights in a racialized society, Black Americans demandingly appeared in segregated public spheres. Using the tactics of non-violence and civil disobedience, the stakeholders of the 1960s movement subjected themselves time and again to criminal prosecution. Instead of disappearing out of sight, they progressively

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congregated. The demanding appearance grew stronger and even more radical when it became obvious that the claimed rights were not that easily granted. Appearing in public, however, was not natural for the women freedom fighters. Stuck in one position, hardly able to change it like Harriet Jacobs, the women were often debased in their achievements and could barely move upwards on the job ladder in their activist groups. The humiliations by the fellow fighters on a professional level mirrored in the private sector by the sidelining of women through other liaisons, oftentimes, crossing the Race-line. Both Angela Davis and Michele Wallace discuss the gender inequality within the groups of the Black Freedom Struggle.vi Challenging and penetrating the surface of racial concessions, the two key figures of the struggle, Dr. King and Malcolm X, were shot dead. But unlike in Richard Wright’s account, this was not the end of this story. Thus, contextualizing Harriet Jacobs’s account and Richard Wright’s “Man Who Lived Underground” with the Black Freedom Struggle in the 1960s reveals the following: first, the racial has always played a significant role in the spatial experience people make in the U.S. Second, being Black calls for strategies that operate between disappearance and appearance when freedom is involved. The idea of the Studio Museum was born out of the spirit of Black Power that postulated the pride and beauty of Blackness. Black Spaces like the Studio Museum in Harlem are a response to the call of Black Power. On the one hand, Black Spaces created during the struggle for Black Freedom aimed to overcome the racial as a segregating category. On the other hand, the same Black Spaces remind us that the racial as an idée fixe, still exists. Now, that is a catch-22.

W ORKS C ITED Civil Rights Act of 1964. 88th Congress. Second Session. Public Law 88-352. 78 Stat. 241. 1964. Print. Brent, Linda [Harriet Jacobs], ed. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Boston, 1861. Stilwell, Kansas: Digireads.com, 2005. Print. Cappetti, Carla. “Black Orpheus: Richard Wright’s ‘The Man Who Lived Underground.’” MELUS 26.No. 4 (2001): 41-68. Print. Carmichael, Stokely. “Black Power.” Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Ed. Charles V. Hamilton, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). New York: Random House, 1967. Print. ---. Black Power. Perf. Stokely Carmichael. Voices of Democracy: The U. S. Oratory Project. Rec 1966. University of Maryland, Department of Communication, College Park, Maryland, 2006. Speech Text.

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Davis, Angela. An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1974. Print. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Borderlines. Vol. 27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. Finzsch, Norbert, James O. Horton, Lois E. Horton. Von Benin nach Baltimore. Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 1999. Print. Franklin, John Hope, Alfred A. Moss. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. 6th ed. New York: Knopf, 1988. Print. Joseph, Peniel E. Stokely: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2014. Print. Lee, Felicia R. “He Cried Out ‘Black Power,’ Then Left for Africa—Peniel E. Joseph on His Biography of Stokely Carmichael.” The New York Times (2014). Web. 3 September 2014. NAACP—National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “NAACP—Interactive Timeline.” NAACP. NAACP 2009-2014. www.naacphistory.org. Web. 4 September 2014. Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Making of America. New York: Collier Books, 1969. Print. Schmidt Campbell, Mary. “The History of Collecting at The Studio Museum in Harlem.” The Permanent Collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem 1982: 5-6. Print. Sellers, Cleveland with Robert Terrell. “From Black Consciousness to Black Power.” The Eyes on the Civil Rights Reader. Ed. Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. 279-82. Print. The Studio Museum in Harlem. “The Studio Museum in Harlem.” The Studio Museum in Harlem. studiomuseum.org 2010. Web. 19 August 2014. Voting Rights Act of 1965. 89th Congress. First Session. Public Law 89-110. 79 Stat. 438. 1965. Print. Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Fourth Printing ed. New York: The Dial Press, 1978. Print. Wright, Richard. “The Man Who Lived Underground.” Eight Men. 1944. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. 19-84. Print. Wylly, Campbell, and Irene Gordon. “New York’s Newest Museum.” Members Newsletter. Vol. No. 3 (Jan.-Feb. 1969): 2-3. Print.

C OMMENTS i

Underlining the constructedness of concepts like Black, White, Architecture, and Space, I use capital letters throughout the text.

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ii

iii

iv

v

vi

The sociologist Denise Ferreira da Silva avers in her book how the racial was invented, how it still permeates modern thought to create knowledge and power whereby global Spaces are organized; see Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Borderlines. Vol. 27. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. In the footnote Capetti draws several references which are worth noting, since they suggest a complex reading of Wright’s signifying: “The initials of the protagonist’s name are those of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose novella Notes from Underground (1864) inspired Wright. They are also the initials of Frederick Douglass, whose name is synonymous with the quest for freedom of the fugitive-slave narrative tradition. Fred Daniels’ name recalls as well the biblical prophet Daniel, whose quest Wright's protagonist shares. And by way of elision, Freddaniels’ name, and especially his adventures into the aesthetic underground, invoke, ironically perhaps, the quest for freedom and ‘autonomy’ of modern art.” Willie Ricks shouted the question to the audience after Stokely Carmichael had been released from his 27th arrest and delivered an emotional speech at a rally in Greenwood on 17 June 1966; quoted from: Sellers, Cleveland with Robert Terrell. “From Black Consciousness to Black Power.” The Eyes on the Civil Rights Reader. Ed. Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Print. 279-82. 282. The excerpt in the reader was previously published in Cleveland Seller’s autobiography, The River of No Return (1973). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization, founded in 1909. “A multi-racial and multireligious group of social and political activists,” the founders were W.E.B. DuBois, Mary White Walling, Ida B. Wells, Henry Moskowitz and William English Walling; qtd. in NAACP—National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “NAACP—Interactive Timeline.” NAACP. NAACP 2009-2014. Web. 4 September 2014. See Davis, Angela. An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1974. Print. and Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Fourth Printing ed. New York: The Dial Press, 1978. Print.

Parasitic Simulacrum Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, and the Urban ‘Creative Class’ W ALTER G RÜNZWEIG

De-industrialization and ensuing urban shrinkage have dramatically transformed city spaces around the globe from the American Rust Belt to the Ruhr Valley. The results have been so devastating that the very spatial foundations of modern industrial society and culture require re-examination. In the past decade, Richard Florida has emerged as a high priest of urban transformation, proclaiming the ascent of the “Creative Class.” Wherever politicians worry about the future—or present—of their city, region, or nation— and that includes Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, as well as Florida’s most important stomping ground, Toronto—Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class is carefully studied. With enough money, the author, then turned consultant, is invited to make his pronouncements on urban spaces and to formulate therapies for speedy recovery. It is awe-inspiring to think of the billions of municipal, regional and national dollars, euros, pounds, and various other currencies spent in the past decade in order to change the face of cities and regions around the world based on this single book. The book, originally published in 2002, came out in a new edition entitled The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited in 2012. Together with Cities and the Creative Class (2005), it has been widely criticized by urban planners and other specialists for its lack of complexity and cut-throat, neo-liberal competitiveness (John Montgomery, Jamie Peck, indirectly also Charles Landry, whose name does not appear in either of the two editions of Florida’s book). The present contribution approaches the Florida phenomenon from the angle of American Cultural Studies and cultural criticism. It will show that the very term “creative class” does not originate with Florida but derives in fact from the father of

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American cultural thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, in its modern reified incarnation, it has lost its characteristic critical Emersonian bite.

R ICHARD F LORIDA’ S C REATIVE C LASS AND AMERICAN C ULTURAL S TUDIES Florida is not so much a researcher, an economist, a planner or even—what he most desires to be—a public intellectual. Rather, his books are primary literature and he is a storyteller in the squarest American (and Americanist) tradition. Critics have observed that much of what he is saying is not new, formulated earlier by visionary intellectuals such as Peter Drucker—whom Florida quotes amply in his book (29f., 68f.)—but I believe his success derives most significantly from his ability to reformulate these familiar ideas as, or to adapt them to, American narratives. According to Richard Florida, a fundamental shift has taken place in— predominantly though not exclusively—Western societies since the 1970s and 1980s. We have long heard that the industrial structure of our society has given way to the service sector—with all of the attending problems, especially an increase in inequality in our societies. Richard Florida’s message, in keeping with the fundamental optimism of American culture—a superficial thesis which may be permitted to a European Americanist—is that this negative development is joined by a much more positive phenomenon, the rise of the “Creative Class.” With the decline of the traditional industrial workforce, the number of people entering the underpaid service sector increases, but a new segment then emerges, which Florida calls the creatives. Within this creative class, he differentiates between a “super-creative” core of artists, composers, designers, media and communication workers, and researchers on the one hand and other creative professionals in areas such as law, teaching, health-care, business, and finance on the other. He claims that some 30-plus percent of working Americans, up to 50 million people, are employed or work in this sector. These are of course not new job categories—we have always had poets and physicians and professors, and the fact that more people nowadays work in software development and the media hardly creates a fundamentally new situation. What is indeed novel is Florida’s identification of them as a “new class.” The story Florida maps out, one must admit, is a good one. It has a significant degree of narrativity, and even though his narrative contains crises and denouements, as all good narratives do, it promises a happy ending, at least for some. The society produced by the ascent of the creative class will be a just

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and, more importantly, a diverse one. Florida’s book probably has become known best by its propagation of the so-called “gay index” of American cities, although the term is not Florida’s own. The creative class is characterized by a new sense of tolerance towards gays, which he connects with openness to diversity at large: Rather, we see a strong and vibrant gay community as a solid leading indicator of a place that is open to many different kinds of people. If gays feel comfortable in a place, then immigrants and ethnic minorities probably will, too, not to mention eggheads, eccentrics, and all the other non-white-bread types who are the sources of new ideas. (238)

Apart from the fact that this list creates, quite literally, astonishing bedfellows, what is most fascinating is that the diversity spearheaded by gays and lesbians— in Florida’s book more gays than lesbians—is not primarily a political and emancipatory goal; rather, it becomes an economic asset because gays, foreigners, eggheads, and eccentrics develop a lifestyle in urban communities which will bring jobs and wealth into city centers or other privileged urban locations. Political correctness finally translates into financial success and in fact becomes an economic necessity: a latter-day version of poetic justice. Asians “are by far the most heavily represented in Creative class work” (55) and women make up the majority of this class. The only group, unfortunately, among the traditionally disadvantaged segments, who seem to have less of a chance here, are African Americans, a fact which Florida deplores but fails to integrate into his thesis or, ultimately, explain. This creative class, according to Florida’s manifesto, has specific qualities which are very familiar to an Americanist. They “exhibit a strong preference for individuality and self-expression” and are “reluctant to conform to organizational or institutional directives” (56). In fact, he calls the creatives, in the best American tradition, non-conformists, without forgetting to explain how capitalism integrates these non-conformists, indeed makes them indispensable for new growth: Capitalism has expanded its reach to capture the talents of heretofore excluded groups of eccentrics and non-conformists […]. The creative individual is no longer viewed as an iconoclast. He—or she—is the new mainstream. (7)

Florida has indeed happy news for Americans, and especially for Americanists. He has adopted our various ways of explaining American culture and turned them into criteria of success, efficiency and productivity of a new society.

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Florida’s interpretation of the Sixties, especially with regard to California, is very instructive and, at first, surprising: “The great cultural watershed of the 1960s, as it turned out, was not Woodstock, but something that had evolved at the other end of the continent. It was Silicon Valley. This place in the very heart of the San Francisco Bay area became the proving ground for the new ethos of creativity” (169). Various “open, diverse, and culturally creative” places became “technologically creative” ones, “birthing high-tech firms and industries” (175). Thus, we are finding ourselves now, as so often in American cultural histor(iograph)y, “at the dawn of a broad and fundamental transformation” (400) The utopian synthesis of human self-interest and the economy, a dream that underpinned not only Marx’s thinking but, in a different way, the history of the development of capitalism, is at the core of Florida’s thesis: “Today, for perhaps the first time in human history, we have the opportunity to align economic and human development” (400). With Robert Fogel, he calls this process “The Fourth Great Awakening,” (83) and, in the characteristic formulae of the Jeremiad, he states: The old regime has left us with a degraded environment, a broken financial system, and a sclerotic political culture in thrall to special interests and its own prejudices. Two decades and counting after the fall of communism and the so-called end of history, the West is as culturally, economically, and politically riven as it’s ever been—but its potential is literally without limits […]. But the clock of history never stops ticking. Sooner or later, some city or nation is going to figure out what it takes to fully engage the full creative potential of its people. If we want to gain the advantages of precedence, we need to accelerate that process. Our future prosperity depends upon it. Our time, as they say, is now. (400)

It is hard to decide whether Florida, son of an Italian-American immigrant family, imagines himself to be the Karl Marx of the creative class or its prophet. Maybe the difference is not so significant. The point is that his vision seems to be democratic and egalitarian: “We’re all creatives” (119), he announces, or at least we can become creative if we want to or if the circumstances allow it. The traditional signs of difference are disappearing; instead of white-collar and bluecollar workers, we now have the “no collars,” the new class wearing t-shirts (101), a dress democracy, because what this creative class likes least are dress codes or any workplace regimentation. Rather, these creatives have ingenious ways of combining their work with their aspirations in leisure time, which they need more than other workers to be—somewhat tautologically—creative. What is needed is a “creatification” of the economy and of society at large, and this

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includes the service sector, which is, significantly, though it is uncertain whether Frederick Jackson Turner foresaw it, “the last frontier of innovation in our society” (388). It is not surprising that a certain brand of anti-intellectualism is a part of the message. Although the university generally is, for Florida, a “Creative Hub” (309), “college-educated experts” frequently “ruin” the economy (34) because “schooling often inhibits and retards creativity” (41). Altogether, “elementary and high-school education” is “badly broken” (390) in Florida’s view and it needs to be, unsurprisingly, rebuilt “from the ground up—and on the principles of creativity and the Creative Economy.” (391). In spite of this basic egalitarianism, and in many ways complementary to it, the new class subscribes to the principles of “meritocracy” (57); they are “ambi– tious and want to move up” (57) though they are doing so in a new—a crea– tive—way. The Protestant work ethic is replaced by a “creative ethos” (15), and the rewards are oftentimes self-fulfilling and intrinsic, emphasizing flexibility, self-actualization and workplace challenge, at times even post-material (61, 70). As a result of this newly emerging lifestyle, it is equally unsurprising that the creative elite likes to move to and concentrate in places which are to their liking, where they can “have a life” and not only a “job” (for example San Antonio rather than Pittsburgh). As a result, we have a veritable migration that is “as significant as the historical migrations of pioneers westward, of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, and of postwar families from cities to suburbs to exurbs” (355). This “spatial sorting” (355), of course, is a great challenge, especially to mayors who are intent on facilitating the right mix of bourgeois and bohemian (a word that appears very often in the book), the right “flow” (here Florida actually makes use of Mihály Csíkszentmihály, 75), and the mix of the 3 T’s—Technology, Talents and Tolerance—, which will either lure people to such places or convince them to stay and decide not to move to San Antonio. The mild irony of this exposition of Florida’s thinking should not blind us to the fact that Florida is taken very seriously around the world by those who are convinced they are going to be among the small group of winners rather than the mass of losers. A more substantive critique is required to reveal the problems of his model. The most fundamental argument brought forth is, of course, that Florida is simply giving a new name to a not-so-new situation. Thus, he is simply lumping together a number of professions and modes of employment, which have always existed, into a new, arbitrary category. According to that critique, his whole thesis is merely an unsubstantiated construct.

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In an article in The Daily Beast of 20 March 2013 (“Richard Florida Concedes the Limits of the Creative Class”), Joel Kotkin questioned whether Florida could uphold his claims in view of the fact that large parts of deindustrialized spaces seem to be unsuitable for his model and whether the suburbs maybe do not deserve more attention. Kotkin voices an obvious weakness in Florida’s thesis—and this is where I believe he encounters fundamental contradictions and ambiguities—namely that not every city in the United States, nor every country in the world, can be turned into a creative hub or solve its problems by introducing a creative economy. Towards the end of the book, Florida calls for—another joy for Americanists—a “creative compact” in society, which will support the creatives but also require a social consciousness and responsibility on the part of this new class. Because the service sector, according to Florida’s analysis, is also growing, it will be hard to change the whole society and economy to align with the privileged and elitist status of the core creative class and, to some degree, of the larger group of creatives. To be fair, Florida does admit to the growing inequality of the societies associated with his model and acknowledges the collateral lack of inclusion of, for example, African Americans. His proposed solution is to call for more voluntary solidarity and justice on the part of the haves without explaining how this is going to come about. Just because these creatives are a more colorful, seemingly non-conformist bunch, and are growing and getting more powerful, this does not mean that society is becoming more just. It is not even necessarily becoming more inclusive. The new world he is sketching—his critics have used delightful terms such as “cappuccino urban politics” (Jamie Peck, quoted in Florida, 317)—is rather naïve and, eventually, will be become as conformist and standardized as the old one, if it has not done so already. The street art venues, second hand shops, cafés and parks, as Florida himself self-critically notes, set new standards, a new “mainstream:” “by making nonconformity mandatory,” the new creative class “instilled a new kind of conformity” (61). His own strategy to get out of this bind is unclear. Two terms he belabors are those of “authenticity” and “experience,” but apart from the fact that they are in principle problematic from the point of view of current theory, he does a poor, and involuntarily self-ironic, job of explaining them: The Creative Class is experience driven. My interviews and focus groups reveal a considerable orientation to active and authentic experiences that participants can structure themselves. In practical everyday terms, this means running, rock climbing, or cycling rather than watching a game on TV; it means travel to interesting, remote and even risky

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locations that engage one physically or intellectually; it means the purchase of unique antique pieces or original midcentury modern furniture, as opposed to just buying something to sit on. (135f.)

Whichever “midcentury.” It is almost unfair to quote such thoughtless passages, but there are many more in his book revealing not only a lack of a theoretical grounding but also an unsophisticated understanding of the notion of culture and cultural processes altogether. While a cultural studies critique will hardly matter to technocrats in city governments around the world, it is important to formulate one, if only to dispute Florida’s self-proclaimed role as a defender of culture. It may be legitimate for cities to do whatever seems right to improve their situations (although I agree with Florida’s critics that his model is not really a solution to the challenge of vast international/global de-industrialized spaces), but it is certainly not legitimate to do so in the name of culture. The ideal “street scene”—Florida here calls upon Walter Benjamin’s Flaneur—for the creative elite is “eclectic” (151), and this eclecticism he sees everywhere and comments on approvingly: “Think of the proliferation of hyphenated music genres like Afro-Celtic, Balkan-Jazz, and Hip-Hop-Klezmer” (151). Hybridity is his chief criterion of good culture, as Florida explains (via literary history): [O]ne could argue that the literary DJ who really pioneered sampling was T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, a poem built largely by stringing together quotations and allusions from every corner of the world’s literature. Today, however, eclecticism is rampant […] and a taste for it is a social marker that can usually be counted on to distinguish a Creative Class person. Cultural intermixing, when done right, can be a powerful creative stimulus. (151)

This surprising contribution to Eliot criticism, a rather butchered attempt to engage in cultural theory, reveals the ultimate commodification of culture inherent in Florida’s project, which, following Italian media theorist Matteo Pasquinelli, I will refer to as a “parasitic simulacrum.” An activist working in the Operaio framework, Pasquinelli coined the term in his article “Immaterial Civil War: Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism,” based in part on David Harvey’s analysis of the City of Barcelona where “creative workers […] produce symbolic value for the real estate economy […] as they suffer [from] the housing price[s] of Barcelona” (6). Pasquinelli then adds: [Florida’s] so-called ‘creative class’ is nothing but a simulacrum of the collective symbolic capital to raise the marks of distinction of a given city. The ‘creative class’ is the

88 | W ALTER GRÜNZWEIG collective symbolic capital transformed into an anthropomorphic brand and a monopoly rent applied to distinctive parts of the society (‘creative class’), of the territory (‘creative city’), of the city itself ‘creative district’). The ‘creative class’ is a parasitic simulacrum of the social creativity that is detached from the precariat and attached to the upper class. (6)

The allusion to Jean Baudrillard is clear and the meaning of the connection is more complex. On the one hand, the creative class itself is a simulacrum, i.e. these creative workers cannot be differentiated from truly creative personalities such as, say, actual artists. On the other hand, one may extend this designation from the class itself to their labor, which—and this is apparent in Florida’s book—in their essential similarity can no longer fulfill traditional paramount criteria of creativity such as uniqueness and originality. Pasquinelli departs from Baudrillard’s rather pessimistic outlook, however, providing a glimmer of hope by sketching out a strategy of resistance. With reference to the real estate market, he anchors his discussion of the creative class in a very concrete economic context. One could, of course, also point to the whole issue of gentrification, which is invariably, even according to Florida himself, associated with the model. The symbolic capital of the creative class is a simulacrum in that this creativity, its cultural work, is a mere brand, anthropomorphic, i.e. represented by living human beings in an area tautologically designated “creative.” The “Creative class” is thus a symbolically charged notion. Moreover—and I really do consider this term ingenious in this connection—the class is “parasitic” in that it hijacks the general, “social” creativity from the working people at large and attaches it in a privileged way to those who profit from it, namely, according to Pasquinelli, real estate speculators. Also, and this is important, Pasquinelli points out, using the Barcelona creatives, that the creative class is by no means homogeneous. Instead, they themselves are victims of their own status and the fantasies connected to it. A political strategy then would require identifying alternative ways to work with this symbolic capital. The crucial question for Pasquinelli is “how to develop a symbolic capital of resistance that cannot be exploited as another mark of distinction?” (7) A form of resistance […] is an assault on the myth of the ‘creative city’ rather than wannabe-radical reactions that can contribute to making it even more exclusive. If the people want to reclaim that symbolic surplus-value vandalised by a few speculators, all we can imagine is a renegotiation of the collective symbolic capital. (8)

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O THER N EW C LASSES : T HORSTEIN V EBLEN AND M ILOVAN Ĉ ILAS The use of “class” as a central organizing term in his book, including the title, may be the most inventive (or creative!) move on Florida’s part. The author himself is proud to have re-established the usefulness of the class category, proudly quoting the late New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp that “just by daring to use the word class,” Florida “changed the framework for discussing social and economic inequality” (366). The adaptation of a Marxist term in a non-Marxist, i.e. non-class struggle, framework, is not exactly new. In Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), a title one is easily reminded of when encountering Florida’s book, the notion of class is disassociated from a productive context and is, in fact, defined by the absence of its productivity. “Conspicuous consumption” designates a lifestyle reminiscent of several aspects of the life of the creative class. Florida refers to Veblen once in his book, though, in being careful to conceal his intellectual indebtedness, not to its title. In fact, when quoting Veblen, Florida contrasts the anti-Bourgeois “bohemianism” supposedly characteristic of the creative class with the “gross materialistic tastes” of the “new capitalist bourgeoisie […] more concerned with amassing wealth than with advancing the arts or becoming culturally illiterate” (162). But this reading overlooks the central notion of conspicuous consumption, which is as significant a part of Florida’s urban street art culture, his fascination with brands and status products, and experiential adventurism, as that of the late nineteenth century Brahmin bourgeoisie. In fact, Veblen’s notion of the wealthy class’s “conspicuous leisure” is where we have to look in order to describe the behaviour of the “creative class.” In their undifferentiated mixture (or simply “conflation”) of leisure and work, they might more specifically be compared to Veblen’s “subsidiary or derivative leisure class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious leisure for the behoof of the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure class” (59). This demonstrates the dependency of the “creative class” on another group, which is indeed calling the shots, and to which the “creative class” is, in Pasquinelli’s words, “attached” (6). After all, as Veblen has it, “[t]he leisure of the servant is not his own leisure” (60). Another forerunner, probably unknown to Florida but nevertheless significant for the semantic history of the category, is Milovan
ilas’s The New Class. Published in 1957 out of
ilas’s experience as an anti-Nazi partisan fighter, communist revolutionary, politician and eventual dissident in Yugoslavia, The New Class, while less in circulation today, was rather popular in

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its cold war context. Well acquainted with socialists throughout Eastern Europe—including Stalin himself, with whom he had extensive discussions—
ilas analysed the emergence of a “new class” in the socialist countries, which controlled the means of production but were not its owners: “The new class obtains its power, privileges, ideology, and its customs from one specific form of ownership—collective ownership—which the class administers in the name of the nation and society” (45). Although Florida’s creative class does not base its power in a central administration, there is a similarity in the way that, in spite of a lack of individual ownership of the means of production, it does exert a kind of hegemony over the majority of the population. Its power is grounded not so much in its “creativity” than in the use and management of social resources in the name of creativity. The same paradox between the messianic promise of a better society and increasing inequality is also at the heart of
ilas’s new class: “While promising to abolish social differences, it must always increase them by acquiring the products of the nation’s workshops and granting privileges to its adherents” (66).
ilas analyzed the special demands this class made on its people to glorify its role with 1st of May marches and declarations of loyalty and parades, amounting to the self-aggrandisement of a bureaucratic caste with all the qualities of a new class, albeit in a system claiming to aim at the abolition of class. There is also a conspicuous leisure quality in all of it. With Florida,
ilas’s account shares the slow emergence of a consciousness among the members of this class in their new role: “Its consciousness had to develop before its economic and physical powers, because the class had not taken root in the life of the nation” (38). This class viewed its role in reaction to the world from an idealistic point of view: [T]he new class is also the most deluded and least conscious of itself. Every private capitalist or feudal lord was conscious of the fact that he belonged to a special discernible social category […]. But [a member of the new class] is not conscious of the fact that he belongs to a new ownership class, for he does not consider himself an owner and does not take into account the special privileges he enjoys. He thinks that he belongs to a group with prescribed ideas, aims, attitudes, and roles. (59)

We can do worse than make the perceptive insights of a Yugoslav partisan available to historically position our new creative class.

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T HE O RIGIN

OF THE

C REATIVE C LASS

The effect of surprise engendered by the use of the term “class,” as I have stated earlier, may have contributed more than anything to the success of Florida’s book. At times it seems as though Florida—as the inventor of the term and thereby the class—wants to establish himself as a part and in fact a leader of the super-creative core. Along with antecedents such as Veblen and
ilas, who anticipated his unusual use of the term class, Florida’s indebtedness goes even further back. The celebrated term was first used by the prominent American philosopher and cultural critic Ralph Waldo Emerson in a not so well-known essay entitled “Power,” which became part of the 1860 collection The Conduct of Life. It is only in its Emersonian context that Florida’s use of this term can be fully appreciated. Altogether, “Power” is not a very pleasant essay. It shows Emerson’s connection to Nietzsche—not only as an intellectual next of kin with regard to his aphoristic, self-reflexive language and radical cultural criticism, but also concerning the superman discourse that would later be abused by the Nazis. In this long essay, Emerson divides human beings into two classes, the strong and the weak, less to disparage the weak—who nonetheless display “imbecility […] [are] victims of gravity, custom, and fear” (Power 46)—than to explore the quality of the strong, those with excess energy, or the “plus men” as he repeatedly calls them. The term, which Florida and the many admirers who cele– brate his originality seem to have overlooked, appears in a key passage in the first third of the essay: In every company, there is not only the active and passive sex, but, in both men and wo– men, a deeper and more important sex of the mind, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class. (49)

This sentence is remarkable for a number of reasons. First of all, Emerson squarely refuses, in an essay on power, to follow the familiar differentiation along gender lines—which he was not above doing elsewhere. There is the italicized “sex of the mind” which goes beyond the biological differences between women and men, in which—and Emerson reiterates this by saying “the inventive or creative class of both men and women”—both female and male partake equally. Secondly, and more importantly for an evaluation of Florida’s “creative class,” he equates power with creativity and inventiveness and not simply with brute force—quite in contradistinction to the abusive misappropriation of an Emersonian Nietzsche by the Nazis.

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As if to anticipate Florida, Emerson contextualizes his notion of creativity and the “creative class” in his characterization of the city. Of course, the author of “Nature” has problems with the urban environment. In spite of his Romantic and Transcendentalist repudiation of the Enlightenment, he at times still seems to subscribe to a version of Jeffersonian pastoral “agrarianism”: That uncorrupted behavior which we admire in animals and in young children belongs to him, to the hunter, the sailor,—the man who lives in the presence of nature. Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What possesses interest for us is the naturel of each, his constitutional excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely; we cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it; and it is this which the conversation with Nature cherishes and guards. (“Farming” 138)

This is the classical Jeffersonian criticism of the urban environment turned cultural. Country life is “uncorrupted,” the city turns individuals into “artificial” ‘talkers’ and ‘entertainers.’ The surprising word naturel seems to suggest creativity. But for the later Emerson—the essays I am quoting here are from Conduct of Life and from the collection Society and Solitude published in 1870—the city is a phenomenon that is there to stay and needs to be reckoned with. Thus, the farm acts as an “asylum” in “reserve” for those who fail in the city—for whatever reasons: All men keep the farm in reserve as an asylum where, in case of mischance, to hide their poverty,—or a solitude, if they do not succeed in society […]. Poisoned by town life and town vices, the sufferer resolves: ‘Well, my children, whom I have injured, shall go back to the land, to be recruited and cured by that which should have been my nursery, and now shall be their hospital.’ […] He [the farmer] is a slow person, timed to nature, and not to city watches. (“Farming” 124)

Thus, as the dialectical title of Society and Solitude suggests, there is a place for the city in the Emersonian universe and it has to do with the assembly of creative minds: Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of railroads is to unite the advantages of town and country life, neither of which we can spare. A man should live in or near a large town, because, let his own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as much of agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all the citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and drag the most improbable hermit within its walls some day in the year. In town, he can find the swimming-school,

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the gymnasium, the dancing-master, the shooting-gallery, opera, theatre, and panorama; the chemist’s shop, the museum of natural history; the gallery of the fine arts; the national orators, in their turn; foreign travellers, the libraries, and his club. In the country, he can find solitude and reading, manly labor, cheap living, and his old shoes; moors for game, hills for geology, and groves for devotion. (“Culture” 128)

The (self-)ironic tone—in the country, a person can find one’s “old shoes”— shows that for Emerson, too, social networks are significant for the creative mind. So are cultural opportunities, especially of the metropolitan areas: It is the interest of all men, that there should be Vaticans and Louvres full of the noble works of art; British Museums, and French Gardens of Plants, Philadelphia Academies of Natural History, Bodleian, Ambrosian, Royal, Congressional Libraries. (“Wealth” 83)

Yet, one should not—as Florida is doing—confuse the cultural opportunities of cities with culture itself. In a bitterly cynical (and self-referential) commentary on Boston and New York, Emerson rejects the false identification of the great names with the creativeness of the city: In Boston, the question of life is the names of some eight or ten men. Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. Greenough? Have you heard Everett, Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker? Have you talked with Messieurs Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees? Then you may as well die. In New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty. Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers, – two or three scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers? New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence. Nor do we expect any body other than a faint copy of these heroes. (“Culture” 117)

Rather than celebrating an urban haute volée as a significant cultural force, Emerson emphasizes the expressive power of the creative class. In this way, he goes far beyond Florida’s 400 pages which provide no definition of creativity— my strongest criticism of the book—beyond saying that “the highest order of creative work” produces “new forms or designs that are readily transferable and widely useful—such as designing a consumer product that can be manufactured and sold; coming up with a theorem or strategy that can be applied in many cases; or composing music that can be performed again and again” (38). That, indeed, is the sucked orange.

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Such a commodified definition of creativity, the total instrumentalization of art and culture as location factors, was, unfortunately, to be expected from Florida, and it is here that the contrastive analysis with Emerson’s urban creative class is most useful—and where American Studies can provide a useful critique of Florida’s concept. Creativity is never a result of living in an embellished part of a fashionable city, but a desperate, and thereby often productive, human struggle with the material environment. It is an “aboriginal might” which “under conditions of supreme refinement” (“Power” 62) leads to the most sophisticated art. Compare Emerson’s representation of the struggle of one of the most creative artists in world culture with Florida’s creatives in gentrified urbanity: When Michael Angelo was forced to paint the Sistine Chapel in fresco, of which art he knew nothing, he went down into the Pope’s gardens behind the Vatican, and with a shovel dug out ochres, red and yellow, mixed them with glue and water with his own hands, and having, after many trials, at last suited himself, climbed his ladders, and painted away, week after week, month after month, the sibyls and the prophets. He surpassed his successors in rough vigor, as much as in purity of intellect and refinement. He was not crushed by his one picture left unfinished at last. (“Power” 62)

It does not matter that this might not do much justice to “Michael’s,” as Emerson democratically calls him, historically verifiable working habits, but it does anchor creativity and the representatives of the creative class in something other than the ability to sell a new product. One may justly deplore the “excess of virility” (“Power” 59) with which Emerson describes the “plus” men—and women!—but the “coarse energy” (55) of the “affirmative class” (62), as he calls these creatives, has something of the “authenticity” which Florida wishes for but can never convincingly demonstrate in his creative class. In fact, as if to argue against Florida, Emerson rejects the notion that creative human beings can “live on nuts, herb-tea, and elegies;” they “cannot read novels, and play whist; cannot satisfy all their wants at the Thursday Lecture, or the Boston Atheneaum” (58). Rather: “Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man” (“Culture” 129). After all: “The city is always recruited from the country” (“Farming” 126). Florida’s central idea, that cities need to embellish themselves and get ready to either attract the creative elite or to retain them, is rejected and it is almost uncanny how Emerson seems to answer to a book authored some 150 years after the publication of his essay:

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The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be supplied by any labor, art, or concert. It is like the climate, which easily rears a crop, which no glass, or irrigation, or tillage, or manures can elsewhere rival. It is like the opportunity of a city like New York, or Constantinople, which needs no diplomacy to force capital or genius or labor to it. They come of themselves, as the waters flow to it. (“Power” 48)

Emerson uses these cities metaphorically—just like New York or Istanbul are permanent magnets, a powerful creative person will be attractive through his or her work and personality and does not need to be improved through clever recipes. But in the context of Florida’s book, Emerson’s image becomes tenor— New York or Constantinople do need to be doctored up to become simulacra for the creative class. And according to the logic of Emerson’s essay, these “Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of a bold and manly cast” (“Power “56). This is not just true for the metropolises—the metrocities being Florida’s main stage—but for all places where “wild liberty breeds iron conscience” and “natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far” (“Power” 55). Emerson’s conceptualization is in direct opposition to Baudrillard’s famous pronouncement on Disneyland and American urban space at large as simulacra: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. (175)

While Florida provides the rationale and the personnel for Baudrillard’s dystopian simulated cityscape, Emerson—and in a way Pasquinelli—provides the potential for a critical perspective. In fact, this is where Emerson’s critique connects to that of Pasquinelli who, using the example of Barcelona, demands a shift of symbolic capital from the parasites to the people: Personal power, freedom, and the resources of nature strain every faculty of every citizen. We prosper with such vigor, that, like thrifty trees, which grow in spite of ice, lice, mice, and borers, so we do not suffer from the profligate swarms that fatten on the national treasury. The huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the strength of the constitution […]. The rough and ready style which belongs to a people of sailors, foresters, farmers, and mechanics, has its advantages. (“Power” 53)

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Whichever way we want to define creativity, we do not want it to serve the economic goals of parasites. My critique of Florida’s book can also be understood as proof of the continuing relevance and vitality of Emerson’s (and Transcendentalist) cultural—and social—criticism. Their legacy in American Studies, a cultural-political dynamic stretching from Emerson and Whitman to F.O. Matthiessen to our days, remains a great resource to oppose the everincreasing commodification of our culture. This legacy equally demonstrates how important it is to view the urban transformations of the present in a historical perspective.

W ORKS C ITED
ilas, Milovan. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. New York: Praeger, 1957. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” In: J.B. Selected Writings. 2nd ed., rev. and exp. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. 169-187. Print. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Culture.” In: R.W.E. The Conduct of Life. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. 113-144. Print. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Farming.” In: R.W.E. Society and Solitude. Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870. 123-138. Print. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Power.” In: R.W.E. The Conduct of Life. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. 43-70. Print. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Wealth.” In: R.W.E. The Conduct of Life. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. 71-110. Print. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Perseus, 2002. Print. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited. New York: Basic Books, 2012. Print. Harvey, David. “The Art of Rent: Globalization and the Commodification of Culture.” In: D.H. Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge, 2001. 394-411. Print. Kotkin, Joel. “Richard Florida Concedes the Limits of the Creative Class.” The Daily Beast. Web. 20 March 2013.

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Pasquinelli, Matteo. “Immaterial War: Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism.” Web. 23 July 2015 Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Modern Library, 1934. Print.

Mapping EthniCity

Negotiating Germanness after World War II Transformations of German Culture in Postwar New York City I NSA N EUMANN

Although the World Wars were not fought on continental American soil, their effects, including the large number of soldiers who lost their lives in battle, did not stop at the North American borders of the United States. Places with a strong German community, including New York City, “had seen once solid German regions dissolve under the secular, political, social, or psychological pressure of daily life” during World War I (Rippley 217). This pressure could be discerned in “the language that marked Germans as the target of venom during and following World War I” (Rippley 221). There was general public disapproval of all things German on the one hand, and there were government-sanctioned actions on the other: for example, “making it a crime to speak German in public, […] [and] removing […] German books from the libraries” (Niers 405). This situation created a hostile environment for those who still made their German origin a priority regardless of actual political involvement: “Many states took German off their school curricula, German music or opera was no longer performed, American towns with German names were renamed, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage and hamburgers became Salisbury steaks” (Raab/Wirrer 16). Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan point out that “the Germanophobia of America during the First World War is, of course, notorious. It had limits in New York where, for instance, German was not driven from the public school curriculum, but the attraction of things German was marred” (312). Nonetheless, this did not mean that in New York City discrimination did not take place or that New York City’s different German communities continued to exist in a vacuum that supported unrestricted celebration of its national origins. The diverse cityscape of New York had been undergoing transformations for many decades. Groups of different ethnic and cultural origins claimed one neighborhood, relocated,i expanded, or shrank with the varying influx of new

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immigrants and the departure of residents to more mixed neighborhoods. Still, the development of the urban community of German Americans and Germans in New York City during and after World War II differed from the changes it underwent in times of more moderate political circumstances. During World War II, it was not only the influence of English-speaking society in the United States that prompted the need to tone down one’s Germanness—particularly in public settings. “The revulsion against Nazism extended indiscriminately to things German. Thereafter, German Americans, as shocked by the Nazis as any, were disinclined to make overmuch of their national origin” (Glazer/Moynihan 312). While it is undisputed that German nationalist organizations like the German Bund and other clubs supportive of the Nazi cause tried to establish themselves in the United States, this by no means implies that most German Americans were supportive of Nazism. Still, many German families were sent to internment camps—on Ellis Island, for example (Fox xvi-xviii)—and, even after their release, their lives had changed to a degree that would discourage their identification with Germany. As one former internee stated: “I couldn’t get myself to go down into the subway, although I had grown up in New York. I walked, and I walked, because I ‘knew’ everybody could tell that I was an enemy alien who had just been released” (Fox 216). Public rejection, the aftermath of systematic isolation and shame for the atrocities of the World Wars, particularly World War II, did not create a favorable environment for the rebuilding of a culture the local basis of which had been strongly confined during previous years. Still, this did not mean that German culture as it had existed in nineteenth-century New York vanished from the metropolis entirely. This essay will explore multiple layers of the German cultural presence in the city; it will illustrate the public, semi-public, and private spaces of New York City in which German culture was still present. It should be noted that neither in the nineteenth nor in the twentieth century (nor at any other point in time) was there a homogenous, singular German community in Germany or in the United States. Many different communities considered themselves German; however, they were unique and distinct in their various customs and traditions. Still, they shared core features, including the German language and traditions that were common in more than one German region. While acknowledging that there never was nor is a homogenous German community, this essay focuses on examples of “German” identity in New York City in the postwar years. It will point out where the different German communities lived, what these communities were built on, what causes they supported, and what they deemed “German” culture in New York City after World War II, during the late 1940s and the 1950s. My essay will include examples from the

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public realm such as the Steuben Parade, semi-public events held in German organizations and clubs, meetings and celebrations, as well as insights into families, their routines and traditions. Some social practices became confined to limited spaces. For example, a family’s native language might be spoken in the home, a space only accessible to a limited and select number of people, while the family members would converse in English—also among each other—whenever they left the private space of their home. Membership in a singing society may only become a salient marker of the identity an individual espouses within a certain space (i.e. the club house of the society). This essay’s categories of private, semi-public, and public spaces seek to identify and study the multi-leveled expressions of cultural identity in the 1940s and the 1950s, exposing aspects of cultural life that were not necessarily visible to the rest of the urban community, but which still served as a foundation for many individuals’ experiences of their “German” identity. Of course, the three levels this essay establishes as categories for the investigation of a “German” experience did not exist in isolation from one another. There was interaction and exchange between the private, semi-public and public arenas, as their actors moved between them. Physical urban spaces— such as buildings, streets and the like—played a role in this interaction and exchange. However, Henri Lefebvre’s concepts in The Production of Space present another approach to space: “We are concerned with logicoepistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias” (11-12). As “physical space has no ‘reality’ without the energy deployed within it” (Lefebvre 13), this essay approaches urban space through the division into three categories of physical—“ideal” (Lefebvre 14)—spaces, in which culture and identity are constructed, which constitute the “energy” that constructs the spaces as social ones. The different spaces or levels thereof are shaped by this energy, or social/cultural transactions. This essay focuses on transformations of the German environment in New York City, but it should be noted that the community did not live and act in isolation from other cultural groups. As part of the mosaic of different traditions and heritages that can be found in the city, the examples presented in this essay seek to illustrate the development of the German community with the awareness that external perception and exchange with the cultural “other,” the non-German elements, are omnipresent factors. Materials and documents relating to the self-representation of people of German heritage, German Americans and Germans living in the United States after the World Wars are less numerous and less well researched than those

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relating to German life in the United States during the nineteenth century. This essay is based on some of the limited sources available, and it looks at the representation of cultural heritage, the otherness of immigrants in New York City and the struggle for status among men and women of German heritage after World War II. The primary sources examined here are texts by members of the German and German American community of New York City. They present a mix of collective visions and individual representations. These sources also illustrate an urban transformation: while Kleindeutschland had been a very distinctive German neighborhood until the General Slocum disaster of 1904,ii the practice of German cultural traditions and the use of the German language receded mostly to the private and semi-public spheres after World War I and even more so after World War II. At that time, Germanness came to be seen by Germans and German Americans in New York City as less of an essential marker of identity and more of a cultural distinction that was foregrounded in some spaces and situations while being irrelevant in others.

P RIVATE S PACES German Culture in the Homes of New York City The privacy of the home allowed new German immigrants and German Americans to express their cultural affiliations more freely than they may have dared under public scrutiny on the streets of New York. In this context, the family represented a group with shared values, and more importantly a shared language apart from English.iii Private spaces allowed for a more intimate approach to personal histories, concepts of belonging and the cultural practices that went with them. This included family traditions that could be perceived as “German,” but were at the same time very specific to the individual family. The German language continued to be important for many Germans in New York after World War II. New immigrantsiv in the 1950s did not necessarily speak English, like Caesar Neumann, who arrived in New York City with his wife and daughter in January of 1956. Immigrating with the help of a pastor who served as sponsor, the family was immediately integrated into a Germanspeaking environment, initially living in their sponsor’s basement (Neumann 200). Their inability to speak English meant that the German language was their only means of communication apart from gestures (Neumann 201). The use of the German language despite the new environment continued to be a priority for these German parents: “Of course, we always spoke German to the children, in

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the beginning because we were not in command of the English language, and later, so they would not lose their knowledge of the German language. And it has thus remained to the present day” (Neumann 204). In Ursula Hegi’s collection of German immigrants’ memories, Tearing the Silence, similar impressions are voiced. “We spoke German at home,” recalls a man by the name of Ulrich,v who migrated to New York around 1954, “and I grew up in a German cultural environment” (Hegi 75). The appreciation of the German culture and language in Ulrich’s home become evident in another story he shares: The first or the second year here, I was supposed to recite a German Christmas poem [at a concert]. For a month my mom worked with me to memorize it. It was awful. When the day came, they put me on this pedestal […] and I sang ‘Jingle Bells.’ My father was furious for days. Here’s this nice German kid who’s going to say this nice German poem, and then the kid escapes into this awful cheap American song ‘Jingle Bells.’ (ibid. 80)

Although the recital took place in a public or semi-public space, the preparation and the subsequent disappointment carried over to the private space of the home in which the young immigrant was confronted with his family’s—particularly his father’s—expectations. In both of the above examples the German language continues to play a dominant role in the families’ lives. But there were also other approaches toward a continued use of German. When Sigrid moved to New Jersey with her (single) mother around 1953, she felt that she was surrounded by “a certain kind of lowbrow German culture” (ibid. 154). As she proclaims, she herself “attached no particular significance to being German and never felt really German other than as a historical fact” (ibid. 154). Upon moving to Brooklyn, she quickly immersed herself in the (predominantly Jewish) community, “developing a Brooklyn accent” rather than speaking German. She explains that she did not “have a [German] community around” her and that, consequently, she found herself not “identifying with either Germany or America” (ibid. 160-61). This example shows how important the social and spatial environment is in the construction of a group identity—with a lack of references and reminders in the immediate surroundings, cultural markers get lost.vi New York City’s urban transformation from a distinctive, ethnically identifiable center of German and German American life, like Kleindeutschland, into ethnically mixed neighborhoods therefore contributed to the relocation of Germanness into private and semi-public spaces as well as to the decrease of its status as an essential marker of identity.

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Nonetheless, there were also families who had lived in the United States and maintained their “German” identities, including their native language, for several generations, even when some generations had barely set foot on the European continent. William E. Bohn, whose first name already suggests a certain level of assimilation to or immersion in American culture, responds to a letter from German relatives in 1952: Du wirst schon ausgefunden haben, dass ich yetzt selten Gelegenheit habe Deutsch zusprechen oder zu-schreiben. Ich hoffe doch, dass wir in Verbindung bleiben können. Wenn du an mich schreiben kannst, werde ich probiren so bald wie möglich zu-antworten. Bitte verziehen die Fehler in dem Gebrauch der Deutschen Sprache. Ich bin gans aus der Uebung.vii (1)

Despite the poor grammar and spelling, the writer, who explains that his own father had come to the United States one hundred years earlier, in 1852 (ibid. 1), can still produce a comprehensible letter in German. Although he points out that he rarely has the opportunity to make use of his language skills, he still appears to have been exposed to German culture and the German language to a significant degree in younger years. Bohn’s interest in keeping in touch with his relatives in Germany, without even considering corresponding in English, also suggests a prolonged interest in his relatives’ lives, despite the very recent war. The context of the letters does not specify why the German side of the family contacted their relative in America, as the letter suggests that the connection had not been a steady one in previous years. While the German relatives simply may have been nostalgic, they might also have wished to emigrate and to establish a network prior to the relocation. Another aspect of identity in the private space of German New York can be found in shared social events and the preparation of specific foods. The rituals of joint meals and of preparing dishes that derived from a specific region or country present vital markersviii of ethnic identity in family homes. Oftentimes, food serves as an immediate and tangible connection to the old country, allowing people to share an experience that is evocative of traditions from their home country. For example, the story of Hinrich Carstensen, who was from the island of Föhr and migrated to New York in 1953 (Götz et al. 37-39), features references not only to his family and leisure time with his wife, but also to a dish from his region in Germany: “Gegen 11 Uhr war Hinrich meistens zu Hause. Die Kinder schliefen und Inge wartete jeden Abend auf ihn, oftmals mit seinem Lieblingsessen: einem Krabbenbrot”ix (ibid. 56).

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Cultural practices in private spaces constitute a basis of a perpetual identity construction, providing a space safe from external judgment by people from outside of one’s community. Particularly when the next generation of a cultural group is born in the host country, they do not have an immediate connection to their parents’ home country and its culture. The home is the prime option for contact with the family’s cultural heritage and literally opens doors to pursuing it in different contexts. In the historical context of the 1950s, the celebration of national and cultural heritage by German Americans often—although not exclusively—evolved in domestic spaces, as these spaces protected the family from the judgement of others. Despite the great importance of private spaces in the discourse of identity construction, private space is also the aspect of German American life that is least documented, perhaps because it has appeared too trivial. This is not only true for the mid-twentieth century, but also for the previous century. On the one hand, families in the 1950s simply may not have considered their everyday life important enough to be written down, regardless of national or cultural identity. Those who decided to keep personal records of their family life, on the other hand, usually did not publish them. While these documents may exist, they are usually not accessible. Perhaps only those who were determined to pass on these traditions wrote and published such accounts. Thus, the available material that deals with personal lives and family stories behind closed doors is rather limited.

S EMI -P UBLIC S PACES The German Community’s Churches, Clubs, and Other Semi-Public Spaces German singing societies were immensely popular during the second half of the nineteenth century in New York City. The Liederkranz and the Arion singing society constituted two of the most prominent examples of this aspect of German culture. Their well-known celebrations and concerts were appreciated by their own community, but also by non-German residents of the city. While some of their concerts were public, not all club business was open to all New Yorkers. Only in 1887/88, the Liederkranz officials agreed to admit a limited number of members to the club who were not of German heritage (Mosenthal 69). Other clubs also hosted events that served as general gatherings and celebrations, but also as job networking meetings and a marriage market (Götz et al. 46). While these events did not take place in exclusively private spaces, they were not

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necessarily easily accessible to outsiders. The same is true for church services and other congregation-related activities: the group as such was somewhat closed, but its activities were visible and, to a certain, degree open to non-members. The Liederkranz singing society has a long-standing history in the United States in general, and in New York City in particular (Wirsing VII). In 1948, the club circulated a history of its efforts to popularize German songs in America. Although published shortly before the 1950s, the club’s wish to commemorate its 100th anniversary can be read as a representation of the New York City Liederkranz’s continuous endeavor to document its presence in the city (Mosenthal ii; The History Committee of the Liederkranz 1847-1947). The collection of one hundred years of club history is a sign of pride in its past achievements. At the same time, it can be read as a means of preserving this history for the future and thus inspiring new members to maintain the singing society’s legacy. Furthermore, the book History of the Liederkranz of the City of New York 1847-1947: and of the Arion, New York, did not exclusively target Liederkranz members: the dedication written into one of the books reveals that New York City’s Manhattan-born German-American mayor Robert Wagner received a copy of the publication after his successful mayoral election in 1953. While this does not mean that the book was widely distributed among the New York population, it shows that a level of official documentation outside of the club was desired. The Liederkranz of the late nineteenth century had debated (in German) whether it would be acceptable to allow members into the club who were not of German heritage (Mosenthal 69), but this practice changed by the end of World War II. The main language of the club had been changed to English in 1919 (Liederkranz of the City of New York), and the tone in the 100-year history had been transformed from a strong support of “Deutschtum,” German language and culture (Mosenthal 120), to a German-based, but American attitude: “This land of ours has been built by sturdy people […]. We, of Germanic ancestry, are but one element which contributed to its phenomenal growth. We are justly proud of having played our part in opening and settling this continent and welding it into a great nation” (Wirsing VII). After World War II, this formulation represented a way for club members to express pride in their German heritage without risking accusation from a public sensitive to German nationalist sentiment. This is reflected in the publication of the Liederkranz history only three years after the end of World War II. By pronouncing German heritage as part of American history and by describing German ancestry as part of the American “melting pot,” the preface of the club history shifts the focus from the (at the time) negatively connoted German heritage to a celebration of positive American values.

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An inclusion of this type of argument in the foreword enables the authors to focus on more German heritage in the following chapters of the club history. Over the years, traditions of the Liederkranz ranged from choir-singing practice to public concerts, included a women’s club (the “Damen Verein”), casual drinking nights, dinners, picnics, and dances. An undeniably successful organization around 1900, the Liederkranz had established itself as a leading social organization before World War I. Many prestigious New Yorkers, such as entrepreneur and piano maker William Steinway, publisher Oswald Ottendorfer, and the German-born former Union Army General and politician Carl Schurz, had participated and held leading positions such as club president (Mosenthal 136). With the change of the singing society’s language to English shortly after World War I (Liederkranz of the City of New York), World War II presumably would have dealt the death blow to the club’s existence. Although the History Committee acknowledged a decline in members and funds after World War I (The History Committee of the Liederkranz 51) and World War II (Liederkranz of the City of New York), the Liederkranz exists to this day. The chapter on the postwar years in the club history is titled “Renaissance” and summarizes: “The spirit of the Liederkranz, however, did not waver. Musical activities were continued on a more modest scale, and numerous young artists were given an opportunity to perform at concerts with the Chorus and Orchestra” (The History Committee of the Liederkranz 60). These “modest” events included plays of the “Dramatic Circle” and annual reunions of the Veterans “at which Max Ludwig gave the traditional ‘Ritterschlag’ to those who had completed twenty-five years of membership, while the audience sang the tuneful ‘Hoch soll er leben, drei mal Hoch,’ and Judge Charles Brandt, Jr., entertained the boys with reminiscences” (The History Committee of the Liederkranz 60). The mentioning of veterans in a German community in the United States might call for some contextualization. Although the history of the Liederkranz never specifies the exact wars in which the members of the veterans’ group fought, it does mention that members of the singing society fought on the American side of World War II, as when it honors “two young men [who] made the Supreme Sacrifice” in Pearl Harbor (The History Committee of the Liederkranz 61). Along with the society’s strong bond to the United States, this detail suggests that the veterans’ celebrations indeed referred to veterans of the United States Armed Forces as opposed to the group honoring men who had fought on the German side in the World Wars. The fact that the club history is written in English may suggest that the official language had rendered the use of German in the clubhouse obsolete. The history does not mention whether German continued to be the lingua franca among members, but it does reveal the prevalence of the club’s founding

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language in the Liederkranz’s most important means of expression: song. The Centennial Celebration in 1947 featured among many other songs “Beethoven’s ‘Die Himmel Rühmen’ and, with orchestral accompaniment, Bruckner’s ‘Trösterin Musik’; then, for the first time, ‘Erinnerung,’ composed for the occasion by the society’s former conductor, Otto Wick” (The History Committee of the Liederkranz 69). On the one hand, classical pieces by Beethoven were played and sung, but, on the other hand, and more importantly, new songs were written, composed and finally also performed in German. The Liederkranz is an example of an organization that was well aware of its heritage—both German and American—as well as of the positive and negative connotations that were attached to each of these cultural legacies. The singing society implemented several measures to sustain their German heritage without the risk of appearing to support Germany and its all too recent political actions. By defining the club through its history in the United States, closely connecting its development to its adopted country, the club avoided an association with the enemy the United States fought in World War II.x Furthermore, despite the omnipresence of German language and culture in club activities and the open appreciation of German music and song, details such as the list of Liederkranz members who lost their lives as American soldiers in the war assert their position as German Americans rather than Germans. By negotiating their position in America, the Liederkranz managed to establish a safe haven for German culture in New York, minimizing the danger of being considered a traitor organization. The decision to publish a history of the Liederkranz did not only serve to commemorate the singing society’s history, it also established the club as a part of New York’s history and as part American, instead of a club exclusively focusing on German heritage. With this balance established, singing societies were often used as a way to maintain the German language as a spoken language in the United States. Advertisements in the newspaper appealed to new immigrants: “Neueinwanderer! Erhaltet das deutsche Lied in Amerika durch Anschluss an deutschamerikanische Gesangsvereine”xi (“Neueinwanderer” B05). The influx of new members who were still fluent in German was necessary to maintain the historical characteristics of the singing societies. The Liederkranz’s development reflects the departure from essentialist notions of German ethnic identity in postwar New York City, which goes hand in hand with an ethnic urban transformation: the dissolving spaces and neighborhoods that were identified as exclusively German. While there were still locations for ethnically marked practices (like the Liederkranz clubhouse or a church in which some services were held in German), German ethnic markers were foregrounded only in certain situations and social constellations. The strong

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presence of German businesses and institutions in the Yorkville neighborhood of the Upper East Side created a space that was not perceived as exclusively German, but one that represented the New Yorker German community’s cultural and business world. Churches and congregations have always constituted important meeting places for people, regardless of their national origin. Shared religious beliefs add a layer of identity, a religious one, that can negotiate a space as a “home” despite the geographical distance from a person’s local origin, particularly when religion had played a greater role in the life of the community in the home country. In cases such as that of the previously mentioned Caesar Neumann, the pastor of his congregation had indeed served as a sponsor for a man he did not know, but trusted because of their shared religious affiliation (Neumann 196). Neumann’s autobiography explains how the German Immanuel Baptist Church became more than a simple stepping stone for his family in 1956, as the pastor provided them with board and lodging upon arrival, secured jobs for them and, through the introduction to the congregation, opened the new immigrants to a network of Germans (Neumann 197, 200-201). Although officially open to the public, the tightly knit community of a congregation can discourage outsiders from approaching it—even more so when the language of the church differs from the language that is predominantly spoken outside the church. Worshippers who shared not only belief, but also the language of the other believers would be more likely to participate in a service, thus reinforcing the prevalent cultural pattern within the subgroup. A full immersion in the cultural group could be supported by the direct involvement of newcomers in congregations or clubs, using the acquaintances and relationships of these groups to extend their social radius. This approach worked for newly arrived immigrants like Caesar Neumann, who was not only housed by the reverend,xii but also taken to church by “other members of the congregation,” so that he would not get lost in the unfamiliar space of the large city (Neumann 200). The origins of the Brooklyn-based “Deutsche Evangelisch-Lutherische Zions-Gemeinde” (German Protestant Lutheran Zion Congregation) can be traced back to 1624 (Kropp 9-13). In its 1955 centennial anniversary publication, the congregation presents its history as an institution and as a German collective, rather than taking the perspective of an individual immigrant. Founded specifically as a German congregation in 1856, the church maintained its German traditions (Kropp 116), regardless of the difficult circumstances in the first half of the twentieth century. Heinrich Arend Kropp, pastor and compiler of the congregation history, justifies the continued use of the German language despite the geographical location of the congregation demographically:

112 | I NSA N EUMANN Aber in einer Weltstadt wie Gross-New York, wo es allein mehr als 350,000 Einwohner gibt, die in Deutschland geboren sind, wo mit jedem deutschen Schiff neue Einwanderer landen und viele Besucher und Geschäftsreisende aus deutschsprachigen Ländern ihren zeitweiligen und oft längeren Wohnsitz haben, da ist es eine absolute Notwendigkeit, dass in wenigstens einigen Kirchen deutsch gepredigt wird.xiii (115)

By referring to the German church service as a necessity for locals and business travelers, rather than as a stubbornly held tradition resistant to Americanization, Kropp strengthens the idea of holding on to German culture as one way to be American. As he points out, he perceives a difference between Americanization and Anglification: “Amerikanisch ist unsere Zions-Gemeinde”xiv (Kropp 114). Like the Liederkranz, the representative of the congregation mentions its status as an American community, despite the appreciation for the members’ ancestors’ native language. Kropp quotes a representative of American national iden-tity to support his claim for the necessity of a German-speaking congregation: “Pastor Dr. Ellis Burgess, der frühere Präsident der Vereinigten Lutherischen Synode von New York und New England hat sich ähnlich ausgedrückt: ‘Wenn es in Brooklyn keine deutsche Kirche geben würde, so müsste man eine gründen’”xv (Kropp 115-16). The German Protestant Lutheran Zion Congregation focuses on its support for the people of Brooklyn at large and on the productivity of the German community in particular. The history of the congregation explains that all of the members speak English and that language classes had also been established tem– porarily so that new immigrants could learn the English language and could be prepared for the naturalization process (Kropp 114). Furthermore, the intellectual advantage of speaking another language besides English was presented as the basis for a well-rounded personality: Unsere deutsch-amerikanischen Kinder können diese zweite Sprache von Haus aus spielend lernen. Dadurch werden sie keine schlechteren Amerikaner sondern im Gegenteil bessere und tüchtigere Bürger dieses Landes mit einem vertieften Gemüt und erweiterten Gesichtskreises”xvi (Kropp 91).

Overall, the congregation proposes that its Germanness, which is defined as nonnegotiable in the congregation’s constitution (Kropp 21), enriches the (German) American spirit, rather than diminishing it. The continued focus on the German language and traditions—despite the precautionary mention of the congregation’s acceptance and appreciation of its American identity—, the physical space the church occupies as a building and the social space it claims as a com-

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munity construct a German space that is visible to the outside (the building and to a certain degree the congregation’s work in Brooklyn’s German community) and perceived by members of the congregation (the sociocultural community). Food and music constitute identity markers that can easily be imported to another country. Although eating/cooking and singing or playing an instrument are activities involving individuals, they are still commonly practiced in larger groups. A shared identity can become audible and visible through sharing song and food. While the larger and more established organizations that look back at a long history in the United States have certainly dedicated their share of urban space to active identity construction, there were also semi-public German meetings of smaller scale in New York City. German restaurants were, of course, publicly accessible and appreciated, but the reason for many guests’ patronage often exceeded their wish to eat good German “bratwurst” (Götz et al. 65). Conviviality and joint meals, a shared language or dialect—these comforts were offered at the “Café Geiger,” “Roter Sand,” “Café Rheinland,” and most prominently the “Plattduetsche Park Restaurant,” all of which appear in the memoirs of German immigrants in New York in the 1950s (Rickmers 74-75; Götz et al. 65). The “Föhrer Musikfreunde” (“Friends of Music from Föhr”), founded in 1954, rehearsed in the “Café Rheinland” on Eighty-sixth Street in Manhattan (Rickmers 76), adding an element of music to the food experience. The ‘Plattduetsche Park Restaurant,’ which continues to serve its beer, bratwurst and schnitzel today,xvii was a busy meeting place for meals and more: “Man trifft sich hier mit den anderen, redet ein bisschen und feiert manchmal. Zweimal im Jahr werden die Föhrer Bälle im ‘Plattduetschen Park Restaurant’ auf Long Island gefeiert”xviii (Götz et al. 65). The Föhr Dance, though mostly confined to the Frisian New Yorkers, provided an important network for their local community: “Er [der Ball] war Fest und Arbeitsmarkt zugleich. Neuankömmlinge und unzufriedene Clerks konnten Stellen finden”xix (Götz et al. 46). Additionally, the Föhr Dance also served as a place to meet potential partners of similar heritage. Some immigrants even reported that these dances were the basis for continued inter-marriage between people from the German islands or “at least [for marrying] a German” (Götz et al. 65). With informal meeting points such as German restaurants and cafés, the city also had more entrenched institutions such as the “Deutsche Gesellschaft der Stadt New York” (“German Society of the City of New York”), an establishment with a long-standing history at the border between semi-public and public space. The society had originally been founded in 1784 (“The Work of a Century: What the German Society Has Accomplished;” Lening 832) to support German immigrants in their endeavors to establish themselves in the United States,

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particularly in New York City. Among many other tasks, the German Society collected information and printed booklets and leaflets that were to be distributed to immigrants before their arrival in the United States (Deutsche Gesellschaft Praktische Rathschläge, no pagination). The society agreed to assist German immigrants and their children free of charge by helping them find work, supporting the needy and providing information and other help if necessary (Deutsche Gesellschaft Charter und Statuten 8). The organization continued to supply this type of support to German Americans and Germans after the World Wars as well, as the following excerpt from Caesar Neumann’s autobiography demonstrates: “Preacher Husmann, quite experienced in these matters, having already helped dozens of immigrants, took me to Midtown Manhattan to the German municipal counseling agency (Deutsche Gesellschaft) for immigrants. Here I was assigned a job in a machine factory” (Neumann 201). Publicly accessible to anyone who was of German heritage, the German Society continued to provide work for new immigrants whose connections in the community did not suffice to make a living immediately. Just as originally intended, the institution continued its work after the World Wars and “today [1959] about forty persons seek help daily at the society office at 147 Fourth Avenue” (“German Society to Note 175th Year on Tuesday” 92). While it can be assumed that an organization of German heritage, easily identifiable by its name, might have been seen in a less favorable light, American media such as the New York Times acknowledge the German Society’s achievements and list honorable members (“German Society to Note 175th Year on Tuesday”). In the 1940s and 1950s, the Deutsche Gesellschaft still had its office in the northernmost part of Lower Manhattan (4th Avenue and 14th Street “Anzeigen” A06; “Anzeigen” 14), an area that was not necessarily associated with German cultural heritage in the city. While Yorkville in Manhattan and Ridgewood, Queens, constructed German spaces within the neighborhoods through the businesses, churches, clubs, and people who had settled there, the Deutsche Gesellschaft, as a respected and clearly German institution, could exist outside of the partial cultural enclaves. In 1883, it had been located very close to the immigration point in Castle Garden (Deutsche Gesellschaft der Stadt New York, unnumbered page), on the immigrants’ way to Little Germany. In 1957, most likely aided by increased mobility through better public transportation and the greater number of available cars, the Society could maintain its office in a “non-German” neigh– borhood. The vestiges of Germanness in a mixed neighborhood or in spaces that were not perceived as ethnically shaped served as reminders, intentionally or not, of the continued existence of a German element in the changing city.

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Reading the German-language paper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung in the 1950s provides an insight into the manifold opportunities German immigrants found in their new environment. The Sunday editions of the publication always featured the sections “In Manhattan und Bronx” and other local news and announcements. Ranging from carnival celebrations (with different German regional foci), dances and concerts to regional Vereine (“In Manhattan und Bronx” B05), different nuances of German cultural life were made visible to those who did not know about them. The newspaper served as a means of collecting and communicating information for and by the different Vereine, clubs, and congregations. Through the announcement of events and meetings, the different cultural groups were advertised and received recognition beyond their usual reach, potentially inspiring new members to join. As the readership of the New Yorker StaatsZeitung was almost exclusively German, or rather from German-speaking communities, the coverage of cultural activities only appealed to people of similar heritage, encouraging a growth of these clubs within their community. Newspapers, club histories and personal accounts all demonstrate that there were a number of places in which convivial Germanness and solidarity lived on. These locations or events were not secret hideouts in which German was spoken in a hushed voice; rather, the dances, concerts, or restaurants were easily identifiable by name: the Liederkranz, the German congregation, or “Café Rheinland” prominently used references to their root culture in their names and titles. Institutions like the German Society of the City of New York represent another aspect of this semi-public Germanness that continued to be present in the metropolis. With this public display, the community behind these institutions still was not entirely accessible to the general public, but certainly more so than the Germanness behind closed doors in private homes. This semi-public presence added to the visibility of German cultural life in New York. What must be kept in mind is that the traditions practiced in the semi-public spaces of the city were potentially not exclusively “German.” Given the large variety of different cultural communities in Germany from which the immigrants hailed, there was not one German way of life, but several. Furthermore, these traditions and practices did not happen in a sociocultural vacuum, which leads to the conclusion that the German cafés, clubs, churches, restaurants, and the like were culturally hybrid, borrowing from their U.S. American environment as well as the influences of other immigrant groups around them. While the German communities of the late nineteenth century had seen the same type of regional and cultural German diversity as the mid-twentieth century, the latter period had given rise to a more hybrid identity. This hybridity transformed neighborhoods

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into German American spaces that gave room to the performance of a German identity within the greater American urban environment of New York City.

P UBLIC D ISPLAYS

OF

G ERMANNESS

Parades, Newspapers, Official Heritage Appreciation Apart from public performances and celebrations of larger organizations such as the Liederkranz, the German and German American community of New York continued to display their fondness of their German origins after the World Wars. The public display of this appreciation for the culture of their home in the Old World resulted in events such as “German Day” or, for example, the New York Steuben Parade. Furthermore, newspapers like the New Yorker StaatsZeitung (und Herold) continued to be published after World War II, which indicates the necessity for a German-language newspaper in the region. The German Day (“Deutscher Tag”) had a long tradition in New York before the 1950s (New York Times, “All-Day Celebration for Deutscher Tag”; New York Times, “Germans Celebrate the Deutscher Tag”), and continued in the postWar years, as a Frisian immigrant states: Im September 1955 hatten wir hier einen “Deutschen Tag.” Viele Vereine mit ihren Flaggen und Bannern waren damals angetreten zu einem Umzug zur Schwabenhalle, dem Treffpunkt vieler deutscher Vereine. Ich persönlich war erst ein halbes Jahr im Lande und meine Frau erst seit ein paar Tagen. Aber wir haben alle bei herrlichem Wetter und froher Stimmung mitgemacht.xx (Simonsen 63)

The German Days of the mid- to late 1950s are only mentioned in very few sources, potentially because the establishment of the Steuben Parade in 1957 may have replaced the German Day or rendered it obsolete, as a second German parade would have exceeded the demand. The Steuben Parade was named after Prussian-born eighteenth-century General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who is credited with restructuring the revolutionary American army (Birtle 1253-59) during the War of Independence. The parade first marched through the streets of New York, more specifically down Myrtle Avenue in the Ridgewood neighborhood in Queens, in 1957 (Radske Welcome). On the one hand, it can be argued that the parade celebrated the heritage of those who were still quite connected to the country of their ancestors; on the other hand, the parade can be read as an “annual reminder”

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(Orsi and Frankel 301) of the community’s history, which required mentioning at regular intervals to avoid oblivion. Regardless of the original purpose of the parade, it occupied the space of one (at that time predominantly German) Queens neighborhood for a few hours. The selection of General von Steuben as representative for the parade inscribes the German American community of New York City into the revolutionary tradition of the United States. Thus, the representation of their unique character simultaneously enmeshes the German groups into the weave of the American cultural fabric. In its second year, the parade had grown large enough to require a change of venue, so on September 20th, 1958, the parade took place on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan (The Plattduetsche Volksfest Vereen), thus increasing the visibility of the German American community for those who did not identify with German culture. Already in 1958 and 1959, the parade was mentioned in non-German newspapers such as the New York Times, both as announcements (New York Times, “Steuben Parade Set” 26; New York Times, “Parade Set Today by German Groups” 26) and in reviews on the day after the parade (Benjamin 85; Clark 82). From the very beginning, the Steuben Parade won high-profile representatives from the community as judges and grand marshals of their event. The New York Times notes that “Mayor Wagner was honorary grand marshal of the parade, and there were many other notables in the reviewing stand at Sixtyninth Street” at the 1958 parade, in which approximately 9,000 members of the community actively participated (Benjamin 85). In 1959, the parade already counted 15,000 marchers and again Mayor Robert F. Wagner served on the jury (Clark 82). Furthermore, the second year of the parade on Fifth Avenue featured “other dignitaries in the stand [including] Wilhelm Grewe, West German Ambassador to the United States, and Georg Federer, West German Consul General in New York” (Clark 82). The focus on West Germany does not come as a surprise, as the political relations of the U.S. with the GDR were strained. Furthermore, both the 1958 and 1959 parades incorporate the singing of the American and the West German national anthems, which is specifically noted in Benjamin’s and Clark’s articles in the New York Times. The Steuben Parades of the late 1950s presented the German-American community as a culturally rich and diverse group: The marchers were described as representing every segment of the German-American community in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and other neighboring areas. […] There were many folk dancers in German costumes, soccer players, choral singers and veterans in the line of march—and the finalists in this year’s Miss German-America contest. (Clark 82)

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Nonetheless, the focus on historical figures such as, of course, General von Steuben (“Steuben Parade Set” 26), or Friedrich von Schiller, whose twohundredth birthday was celebrated at the 1959 parade, appears to have been an important aspect of the celebration. Steuben here emphasizes the GermanAmerican dimension, while Schiller stands for the traditionally German, though democratic, line of thought. Similar to the Liederkranz and the German Zion congregation of Brooklyn, the Steuben Parade used the idea of a German heritage in the United States as the main reason for the event’s existence. The connection to the United States of America and the focus on the achievements of Germans in the United States played an important role in the public display of national identity. Both the American and the German flags were on display, and had been donated by each country’s president, according to the New York Times (Benjamin 85). The connection and synergy between the historical and contemporary German immigrants and their American home was illustrated when “Mayor Wagner remarked that he was very proud of the ‘contributions German immigrants have made to our city from Steuben to Wernher von Braun [the rocket expert]’” (Benjamin 85). Over all, the Steuben Parades of 1958 and 1959 did not feature a “Deutschtum” that was exclusively focused on itself and the promotion of Germanness regardless of the American local context. Instead, the parades focused on cultural diversity and the positive aspects of a culture that enriched the city of New York. The choice to take German heritage to the street and to occupy public spaces reclaimed a part of the city’s multi-ethnic history that had been shunned in earlier years. The parade constituted one way in which the cultural heritage of German Americans could transcend the borders of the private and the semi-public to revive a public German or German-American collective identity, one that could increase the visibility and acceptance of the cultural manifestations reclaimed the spaces which had rejected it for decades. While American media commented on the German cultural traditions in New York, the German community had its own newspapers, most prominently the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, that informed their readership of international, national, as well as local and community-related issues. The New Yorker StaatsZeitungxxi was founded in 1834 and constituted an important local source of information in German for the immigrant community in New York City. With daily, weekly, evening, and Sunday editions during the late nineteenth century, the newspaper was widely read. After the World Wars, the newspaper continued to be published, though at a lower frequency than in the late 1800s.xxii It continued to be a daily newspaper until 1953 and then changed to a tri-weekly and eventually a weekly paper. The Staats-Zeitung featured job advertisements

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as well as information on the local theater and club (Verein) scene specifically tailored to the German-American and German immigrant communities of the city. Furthermore, political issues of both the new home country and the Old World were covered, making the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung a newspaper that catered to the needs of diverse readerships (Tolzmann iii, 309),xxiii though it was specifically tailored to its German-speaking audience. The profitability of this German-language newspaper testified to the demand that sustained the daily publication of the newspaper. The newspaper perceived the German communities of New York City as a more unified group than it actually was: sections like “Wegweiser durch unsere Geschäftswelt”xxiv (“Wegweiser durch unsere Geschäftswelt” A9), which exclusively featured German companies, suggested that a “we” and an “our” existed beyond the borders of German regions and their representatives in America. While communities often appeared distinct in their regional identity, the “Wegweiser” featured businesses as “German,” rather than limiting their appeal to clients by focusing on regional German heritage. However, the publication’s subtitle is rather telling of the changes in the way it represented itself and its readership. While the newspaper only printed its regular name on the title page in the late 1800s, the issues of the mid-twentieth century were subtitled with the words “An American Newspaper Printed in the German Language” (“Title Page” 1). This change in the newspaper’s marketing and selfpresentation can be read both as a strategic move and as a reflection of changes in the German communities in and around the city. In addition to the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the New York-based GermanJewish newspaper Aufbau, initially a monthly, then a weekly, was first published on December 1, 1934. Although it could be argued that the newspaper’s audience was defined more by its Jewish identity, which had become even more central to writers’ and a readers’ lives during the Holocaust, editor in chief Hans Steinitz remarks in retrospect in 1972 that the newspaper was American and Jewish, yet printed in the German language and received by a large number of non-Jewish readers. He describes the audience of the newspaper as the voice of a part of the German people who “were violently separated from the German cultural realm, preserving the German language, literature, culture, and tradition” (15). Thus, the Aufbau introduced an additional German side to the multifaceted newspaper landscape of New York City. The Jewish experience of Holocaust, diaspora, and discrimination made the negotiation of identity and belonging, as well as the claiming of spaces socially relevant aspects in the conceptions of Germanness, Jewishness and other identities of German Jews in New York. Despite or particularly because of the

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1948 proclamation of Israel as an independent state and the following wars, Jews often lived in contested spaces, nationally and socially. Manfred George, editor of the Aufbau, wrote an article discussing the feeling of home and “having arrived” in the clearly German-speaking and Jewish-identifying publication; he also wrote about his personal relationship with New York City as a home. Bringing up the issue of assimilation to the host country, he discusses “external criteria” that need to apply for an immigrant to be considered as assimilated, including adherence to social norms and being in full command of the local language. However, he adds an emotional perspective that offers his personal definition of home and identity: “Wir meinen jenen Zeitpunkt seiner Entwicklung, da er plötzlich fühlt, dass er eingewachsen ist, dass irgendwelche Empfindungen und Gefühlsreaktionen aus der Tatsache resultieren, dass er ‘Wurzel geschlagen’ hat”xxv (George 32). This sentiment can be read as a result of his loss of a sense of home after having been deprived of his German citizenship by the Nazis in the 1930s. Yet it can also be understood as a positive approach to identification with his new home in New York: “Was ist das? Das ist echtes ZuHause-Gefühl. Das ist Zugehörigkeit, die zum Lokalpatriotismus führt, zum echtesten aller Patriotismen. Es ist der Patriotismus des Dorfes, der Nachbarschaft, des Gemeinwesens, wenn auch das Gemeinwesen eine Millionenstadt ist”xxvi (George 32). The addition of a layer of identity that exceeds the expected ones considering the publication, the Aufbau, for which George writes, presents an interesting public negotiation of identity. The Aufbau clearly identifies as a Jewish publication in the German language. Still, the idea of being a New Yorker does not appear to clash with the concept of being of German heritage, or in George’s case, of identifying as Jewish.xxvii New York City rather appeared as a space that consolidated George’s identities in a way other cities or countries could not. It had transformed into an urban space that incorporated, supported and enabled hybridity instead of enforcing clean-cut patterns of nationality or heritage.

C ONCLUSION This essay has provided some insights into the German-American communities that existed in New York City after World War II until the end of the 1950s. While some experiences could be addressed, a large number of personal histories, clubs, neighborhoods, or publications are still awaiting scholarly analysis. Yorkville on the Upper East Side can be seen as a neighborhood the space of which was claimed by a revived, yet changed German-American iden-

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tity on a public level, for example through the first Steuben Day Parade. Yorkville testifies to a rich ethnic urban history that has been widely neglected by academia so far. Similarly, studying New Yorker Staats-Zeitung issues from the second half of the twentieth century presents an interesting basis for further research in this field and time frame. It is important to note that there was not one unified German community in the city, but many small groups which— depending on the context—shared an identity, but for the most part identified with their immediate peer group, for example their Verein or congregation. With the exception of Yorkville in Manhattan and Ridgewood in Queens, the German presence in greater New York was dispersed and increasingly blended in with its American surroundings. Germanness in late 1940s and 1950s New York City was less defined by neighborhood than by occasions like the family meal, the church service, the singing practice, or the public parade. The city’s transformations and the post-war attitude toward things German did not obliterate Germanness in the city; rather, it reduced the number and concen-tration of sites for cultural practices associated with a German origin. As illustrated in this essay, institutionalized and non-institutionalized voices alike brought up issues of German identity and German life and culture in New York City after World War II. While the German presence by no means recovered the visibility and strength it had seen seventy to eighty years earlier, the anti-German measures relating to American residents and citizens of German heritage that were taken during the First and Second World War did not eradicate Germanness in New York. The individual perspectives in this essay, of course, cannot account for all of the diverse groups that constituted the German communities in the city.xxviii As part of New York City’s increasing diversification, the changes in the German communities added to the dynamic, socially and economically motivated transformations of the city at large in the late 1940s and 1950s. The examples in this essay illustrate that Germanness, Deutschtum, as a cultural identity in a foreign country cannot be limited to public parades or the use of language. Instead, expressions may be limited to practices found only in particular environments, spatial or social. Public perception does not necessarily take into account which types of personal rituals, family traditions, but also national backgrounds define the individual experience of those who made and make up the German-American communities in the 1950s and at other times. The proposed categorization of spaces into private, semi-public and public in this essay serves as a tool to investigate the different individual and collective acts of maintaining a German or German-American identity. The construction, performance and perpetuation of a cultural identity does not require participation

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in any or all of the mentioned dimensions. However, personal involvement in ethnically defined scenarios brings into being a collective experience through a collaborative effort of individuals. German continued to be a language spoken in the home and also taught in some private and public schools in the New York of the 1950s. It was printed, preached, sung, written, read, and valued. But the language was not the only sign of German culture as a facet of city life. Although many clubs, churches, and other organizations openly acknowledged their positions as German American rather than German, their focus continued to be on their ethnic heritage. It should be noted that neither the German congregations or organizations nor the individuals whose positions were examined in this essay were critical or depreciative of their American surroundings and fellow countrymen. Indeed, the decision of clubs like the Liederkranz or congregations like the Deutsche Evangelisch-Lutherische Zions-Gemeinde to publish their history establishes them as groups with a certain collective identity and historical narrative, but, in doing so, they also write themselves into the history of the city of New York and of America. Through their different environmental influences, their Germanness had become “Americanized” without forcing assimilation.xxix It had become more situational than essential, more dispersed than concentrated, and sitespecific rather than general. In the self-representations of these many different actors in the urban fabric, the American and the German sides of their identity are rather seen as different threads interwoven into a richer cultural weave of personal and collective identities. Accordingly, their New York City is a site of interlinked cultural practices—some of them German-derived, others not.

W ORKS C ITED “All-Day Celebration for Deutscher Tag: Germans Commemorate First Landing of Countrymen. Their Part in Our History. Services of Germans to the Country of Their Adoption Recalled by One Speaker.” New York Times 17 September 1906: 10. Print. “Anzeigen.” New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold 13 December 1957: A14. Print. “Anzeigen: Deutsche Gesellschaft der Stadt New York.” Sonntagsblatt StaatsZeitung und Herold 2 Jan. 1949, 1: A06. Print. Benjamin, Philip. “9,000 March Here to Honor Steuben: Spirit Is Gay Despite Gray Skies at 5th Ave. Parade of German-Americans.” New York Times 21 September 1958, Sunday Edition: 85. Print.

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Birtle, Andrew J. “The Origins of the Legion of the United States.” The Journal of Military History 67.4 (2003): 1249-62. Web. 15 July 2014. Bohn, William E. Letter to Adolf Kuchenbecker. April 23, 1952. TS. Nordamerika-Briefsammlung. Forschungsbibliothek Gotha. Print. Bungert, Heike. “Deutschamerikanische Ethnizitätsbildungsprozesse in San Antonio und San Francisco, 1948-1914.” Die deutsche Präsenz in den USA: The German Presence in the U.S.A. Eds. Josef Raab and Jan Wirrer. 1st ed. Berlin, Münster: Lit, 2008. 57–94. Print. Clark, Michael. “Parade of 15,000 Honors Steuben: 200,000 Line 5th Avenue to Watch March—Start Delayed for the Mayor.” New York Times 20 Sep 1959. 37,129. Sunday Edition: 82. Print. “Deutsche kath. St. Nikolaus-Kirche: Geschichte der ältesten deutschen Gemeinde in New-York.” Sonntagsblatt der New Yorker Staats-Zeitung 12 May 1895: 6. Print. Deutsche Gesellschaft der Stadt New York. Praktische Rathschläge u. Mittheilungen für deutsche Einwanderer. 1st edition. New York: E. Steiger & Co, 1883. Print. ---. Charter und Statuten der Deutschen Gesellschaft der Stadt New York. New York: John Oehler, 1900. Print. “Die Steubenparade der Deutschamerikaner: Sonderbeilage des Sonntagsblattes New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold.” Sonntagsblatt der New Yorker Staats-Zeitung 15 Sept. 1963: D01-D12. Print. Fox, Stephen. America’s Invisible Gulag: A Biography of German American Internment & Exclusion in World War II: Memory and History. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Print. Vol. 23. George, Manfred. “Meine Stadt: I.” Aufbau 28 Jan. 1949: 32. Print. “Germans Celebrate the Deutscher Tag: United Societies Gather in Terrace Garden to See Hauptmann’s ‘Festspiel 1813.’” New York Times 6 October 1913: 16. Print. “German Society to Note 175th Year on Tuesday.” New York Times 5 April 1959, 36,961, Sunday edition: 92. Print. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. 2nd edition, 8th print. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1979. Print. Götz, Heike, et al., eds. Unsere Stadt war New York: Friesen in Amerika: [Sonderausstellung “Nach New York: In Hamburg kannten wir doch keinen, Aus- und Rückwanderer von Amrum und Föhr” vom 14. August bis zum 30. November 2011 im Deutschen Auswandererhaus Bremerhaven]. Bremerhaven: Ed. DAH, 2011. Print. Exhibition.

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Hegi, Ursula, ed. Tearing the Silence: [on] Being German in America. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Print. “In Manhattan und Bronx.” Sonntagsblatt der New Yorker Staats-Zeitung 18 Jan 1953: B05. Print. Kiely, Richard, et al. “The Markers and Rules of Scottish National Identity.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 3.3 (1982): 33-55. Web. 2 Feb. 2015. Kropp, Heinrich A. Hundert Jahre Deutsche Evangelisch-Lutherische ZionsGemeinde in Brooklyn: in Wort und Bild. Brooklyn Heights, New York: F. Brendecke, 1955. Print. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991. Print. Lening, Gustav. Die Nachtseiten von New York und dessen Verbrecherwelt von der fünften Avenue bis zu den Five Points: Eine vollständige Schilderung der Geheimnisse des New Yorker Lebens. 2nd edition. New York: S. Zickel, 1881. Print. Liederkranz of the City of New York. History. Web. April 7, 2014. Mosenthal, Hermann, ed. Geschichte des Vereins deutscher Liederkranz in New York: Im Auftrage des Vereins zur Feier seines 50-jährigen Bestehens am 9. Januar 1897. New York: The F. A. Ringler Company, 1897. Print. “Neueinwanderer: Advertisement.” Sonntagsblatt der New Yorker StaatsZeitung 18 January 1953. 3: B05. Print. Neumann, Caesar R. The Neumann Family, 1840-2003, 2004. Private Collection. Niers, Gert. “Same Place, Other Language.” German? American? Literature? New Directions in German American Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck. New York: Lang, 2002. 401-14. Print. New Directions in German American studies 2. Orsi, Robert A., and Bruce Frankel. “Chapter Thirteen: Traditions and Invented Traditions: Introduction.” American Immigration and Ethnicity: A Reader. Ed. David A. Gerber and Alan M. Kraut. 1st edition. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 300-304. Print. “Parade Set Today by German Groups.” New York Times 20 September 1959: 26. Print. Raab, Josef and Jan Wirrer. “Introduction.” Die deutsche Präsenz in den USA: The German Presence in the U.S.A. Ed. Josef Raab and Jan Wirrer. 1st edition. Berlin, Münster: Lit, 2008. 13-24. Print. Radske, Bob. “Welcome from the General Chairman.” German Parade NYC. Web. 15 July 2014.

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Rickmers, Julius G. “Meine Auswanderung nach den U.S.A. im Jahre 1948.” Amerika-Auswanderer von Föhr und Amrum. Ed. Hans Krüger. Wyk auf Föhr: BU-BU-Verlag, 1988. 71-77. Print. Rippley, LaVern J. “Ameliorated Americanization: The Effect of World War I on German-Americans in the 1920s.” America and the Germans // The Relationship in the Twentieth Century: An Assessment of a Three-hundredyear History. Ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh. Vol. 2. 2 vols. Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985 // 1990. 217-31. Print. Simonsen, Heinrich. “Die Föhrer und Amrumer in der Steubenparade in New York.” Amerika-Auswanderer von Föhr und Amrum. Ed. Hans Krüger. Wyk auf Föhr: BU-BU-Verlag, 1988. 63-70. Print. Steinitz, Hans. “Aufbau, Neubau, Brückenbau: Ein Geleitwort vom Chefredakteur des ‘Aufbau’.” Aufbau (reconstruction): Dokumente einer Kultur im Exil. Ed. Will Schaber. New York: Overlook Press, 1972. 11-20. Print. “Steuben Parade Set: Americans of German Descent Honor Birthday Tomorrow.” New York Times 18 Sept. 1959, 37,127: 26. Web. 16 July 2014. The History Committee of the Liederkranz of the City of New York. “12. A Family Reunion.” History of the Liederkranz of the City of New York 18471947: and of the Arion, New York. Ed. The History Committee of the Liederkranz of the City of New York. New York: The Drechsel Printing Company, 1948. 51-52. Print. ---. “14. Renaissance.” History of the Liederkranz of the City of New York 18471947: and of the Arion, New York. Ed. The History Committee of the Liederkranz of the City of New York. New York: The Drechsel Printing Company, 1948. 60-65. Print. ---. “15. The Centennial Year.” History of the Liederkranz of the City of New York 1847-1947: and of the Arion, New York. Ed. The History Committee of the Liederkranz of the City of New York. New York: The Drechsel Printing Company, 1948. 66-75. Print. ---, ed. History of the Liederkranz of the City of New York 1847-1947: and of the Arion, New York. New York: The Drechsel Printing Company, 1948. Print. The Plattduetsche Volksfest Vereen of New York & New Jersey. Steuben Parade: The First Parade. Web. 15 July 2014. “The Work of a Century: What the German Society Has Accomplished.” New York Times 5 Oct. 1884, 10,323. Sunday Edition, Quadruple Sheet: 2. Print. “Title Page.” New Yorker Staats-Zeitung 12 Aug. 1950: 1. Print.

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Tolzmann, Don H. “Contemporary German-American Literature: 1970-76.” German-American Literature. Ed. Don H. Tolzmann. Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press, 1977. 308-11. Print. ---. “Foreword.” German-American Literature. Ed. Don H. Tolzmann. Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press, 1977. iii. Print. ---. The German-American Experience. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. Print. Wirsing, Hans E. “Foreword.” History of the Liederkranz of the City of New York 1847-1947: and of the Arion, New York. Ed. The History Committee of the Liederkranz of the City of New York. New York: The Drechsel Printing Company, 1948. VII. Print. “Wegweiser durch unsere Geschäftswelt.” Sonntagsblatt der New Yorker StaatsZeitung 2 Jan. 1949: A9. Print.

C OMMENTS i

ii

iii

iv

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The German community moved from “Little Germany” on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Yorkville on the Upper East Side at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the General Slocum Disaster is considered an aggravating factor in the disappearace of Klein-Deutschland, the German movement towards Yorkville had already been visible in the time before 1904. This only applies if the family spoke English at all. While established German American families in the 1950s most likely did speak English, particularly after the public disapproval of foreign languages, especially languages of enemy countries, during the World Wars, new immigrants often came without any English skills: If a family had only settled in the United States after World War II, they did not necessarily speak any English. (Neumann 201-02). During the 1950s and 1960s about 750,000 Germans migrated to the United States (Tolzmann 349-50). The book only mentions first names, family names are omitted. This can also be read as a denial of the type of Germans she encountered, refusing them for their “low-brow” lifestyle rather than for their Germanness. Translation: “You will have found out by now that I rarely have an opportunity to speak or write German. I hope we can stay in touch. If you can write to me, I will try to answer as fast as possible. Please excuse my mistakes in using the German language. I am quite out of practice.”

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viii

ix

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Identity markers in the context of national origin have been defined as “any characteristics associated with an individual that they might choose to present to others, in order to support a national identity claim” (Kiely et al. 35-36). Translation: “Hinrich usually was home around 11. The children were sleeping and Ingrid waited for him every evening, often with his favorite food: a sandwich with shrimps.” Heike Bungert observed similar structures in German communities of San Francisco and San Antonio: “Seit der Jahrhundertwende kam es zu einem verstärkten Bezug auf das Deutsche Reich, aber auch zur vermehrten Betonung eines amerikanischen Patriotismus.” (85). Translation: “New immigrants! Maintain the German song in America by joining the German American singing societies.” It should be noted that American churches are privately funded and thus depend on their members. As the number of Germans who were also of Baptist denomination, both in New York, but also in general, was rather limited, the congregation must have had an interest in acquiring new members to ensure their growth and continued existence. Translation: “But in a global city like larger New York, where more than 350,000 inhabitants were born in Germany, where every German ship brings new immigrants, and business travelers from German-speaking countries find a temporary or permanent residence, it is absolutely necessary to have at least some churches in which sermons are held in German.” Translation: “American is what our Zions Church Community is.” Translation: “Pastor Dr. Ellis Burgess, the former President of the United Lutheran Synod of New York and New England, expressed likewise—: ‘If there was no German church in Brooklyn, we would have to found one.’” Translation: “Our German American children can learn this language because of their domestic context. They do not become worse American through it, but instead turn into better and more capable citizens of this country with a deepened mind and broadened personal horizon.” See Park Restaurant website: (last visited 6 July 2014) Translation: “Here we meet with others, talk a bit and sometimes celebrate. Twice a year, the Föhr dances at the ‘Plattduetsche Park Restaurant’ on Long Island take place.” Translation: “It was a celebration and job market at once. Newcomers and unhappy clerks could find new positions.”

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Translation: “In September of 1955, we had a ‘German Day.’ Many clubs had lined up with their flags and banners to go on a parade to the Schwabenhalle (Swabian Hall), a meeting point for many German clubs. Personally, I had only been in the country for half a year, my wife only a few days. But we all participated in excellent weather and happy atmosphere.” xxi Originally founded as the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the newspaper circulated as the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold in the 1950s, after it had merged with the German-language publication Herold in 1934. xxii The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung appeared with daily and weekend editions, during some decades of the late nineteent century even with a morning and an evening edition. These numbers decreased in the twentieth century. xxiii As mentioned in the beginning of the essay, there is very little literature available about German culture in New York after the World Wars. A deeper analysis will follow after reviewing the 1950s issues of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung in the near future. xxiv Translations: “Signpost to our business world” xxv Translation: “We mean that point in his development when he feels that he has grown into it, that some of his feelings and emotional reactions result from the fact that he has ‘struck root.’” xxvi Translation: “What is it? It is a true feeling of being at home. It is a sense of belonging which leads to local patriotism, the realest of all patriotisms. It is the patriotism of the village, the neighborhood, the community, even if the community is a megacity.” xxvii Although the United States are rightfully considered a nation of immigrants, the purpose of identity-specific publications, such as the Aufbau, is usually not to focus on how the community to whom the newspaper caters blends into their environment, but rather on their distinctiveness and their identity as a means of setting themselves apart. Thus, George’s reconciliation of his German, Jewish, and New Yorker identity can be considered unexpected— not per se, but within the medium chose for the publication of this negotiation of identity. xxviii Of course, there were people of German descent who chose to assimilate and give up their German heritage and identity in favor of an American one. However, on the one hand, this essay deals with the German presence as opposed to the German disappearance, and on the other hand, it would be rather difficult to identify people who had given up a national identity. xxix This, however, is not new and can already be seen in club histories and newspaper articles of the late nineteenth century (Deutsche kath. St.

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Nikolaus-Kirche 6; Die Steubenparade der Deutschamerikaner D01; Mosenthal ii).

Transnational U.S. Literature Manhattan Music by Meena Alexander K ORNELIA F REITAG

In the opening contribution to a collection of essays by the title Transnational American Studies, Donald Pease comments on the changing focus of U.S. literary criticism since the early 1990s: The globalization of the literary realm has resulted in a shift in interpretive attention away from explanations of how literary works function in relation to national cultures and towards an examination of how postnational literatures participate in the formation of deterritorialized contexts. (Pease “From” 9)

Pease’s observation highlights that the field of American Studies is in a process of reorientation. While Pease refers explicitly to Janice Radway’s Presidential Address to the American Studies Association in 1998, he might also have mentioned Giles Gunn’s “Globalizing Literary Studies” (2001), Paul Jay’s “Beyond Discipline: Globalization and the Future of English” (2001), or Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, “The Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies” (2005). All of these pieces indicate that the field has been opening itself towards the world for the better part of two decades. By using the term “postnational” (emphasis added), Pease allies himself specifically with theorists who prefer it to the terms “global” or “transnational.” He mentions John Carlos Rowe’s collection Postnational American Studies (2000) and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), the latter of which argues that because of the global workings of multinational corporations and electronic media, “the nation-state, as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs,” and “post-national social forms” are on the horizon (19). In his essay Pease underlines the general anti-

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exeptionalist potential of a postnational perspective (“From” 10) and the ways in which the term has become “a banner under which to give expression to […] allegiance to transnational formations” in order to “combat injustices in the global economy” (ibid.). He also remarks that postnationalism (whether in criticism, literature, culture, politics, or economy) is no guarantee that injustices will be combatted or even critiqued.i In an earlier essay on “National Narratives, Postnational Narration” Pease characterizes postnational narration very much along these lines—as importantly different from, although not necessarily critical of, national narrative: National narratives were structured in the (metanarrative) desire (intentionality) to recover a lost national origin whose projection onto a national future organized an individual quest in the form of a sequence of purposive events (national narrativity). National narratives might in retrospect be described as having constituted literary forms wherein official na– tional fantasies were transmitted to a “national people” that they aspired simultaneously to consolidate and represent. (Pease “National” 4)ii

Counter to the nationalistic endeavor in national narratives, which he analyzes convincingly and in great depth, run “[p]ostnational narratives” that “might be understood either to constitute belated accommodations to global capital or to narrate forms of resistance” (“National” 2). In other words, Pease is aware of the diametrically opposed ideological effects that different types of postnational narratives may evoke. I completely agree with the observation that during the last decades American Studies’ focus has changed to some extent and that globalization is one reason for it, but I doubt that “postnational literatures” and “deterritorialized contexts” are helpful concepts to investigate the changes globalization has brought to the field of literature. In this essay, I want to shift away from the focus of Pease’s argument and some of its central terms and towards the conception and reconception of “America” in works of American literature published especially since the mid-eighties. I argue that since the 1980s, a growing number of texts, but by no means all literature published in the U.S.A., has started to reconfigure the representation of “America” in terms that are transnational by way of plots and images that stretch beyond its national borders. In the first part of this essay, I point out some pitfalls of narrowing down the spatial politics of globalization to “deterritorialization” and assuming that the national has already been transcended by the “postnational.” I enumerate a number of texts that feature the relations between U.S. American and other territories and I characterize the special way in which these literary texts inscribe

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spatial effects of globalization concretely into their narrative structures as transnational. In the second part of the essay, I demonstrate the transnational negotiation of space in the writings of Indian American writer Meena Alexander and engage in particular with her novel Manhattan Music. At the end, I come back to Pease’s underestimation of the importance of national territory in a discussion of the meaning of Ellis Island, a space that is, in fact, important in both Pease’s reading of a text by C. L. R. James and Alexander’s characterization of her protagonist.

G LOBALIZATION

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Pease’s theory of postnationalism tends to privilege time over space. This tendency is indicated in the choice of the temporal prefix “post” over the spatial prefix “trans” in his key term, and it is strongly supported by the assumption of “deterritorialization” (Pease “From” 9). Deterritorialization is the idea that with globalization the ties to territory, and in particular to national territory, are more and more erased and may thus become less important. As Ludger Pries, among others, has argued, this idea is directly related to certain tendencies in globalization theory that conceptualize deterritorialization in two ways: “as the spatial widening of social relations,” as found, for instance, in the theories of Giddens, Albrow, or Urry; and/or “as the annihilation of space,” as has been claimed for example by Robertson, Waters, Harvey, Castells, and Albrow (Pries 14). When Pease takes “deteritorialization” for granted and reduces “geographic space […] in importance in the structuring of social relations and interactions” (Pries 14) just as Pries describes it, Pease not only repeats the assumption that territory has become less important: the assumed “disappearance of space” in global deterritorialization is for his theory more than a sociological fact and becomes a crucial stepping-stone in his theorization of alternatives to global capital. For it is deterritorialization that supposedly makes it possible to “narrate forms of resistance” (“From” 2) via “the extraterritorial imagination,” as he concludes his article “From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature: The Emergence of Literary Extraterritoriality” (“From” 34).iii While it is clear that by celebrating the powers of “extraterritorial imagination” he aims at anti-nationalist, and probably anti-imperialist, humanist “forms of resistance” (“Nationalist” 2), in using this formulation he is playing down the crucial importance of the attachment to and the politics of space. To use a difference Foucault elaborates in his “Of Other Spaces,” Pease minimizes the attachment to and the role of “real spaces”iv in order to underline the impor-

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tance of “unreal spaces,” which Foucault calls “utopias” (Foucault 239) and Pease designates “alternative public sphere[s]” (Pease “From” 29) and “[t]he extraterritorial past of the radically altered future” (“From” 33). Yet, as Foucault maintains, as humans we do “not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live in a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not imposable on one another” (Foucault 239). With a focus on globalization, Pries expresses the same idea somewhat more prosaically: “globalization [is] not possible without spatially concentrated actor and power groups and systems of artifacts, such as global cities or mighty nation states” (Pries 14). Nobody—not even the multinational executive or the “postnational” scholar—lives completely detached from these sites and national spaces. Moreover, it might be instructive to historicize specifically the territorial investment underlying the idea of “America,” a.k.a. “the American Dream,” in the political and literary discourses of the 1980s and 1990s—that is in the phase of globalization that is the background of the latest turn in American Studies— and not to prematurely universalize extraterritorial reactions. As Inderpal Grewal argues, since that time America functioned as a discourse of neoliberalism making possible struggles for rights through consumerist practices and imaginaries that came to be used both inside and outside the territorial boundaries of the United States. American national identity worked, in a Foucauldian manner, as a mechanism that combined biopower with apparatuses of governmentality to produce discourses and practices of freedom and choice—yet these discourses and practices had older imperial histories and newer disciplinary formations that were also recuperated in new ways. This imperialism not only was a search for markets […] but provided the technologies—the strategies, the rationalities, and the subjectivities—acontained within networks of deterritorialized and reterritorialized power. (2; emphasis added)

Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake also issue a strong critique of an “all too uncritica[l]” re-articulation of the “ongoing processes of disruption and manipulation by global discourses and technology […] into ‘translational’ inbetween spaces of negotiated language, borderland being, and bicultural ambivalence” (2) in the introduction to their essay collection Global/Local. While they refer explicitly to Homi Bhabha’s writings, their admonition applies as well to Pease’s. They warn that “[t]he geopolitics of global cultural formations and local sites are shifting under the pressures of the new ‘spatial dialectic’ obtaining between mobile processes of transnationalization and

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strategies of localization or regional coalition” (ibid.). This new “spatial dialectic” should not be swiftly overlooked but closely investigated also and in particular in literary texts. While the utopian counter space of “an alternative public sphere” might very well be the literary outcome of a radical reduction of the available public sphere (Pease “From” 29), a utopian extraterritorialization seems only one, and maybe not even the most frequent, way of alternative imaginaries in literary texts focused on or related to the territory of the U.S.A. Instead of starting from the idea that culture as a whole is already deterritorialized (Tomlinson 106 ff.) or has “escaped the bounded nation-state society” (Featherstone 2), I focus on the role that space, or rather the “new ‘spatial dialectic’” (Wilson/Dissanayake 2), plays in the ways literature reacts to, participates in, or obstructs and opposes the neoliberal discourse of globalization in transnational narratives. I use the term “transnational” for this project because, as Ulf Hannerz has pointed out with regard to what is often too swiftly called “globalization”: Many such processes and relationships obviously do not at all extend across the world. The term “transnational” is in a way more humble, and often a more adequate label for phenomena which can be of variable scale and distribution. (Hannerz 6)

Hence, I use the term transnational U.S. literature not to refer to all literature written and published today in the U.S.A. It is meant to refer to the texts that deal with “America”—both in terms of the idea and the territory of the U.S.A.— in the current phase of globalization, and that highlight and negotiate the implications of the inscription of the global into the national and vice versa. A growing body of texts, which goes way beyond the scope of an essay and can only be very briefly summarized here, meets these criteria. Next to so-called ethnic authors, whom I take up below, writers who are not usually marked as “ethnic” are reacting to globalization and the American role therein through texts that have a transnational setting and characters who move between the U.S.A. and other nation-states. T. C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain (1995) or Susan Straight’s Highwire Moon (2001), for instance, problematize the Mexican-American border. Robert Newman’s The Fountain at the Center of the World (2003) is devoted to Great Britain, Mexico, and the U.S.A. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998) looks at the fate of a missionary family in the Belgian Congo. Russell Banks’s Rule of the Bone (1995) features—an admittedly strongly exaggerated—Jamaica. Chuck Wachtel’s The Gates (1994) places the protagonist in Nicaragua. Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision (2005) leads an aimless and clueless New Yorker to Ecuador. The travelers in these texts differ even at

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first glance from the protagonists of the genre of the International Novelv or literary travelers like Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959), who moves to a mythical Africa to find peace from his non-specific pain and desire. The more recent travelers may be related to their literary predecessors but they come from lower-class backgrounds or have a lower social status and, even more importantly, their implication in the processes and effects of globalization are explicitly foregrounded. On the other hand, many works of minority writers explore more than the situation of immigrants and/or the exploited and oppressed descendants of African slaves or Native Americans within the U.S.A. There are many who turn to imaginative explorations of their multiple places of origin and belonging and who thereby flesh out transnational connections between the U.S.A. and other nations. This has been true for a longer time for the rich body of literature “straddling” (Anzaldua, Preface n.p.) the border between Mexico and the U.S.A., written mostly by Chicano authors like Rudolfo Anaya and since the 1980s also by Chicana authors like Ana Castillo, Gloria Anzaldua, María Amparo Escandón, and others. More recently, the transnational experience has been broadened to establish connections to the Caribbean, as in the Dominican American Julia Álvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1992) or Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). The border region also features prominently in Native American Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), which interlaces the spatial politics of Indian “removal” from the land of their ancestors with today’s neocolonial exploitation of Central America in a story involving arms deals, organ dealing, drug trafficking, and revolutionary plotting. Africa, which for a long time has been more the result of “Ethiopianism” (Gruesser’s term)vi than a geographical place in African American literature, is still mythically exaggerated in a novel like Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990) or somewhat stereotyped in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), yet it takes on concrete dimensions in the Senegalese settings of Reginald McKnight’s White Boys (1999) or He Sleeps (2001) and in novels like the Nigerian American Teju Cole’s Open City (2012) or the Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013). Also starting around the 1990s, many more Asian American texts turned to negotiating “America” in connection and/or conflict with China, the Philippines, Japan, India, and other Asian countries and regions in the world. Well known examples are the Chinese American Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993), the Philippina Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), the Japanese American Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), and texts by writers from the Indian diaspora, like Bharati Muk-

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herjee’s Jasmine (1989), Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music (1997), Jhumpa Lahriri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999), or Salman Rushdi’s Fury (2000). All of these texts inscribe and conceptionalize space in literature as resulting from and consciously reacting to worldwide flows of goods, people, and information across the borders of nation-states, instigated—in one way or another—by the last wave of globalization. Their plots and imagery refer—in many different ways—to the information technology revolution, the intensification of the internationalization of financial and labor markets and, as argued above, the spread of U.S. neoliberalism. As the necessarily sketchy list of naratives above indicates, since the mid- or late-1980s more and more texts have been appearing on the U.S. literary market that have a setting that is not restricted to U.S. territory but is importantly bound up with it. These texts ponder problems of American identity that question “an ideological consensus about what rendered the United States exceptional” (Pease “From” 9) and deal quite specifically with the meaning of the U.S.A. within and outside its national borders. While they keep telling important stories about U.S. cultural difference (and ordinariness) and thereby highlight precisely the “underside” of U.S. exceptionalism, they are not (not completely or not at all) contained within the national borders of the U.S.A. (without transcending these borders into the thin air of deterritorialization). The message of U.S. national cultural difference is in these texts partially unbound from the “container” of the national territory of the United States. Hence, they can be understood to mark the weakening of U.S. literature as the expression of a “national-container society” (Pries 5), precisely by pointing towards the oppressive and often violent ideologies and technologies by which the U.S. nation-state still aims at “containing” its meaning and its culture. The movement to, away from, and through the space of the U.S. nation, politics, and culture is the basis for meaning making in these texts. Globalization processes can, of course, be spotted in all kinds of contemporary U.S. texts, for instance, in the scene in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) where the protagonist consumes “kiwi fruit and sliced Japanese apple-pear (they cost four dollars each at Gristede’s) out of aluminum storage boxes that were designed in West Germany” (28). Yet the texts I designate as “transnational” have a setting that spans at least two nations and topics that deal with migration, travel, and displacement in connection to the U.S.A. While, as Karen Kaplan has argued in Questions of Travel (1996), there remains an important difference between U.S. travelers abroad and immigrants or refugees to the U.S., as well as between travelling and displacement represented in the texts mentioned above all of these texts share an understanding of the spatial dynamics they represent in terms of “transnational social spaces.” These

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spaces have been defined by Pries as “configurations of social spaces, artefacts and symbol systems that span different geographic spaces in at least two nation states without constituting a new ‘deterritorialized’ nation-state or being the prolongation of one of these nation-states” (18). Using this definition, the texts mentioned above can be defined as U.S. transnational literature. Transnational texts are textual configurations that react to the last phase of globalization, span and explore geographic and cultural spaces in the U.S. and at least one other nation, create thereby also a bi- or pluri-locale imaginary space (also over long distances), and present characters who construct identities across national territories and borders. Transnational texts stage mobility without final utopian arrival—neither in the U.S. or another nation-state nor in a new “deterritorialized” nation-state or the prolongation of one of these nation-states. With this definition, the focus is on space, the meaning of national space, and positionality as important conditions and contexts, especially in transnational literature. In this kind of literature, space is imaginatively produced by a strong fictional dynamics of characters, settings, metaphors, and intertextuality in order to inspect, produce, and reproduce the idea of “America” with its various nationalist and imperial, neoliberal and consumerist, but also democratic implications for subjects in globalized space. In the following, I will show how transnational space is translated into literary configurations of space and subjecttivity by the Indian American novelist, poet, and essayist Meena Alexander and her novel devoted to writing and rewriting the urban space of New York.

T HE S HOCK

OF

ARRIVAL

The Shock of Arrival is an essay collection by Meena Alexander, subtitled Reflections on Postcolonial Experience and published in 1996. The two slightly incongruent parts of the title phrase capture the perplexing ruptures in the life of migrants—postcolonial and other—in an extraordinary way. As the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary explains, “arrival” means “1. an act of arriving: a coming; 2. the reaching or attainment of any object or condition;” in other words, it refers to the experience of reaching a certain destination or resting point. “Shock,” on the other hand, designates “1. a sudden and violent blow or impact; collision; 2. a sudden or violent disturbance or commotion; 3. a sudden or violent disturbance of the mind, emotions, sensibilities;” that is, basically, something sudden, disturbing, and the opposite of rest. The jarring phrase “shock of arrival” appears in and is elaborated upon in an article where

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Alexander characterizes the common features of contemporary Asian American art, thereby also illuminating her own artistic creations: The shock of arrival in the new world is crucial to an understanding of contemporary Asian-American art. It crystallizes the jagged boundaries of the disjunctive worlds that the artist presses into play, and clarifies the painful gap between desire and the brute actual. It is replayed. Over and over again, through the thematics of passage, arrival and dwelling, figurations that permit us to make sense, however minimally, of the rupture between desire and the actual, between intimate memories and a place where one is rendered strange, where the body is marked as Other. (Shock 153)

In other words, for the Indian American writer the jarring phrase “the shock of arrival in the new world” captures immigrants’ ways of being in “America”— torn to the point of contradiction. The phrase, as explained in the quote, signals a way of being that is doubly bound to space. On the one hand, it indicates the result of movement towards the national territory, the space of the U.S.A. that she, like other migrants, has wished to reach. Moreover, to call it “arrival in the new world” presents the U.S. territory as part of a very specific national narrative with a long political and ideological history. Yet her use of the term “new world” indicates an appropriation, and thereby a subtle redefinition of the traditional “first-world” discourse— of which, by now, the “new world” has become a solid part—by a “third-world” speaker, a move that Homi Bhabha calls mimicry (121-131). The strained spatial dimension of this kind of “arrival” is explicitly spelled out by pairing the two incongruent words “arrival” and “shock” in one phrase. On the other hand, what is implicit in this very phrase, and what becomes quite explicit in the final reference to “the body [that] is marked as Other,” is that “shock” has a physical dimension. The space of the body brings about and registers arrival in a place. It weighs and evaluates the newness and, as becomes clear at the end of the quote, also marks its own Otherness in the space of this “new world.” Im/migration as movement (and repeated stoppage) in and through territory has an anthropological dimension. Alexander highlights the complex relationality between the spaces of the body and the sites it moves in(to), a relationality that is part of globalization and an important dimension of transnational movements. Hence, if one takes Alexander’s idea of the “shock of arrival in the new world” as starting point for an analysis of what has been termed transnational literature above, one has to investigate precisely how U.S. space is staged as part and counterpart of other national spaces in “networks of deterritorialized and reterritorialized power” (Grewal 2) and how the ensuing dynamic is shown to

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play itself out also in the space of the body. The analysis has to focus on the production of and resistance to the discourse of “America” by figurations of “passage [through], arrival [at] and dwelling [on]” U.S. territory (Alexander Shock 153). It must inspect the technologies—the strategies, the rationalities, and the subjectivities—that position dreaming and desiring characters within (the ideology of) the text while they move between these spaces in different modes of confusion about, resistance to, and complicity with the “new world“-discourse. Meena Alexander’s novel Manhattan Music, published in 1997 by Mercury House Press, stages the meanings and repercussions of “the shock of arrival in the new world” in manifold ways. It is set in the spring and summer of 1991, mainly in New York, U.S.A., and in part in Tiruvella, India. It tells the story of Sandhya Rosenblum, daughter of a well-to-do Syrian Christian family from the small Indian town of Tiruvella, who is initiated into life in the U.S.A.vii The story of Sandhya’s initiation is mainly told in chapters in limited third-person narration that wavers between Sandhya’s perspective, which predominates, and other character perspectives—of her husband; relatives residing in India, the U.S.A., or passing through; her mixed-race friend Draupadi; and her lover, the Egyptian immigrant Rashid. These characters not only function as different models of nationality and diaspora in comparison to the protagonist but also form a transnational community that, “reflecting and speaking [...] entails a quiltlike pattern of recollected narratives” (Mehta 235). The extensive chapters in limited third-person perspective alternate with brief chapters in straightforward first-person narrative by Sandhya’s friend, the mixed-race American performance artist Draupadi Dinkins. Draupadi represents “all she [Sandhya] might one day be;” she is “the one who [is] native” (4) and functions as Sandhya’s foil, double, and mentor. Moreover, the “Coda: Four Poems by Arjun Sankaramangalam” (Manhattan 229-231), just as the short chapter “Jay’s Journal” (Manhattan 160-162), also feature a first-person speaker. Both are written from the perspective of Sandhya’s cousin Jay, a.k.a. Arjuna, a cosmopolitan photographer and aspiring poet (Manhattan 155-156). Draupadi and Jay allow Alexander to negotiate the role of art to capture “arrival” and the “shocks” upsetting it in a world full of change and violence that reaches from the U.S.A. to India and the Middle East. As Nalini Iyer has correctly observed, the plot clearly focusses on the “different ways in which South Asian women make sense of their diasporic lives” (Iyer 153). Not only are the protagonist Sandhya and the narrator Draupadi given center stage, but considerable room is assigned in particular to the reflections and actions of Sandhya’s cousin Sakhi who is married to another diasporic Indian and gives up her lucrative post as accountant to become a social

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worker. Cousin Sakhi also connects Sandhya to a group of diasporic women in New York that illuminates the suffering and deprivation of less affluent migrants. Yet, the novel embraces not only women’s lives. As Sakhi’s thoughts make clear, “it was not just women […]. Men had to struggle, too” (212). The changing points of views in Alexander’s novel allow for a wide and diverse range of perspectives. The protagonist’s coming of age narrative is framed and reframed by alternating perspectives that illuminate Sandhya’s development from different angles and put her story into an American and global context. The variety and contradictions of transnational “passage, arrival and dwelling” (Alexander Shock 153) are highlighted and personified in the characters of female and male Indian immigrants, second- and third-generation U.S. citizens, cosmopolitan travelers, international scholars, and visitors to New York. How Alexander represents the common and different ways of inhabiting and traversing transnational space is shown in the remaining part of this essay.

“O LD ”

AND

“N EW ” I NDIAN D IASPORA

Draupadi’s voice starts the novel in the two-page “Overture: Monsoon Flood” (Manhattan 3-4). She is of Indian descent but second-generation American, culturally and politically savvy, from a lower class and very different family line than Sandhya. Her “ancestors were scattered from British sailing ships, dark bits of ground pepper flung on plantations in Trinidad, Fiji” (4). As she explains her performance piece titled “CHOOSE YOUR BLOOD. THAT IS AMERICA” to a startled European visitor, she was born in Gingee [Columbia County, New York], most part Indian, part African descended from slaves, pride of Kala Pani, sister to the Middle Passage. Also part Asian American, from Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino blood […]. Also a smattering of white— low European. (Manhattan 47)

This marks Draupadi as a descendant of nineteenth-century girmityas—the mostly poor Indians who sold themselves as indentured laborers to leave India in order to work on plantations abroad and thus “provide[d] a cheap workforce in the colonial economies of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, South and South East Asia, Africa and the Pacific” (Kudaisya 44). For centuries, crossing the ocean—warningly termed “Kala Pani” (“black waters”)—referred not only to a dangerous and uncomfortable passage on a perilous sea. It also meant breaking a taboo for Hindus, who were generally

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forbidden to travel the ocean, as it led to contamination and, consequently, loss of caste and status (McCormack 220, note 6). This and the fact that the girmityas were “meant to replace slave labour in the local plantations” (Kudaisya 44) and worked, in fact, under much the same conditions as the slaves, are suggested by Draupadi’s characterization of “Kala Pani” as “sister to the Middle Passage.” The “complex relationship of power and privilege [with other colonized people] in Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia, Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam” (Mishra 3) into which the Indian indentured laborers entered is indicated in the bloodline Draupadi claims. As modern American heir of this “old” Indian diaspora (Mishra 3, Kudaisya 44) and its “sister […] the Middle Passage,” augmented by “a smattering of white—low European” (Alexander Manhattan 47), Draupadi is a character attesting to a historical network of worldwide exploittation and colonial displacement. The highlighted hybridity of Draupadi Dinkinsviii allows Alexander to diversify her representation of the Indian diaspora, which encompasses more than the well-educated, middle- and upper-class immigrants of the “new” Indian diaspora—of which Sandhya is a part. The character of Draupadi embodies a version of lived second-generation ethnicity in the U.S. and, in particular, of an Indian diaspora that is set against the one of “Sandhya’s people” who, up to the 1960s, seemed never to have budged from the Indian subcontinent. Her veins were etched by centuries of arranged marriages, dark blue blood pouring through. She could point to a plot of land bounded by granite wall and name ancestors who had owned the land for generations. […] But memory swelling like black water threatened to drown her. (ibid. 4)

Sandhya is designed as a representative of the “new” Indian diaspora that does not encompass emigrants headed to the colonial outposts of an Empire but “people who have entered metropolitan centres of Empire or other white settler countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA as part of a post1960s pattern of global migration” (Mishra 3). Blue-blooded, high-caste Sandhya of the “new” diaspora appears to be the complete antithesis of hybrid, “old”-diaspora Draupadi. At a first glance, her characterization seems to support Brij V. Lal’s observation of today’s obsolescence of “the conventional wisdom about Indians’ general dislike of crossing the kalapani, the dark dreaded seas, for foreign lands”ix (10). He argues in his introduction to The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora (2006):

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There was a time, a little over a hundred years ago, when migration was frowned upon, when it was widely believed that in most circumstances only the desperate departed their homeland for strange places, and then, too, under compulsion or false advertising by those who enlisted them for various jobs. There is no such fear anymore. Crossing the kalapani has become an enviable, a much sought after symbol of success. (Lal 10)

Yet Alexander dampens this all too optimistic definition of the successful “new” diaspora by delineating some of the real-life problems of post-1950s Indian immigrants to the U.S.A., especially the everyday racism they face. Moreover, she also clearly aligns the new diaspora with the old by alluding to “memory swelling like black water [that] threatened to drown her” (Manhattan 4, emphasis added). Alexander both differentiates and connects the two generations of migrants that Sandhya and Draupadi stand for. While the deeply symbolic phrase “black water” suggests that not only the old but, in the words of Vijay Mishra, “[a]ll diasporas are unhappy” (1), the use of the English translation of “Kala Pani” indicates Sandhya’s difference from the “old” Indian diaspora or, to quote Mishra again, that “every diaspora is unhappy in its own way” (1). While Sandhya is not threatened to drown in cultural taboo or ocean water, the “black water” of her memories of home, irreconcilable with her life in New York, threatens to overwhelm her. They drive her to a suicide attempt (204-205) she escapes as narrowly as earlier girmityas escaped the “Kala Pani” of old.

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Draupadi, who finds and saves Sandhya (ibid.), is more than the protagonist’s mentor and a connecting link to Indian diaspora history. She is steeped in a variety of (often counter-) cultural traditions allowing Alexander to establish links between and throughout Eastern and Western culture. Draupadi’s chapters are introduced by epigrams by Kalidasa, Ellison, Shakespeare, Genet, Blake, and Kafka (3, 43, 86, 118, 163, 168). She claims the legacy of Melville, Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs (118-119), Billie Holiday (53) and of Indian mythology. She is named for Draupadi, the heroine of the epic Mah bh rata. Alexander, just as Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warrior (1976), not only updates the original mythical female figure (in modern-day Draupadi Dinkins) but also liberally changes her characteristics by including features of a number of other mythical characters in order to fashion a feminist version of combative (South) Asian American femininity:

144 | K ORNELIA F REITAG Alexander unapologetically subverts and rearranges the Hindu pantheon and imagines Draupadi as a combination of Kali, the angry goddess of Destruction, “blessed with four arms,” Sita who was (re-) “born of fire and endured exile” in the ancient epic Ramayana, Durga, the maternal Preserver, who “raced into the wind, atop a tiger,” and Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity, with a “lotus blossom in one hand and a sword in the other” (88).x (Shankar 300)

Draupadi Dinkins—her “Grandpa changed his name from Dineshwaran to Dinkins, thinking it sounded easier on the ear” (Alexander Manhattan 88)—is of hybrid heritage and symbolically imbued with the fighting spirit of Hindu Goddesses and the literary heritage of both East and West. She represents modern-day, urban, transnational America in the novel. Her friends, a colorful group of artists and intellectuals—mostly minor figures in the plot—flesh out this picture. There are, for instance, the Thai, white, and Mexican American performance artists Sikrit, Rosie, and Simon Escobar, involved with her in “the AIDS show at Franklin Furnace” (45-47). There are the participants in the show in the Poet’s Café that “involv[es] crossing borders. Set […] by a riverbank. Imagin[ing] us all, black, white, yellow, brown, stripped down, leaping into water” (118). And there are—instrumental to the plot—the characters of the Egyptian scholar Rashid el Obeid and Sandhya’s cousin Jay, the photographer-traveler. Both allow Alexander to widen the horizon to include references to the African American Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings (160-162) as well as to the Sudanese Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (59). Jay, Rashid, and some of the latter’s friends are the characters that come closest to Pease’s idea of postnationality as they feel little or no attachment to any nation, neither to their nation of origin nor to their current place of residence. Jay lives a nomadic life as a photographer and travels the world to cover political hot spots. “Have camera, will travel, Jay quipped to himself as he climbed” the airplane that is to take him from Berlin, where he “had arrived as the wall was falling,” to New York. “Nothing of home or motherland pierced his thoughts, for such notions were alien to him” (22). While this expresses a measure of postnational attitude, his movements are clearly determined by the differrent national sites and events he has been covering: the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the war in Lebanon, and the unrest on the Indian subcontinent. The intellectual Rashid, traumatized by the military conflicts and changing regimes in the Near East, “had started in the city as a post-doc fellow at Columbia, but in between jobs was making do as a doorman at Westbeth” (54). He lives as if in a no-man’s land, meeting his girlfriends in an undecorated

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whitewashed room, unwilling to settle—residing in New York, without being of it. “He was uncomfortable with people around, even with the shadow of the tourist from some Slavic country with a camera dangling helplessly from a shoulder” (45). As Xiaoying Zhou observes, Rashid serves “to expand the geographic and demographic map of New York City,” and Sandhya meets through him victims of British and French colonialism in the Middle East (218) who are stranded in the city. Rashid intends to write a book “on post-colonial identity,” and “New York, of course, was the perfect location in which to put such a narrative together” (68). Yet, like Jay, even as Rashid tends toward thinking that is far from nationalist and severely critical of neo-colonialism, he does not imagine himself in a deterritorialized state but understands the “world” in terms “of multiple anchorages” (68; emphasis added). Rashid keeps himself aloof not only from everyday American life but from life in general. In love with first Draupadi, then Sandhya, he turns out to be unwilling or unable to commit to a relationship: he “doe[s] not want to live with anyone just now” (183). In need of “friendship, the warmth, the room in Brooklyn” (75), he does consort, if somewhat uncomfortably, with a childhood friend, Zahir, and his shady friends who are involved in terrorist activities. “Rashid had heard Zahir whisper of a circle of acquaintances, men who imagined themselves soldiers in the army of God, secret agents in the cause of purity who were ready to blow up buildings, bridges” (75). The little developed sub-plot of brewing Muslim radicalism reads like an eerie premonition of an “extraterritorial past of the radically altered future” (Pease “From” 33) that would explode on 9/11 in Manhattan; Arlington County, North Carolina; and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Draupadi, on the other hand—“born on the fourth of July” (Manhattan 87), “in America, [and seeming like] the epitome of newness […]—leather jacket, Benneton sweater, short black hair, subtle eye shadow, the lot” (Manhattan 3)— is anchored in the U.S.A, even if she is transnationally connected to the rest of the world by biological and cultural heritage: “parts of the globe […] flowed into her” (54). What makes her a cultural insider is not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant pedigree starting with the Mayflower’s arrival on American shores but a transnational patchwork of historical and cultural connections that allow her to accept much more of New York City and American culture as “hers” than only one, dominant strain—and to look beyond them. She has “a bond with Billie Holiday” (Manhattan 53) and feels that “India owed her” (52).xi Her variegated cultural connections and demands make her a perfect urban mentor to introduce the newcomer Sandhya to her city and its inhabitants. As Zhou puts it, “Draupadi embodies both the constituent attributes and the transformative forces of the

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multi-racial, multicultural urban environment of New York City for the formation of the subject and the transformation of urban citizenship in a postcolonial metropolis” (206)—and, one might add, a transnational and transcultural one at that. Draupadi initiates the protagonist to a transnational New York, where “Sandhya’s map of Manhattan seemed useless” (57). The map is “useless” as it captures only the known tourist sights and the general design of the streets of Manhattan but not the rush of people when the subway is suddenly closed, the use of sidewalks by street musicians and vendors, the deportment of people evicted from a hotel that is demolished (55-58). Alexander illuminates at this point and numerous others in her narrative that, in Henry Lefebvre’s terms (3839), the conceived space of a city map does nothing to illuminate the lived space of New York, its dynamics, its sounds, its colors, its joy and tragedy: “Subway broken down,” […]. They coasted forward, pointing out the young things on their platform heels, the matrons gesticulating, men and women mouthing English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, whatever came first. […] They came upon a man with a saxophone making music with his mouth, dark skin ballooning, precious music afloat […], dressed in red silks, shirt, scarf, and cheap black slacks, shiny shoes with fretted leather work. […] Sandhya wanted to watch but Draupadi pointed to a building that stood halfbroken against the skyline. […] It was an old residential hotel for the poor. They were pulling it down as part of a neighborhood gentrification scheme. […] [A]n old black woman [was] kneeling on the sidewalk at the edge of what had been the foyer. The woman’s flesh was bound with bits of cloth, soiled from overuse. Her torn skirt was held together with a pin. […] Keening sounds rose from her mouth, struck the damp air. Sounds from a language Sandhya felt she could almost understand. And the old woman, what was she: African-American, Somali, Ethiopian, Indian, who could tell? (55, 57, 5758)

As becomes clear in these lines, what the schematic representation of space (on the paper map) blocks out is more than simply the representational spaces of Manhattan: what is screened from view are, in particular, the transnational representational spaces (in the real-life streets): “African-American, Somali, Ethiopian, Indian, who could tell?” Draupadi establishes Sandhya’s (and the reader’s) connection to the lived transnational spaces of labor migrants, international scholars, and artists in the city. New York, as represented by Draupadi Dinkins and her friends, is dynamic and transnational, made up of people and ideas from all over the world: “Syncretism was part of her [Draupadi’s] being, and it might work for her,

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overcoming the barriers she felt she had faced since childhood” (Manhattan 52). Draupadi helps Sandhya, who desperately wants to settle down in her new homeland, to understand that assimilation or adaptation to a (supposed) national norm or standard are neither available nor desirable.

T HE “N EW ” I NDIAN D IASPORA Sandhya Rosenblum is only one of Alexander’s Indian characters designed to belong to the “new” Indian diaspora, which has been forming in the “Age of Globalization” (Rai 66-81). She is given a whole family involved in this diaspora, one way or another. All of the “new” diasporic Indians and even their relatives at home have to live in and work out the “separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place” (Clifford 255), as James Clifford has defined the predicament of diaspora. Hence, Sandhya’s diaspora role as wife of an American citizen is multiplied and reflected by a whole spectrum of “new” transnational Indian subject positions. Next to her cosmopolitan cousin Jay, discussed above, Sandhya is supported by her cousin Sakhi, who turns from accounting to feminist activism and social work and “embodies a mode of self-invention that resists the assimilative model and demonstrates another way of claiming belonging in America” (Zhou 221). Sakhi’s husband Ravi represents the typical post-1960s Indian immigrant—with an M.S. from Madras, he works successfully for a major corporation and struggles to understand why his wife “was threatening to give up the accounting business that had helped them to set up, and devote herself to antiracist, antisexist work, as she put it” (136). The typically enterprising Indian businessman is represented by cousin Chanduh—with an MBA from Columbia University, he resides in India, hails “Free enterprise, the salvation of the world” (13), and intends to open a business with Ravi to export Kerala goods (116). Left back at home in India, Sandhya’s father, mother, and sister wait for her to bring “the long list of items her mother requested: rubber rings for the Moulinex blender; deodorant; vaseline tubes; yeast in jars; eau de toilette with a light jasmine scent” (41). While the novel allows catching a glimpse of each of these characters’ problems with stretching the family over multiple oceans and borders, it is Sandhya and her story that express them most clearly. As her first name indicates, she is literally a character on the threshold. Sandhya, the reader learns at the very end of the novel, “[i]n Sanskrit […] signified those threshold hours, before the sun rose or set, fragile zones of change before the clashing absolutes of light and dark took hold” (227). Sandhya’s biography took her from her native

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Tiruvella via Hyderabad to Nainatal, where she met her Jewish American husband Stephen, with whom she is now living in New York, along with their fiveyear old daughter. Although she has lived for three years in the U.S.A., at the beginning of the book she is introduced as still utterly forlorn in the City. Her hopeless entanglement in “living here and remembering/desiring another place” (Clifford 255) is indicated in a stream-of-consciousness narrative that weaves artfully in and out of here and there, now and then. The reader meets Sandhya sitting on a wooden bench at the edge of Central Park in Manhattan. It is a place that is geographically, symbolically, and literally “central”—in Manhattan, in New York, and thereby in the Western World—but is only halfheartedly occupied by the protagonist. She is huddled at the mere border of Central Park, on a bench that, far from being comfortable, “is growing colder” while she is perching on it, passively observing the hustle and bustle of the city (Manhattan 6). It is from here that Alexander establishes the first of many spatial linkages between the U.S.A. and India and represents how Sandhya’s “body is marked as Other” (Shock 153) in her novel. First Sandhya observes a “small man, as dark as she was […] balancing on a bicycle” that was “wobbling” (Manhattan 5). This immediately widens the reader’s perspective to include other dark-skinned people in New York. The man—with his skin color, his smallness, and his insecure movements—clearly reflects the protagonist’s own perception of difference, unimportance, and insecurity. Hence, the passage transmits an idea of the marginalization of the dark-skinned Indian body in relation to the space of Manhattan in the midnineties, but the text does not stop there in widening and filling out the essayistic metaphor of “the shock of arrival.” The protagonist’s thoughts wander from the insecure movements of the man on the bicycle to an art installation she has recently seen in a subway station that for her symbolizes a point of arrival and rest—even if only transitory. She recollects “a cage of chicken wire […] two metal chairs, bolted to the ground,” and that “she wanted to […] sit ever so quietly, waiting. She wanted her feet soldered to the rough tiles, in the middle of no-man’s land” (5). This envisioned state of “extraterritoriality” (Pease “From”)—affixed to the ground in one of the narrow, smelly, and crowded New York subway stations—might be a vision of rest but it does not imply utopian possibilities, “an alternative public sphere“ (Pease ibid. 29) but rather stasis. In the image, the space of the body is taken out of real space into “a void that could be [literally] colored with diverse shades of light” (Foucault 239) by the passing train. Yet, as if taking Foucault’s observation to heart that “we live in a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely

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not imposable on one another” (ibid.), a further leap of imagination transports Sandhya out of the “no-man’s-land” of “the subway at rush hour” (Alexander Manhattan 5-6) to India. She remembers herself as a small child in her home– town Tiruvella, lovingly supervised by her grandmother observing a play put on by a puppeteer. While the moment is first presented as a “homecoming” (it is warm, little Sandhya is loved, well guarded, and knows her way around), even if it is only an imaginary one, it develops into an initiation into knowledge of migratory life and hardship. For, as the child attentively observes the stage, “a minute chair was pushed forward” into which “Draupadi was lowered,” while the puppet master recited “[w]ords that Sandhya could no longer summon up about exile, about being unhoused, and the long years Draupadi waited” (ibid. 6). By the allusion to the sad story of the central female figure from the Mah bh rata and the memory of a rain shower curtailing the performance (ibid.), the home in India turns from the supposedly secure haven to a space as fraught with exile, displacement, and bodily discomfort for an Indian female as Manhattan. This beginning is one of Alexander’s “crystalliz[ations of] the jagged boundaries of the disjunctive worlds that the artist presses into play, [to] clarif[y] the painful gap between desire and the brute actual” (Shock 153). The movement from a bench to two different chairs highlights that in each of the three cases the seats may be resting points but will not bring unending peace and quiet. They provide just stops in a “wobbly” personal situation, in “no-man’s-land,” in “exile”—in what Nikos Papastergiadis has termed “the turbulence” of migration, the disturbance and tension between different “homes” (4). Her narrative de- and reterritorializes the protagonist while it expresses the “diasporic consciousness” that Clifford has described as being torn between the old and the new home, of “dwelling in dis-placement” (254). It is only in the next section of the chapter, after this thorough transnational dis/placement of the Indian-born American wife in New York (in Central Park and an unspecified subway station) and in India, that her diasporic consciousness becomes—by way of the same technique of personal narrative—distinctly fixed in America. The cold and “[rain]drops on her face” make her “thrust her feet into the damp ground” and she “fe[els] the rim of a soda can;” basic bodily actions and reactions bring her back from her daydreams and anchor her in the mundane reality. Thinking “of getting up, her hand close[s] over a card in her bag” (Manhattan 6), the green card with Sandhya’s blurry photo. It reminds her of the Irish immigration officer who greeted her “so energetic, cheery—‘Welcome to America. Be happy here’” (7) and her husband’s assurance that “[t]he gates of America are open wide” (ibid.). Finally rising from her bench, Sandhya asks herself:

150 | K ORNELIA F REITAG Why couldn’t it all be simple after that, a play, sensible and short? Wasn’t that the way it was meant to be, after all? But nothing felt right. […] Neither words nor gestures came out right. As she walked to the bus stop a thought gripped Sandhya, supposing she were to swallow the green card, ingest that plastic, would it pour through her flesh, a curious alchemy that would make her all right in the new world? She gazed at her two hands, extended now in front of her. What if she could peel off her brown skin, dye her hair blonde. Turn her body into a pale, Caucasian thing, would it work better with Stephen? […] Stepping carefully onto the sidewalk she pondered the versions of beauty she had gleaned from the old movies that found their way to Hyderabad—Marilyn Monroe, though she was far too sexy to emulate, she who made the cats crawl on the hot roofs of the city, made helpless men cry “Zindabad Marilyn!” Someone like Michelle Pfeiffer would be better […] her filmi body curved just right. (ibid. 7)

While the desire expressed in this wish is directed at assimilation to, even transformation into, an American beauty, the movement of thought is determined by transnational experiences—by the beauty ideals of American movies watched in Hyderabad, slightly out of sync with New York in the 1990s. Even the (imaginary) relinquishing of Indian identity and physique turns out to be measured more by Indian and less by American standards. Throughout the novel, glimpses of the protagonist’s and her cousins’ childhood in India, references to Indian myths and history, and Sandhya’s visits home show the protagonist’s “fundamental (and frequently nostalgic, even when ambivalent) investment in a homeland, a place to which [she] belongs” (Wald 209). Yet in the course of the narrative, the longing for the Indian homeland is not just interrupted by memories of rain showers but by glimpses of India ridden with political and religious violence as well as with discrimination and violence against women that pierced and continue to pierce even the shielded and privileged upper-middle-class existence of Sandhya’s family (14-18, 33, 108-109). While Sandhya’s story unquestionably tells an immigrant’s fate, it seems not to fit easily what Rosemary Marangoly George has termed the “immigrant genre” (278). It is neither “marked by a curiously detached experience of ‘homelessnesss’” nor is this absence “compensated for by an excessive use of the metaphor of luggage, both spiritual and material” (278). In fact, the text is loaded with moving metaphors of homelessness. Alexander writes not just about lonely park benches, the no-man’s land of subway stations, or exiled mythical heroines, all indicating “dwelling in dis-placement” (Clifford 254) and constituting only the starting point of a host of metaphors like them. She also makes her protagonist face homeless people in New York—for instance, the evicted old woman outside the Hotel Alexandria on her first outing with

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Draupadi (Manhattan 57-58). She thereby connects but also contrasts the suffering from crossing borders with the suffering of unhoused ones within the U.S.A. Moreover, Sandhya seems happily unencumbered by material baggage from her past. It is the minor character cousin Sakhi who describes in the novel the attitude that George ascribes to the immigrant genre: Immigrants always had problems. Traveling places was hard. Staying places was harder. You had to open your suitcase, lay out the little bits and pieces into ready-made niches. Smooth out your sari, exchange it for a skirt, have your hair trimmed a little differently. Sometimes the air hurt to breathe, but oftentimes it worked well enough […]. Then you tucked the suitcase under the bed and forgot about it, started to accumulate the bric-a-brac that made [immigrants] part of the streets around. (207)

Yet this “scen[e] that catalogue[s] the spiritual [and] material […] luggage that immigrants carry over” (George 280) is only called up by Sakhi to point out that it does not fit Sandhya at all: [I]t was as if Sandhya had opened her imaginary suitcase, taken out her little bits and pieces, arranged them carefully in an imaginary vault in her kitchen. Gold watch and silk sari laid there, notebook and hairbrush, the little pacifier Dora had first used, her own wedding ring, a diaphragm she no longer needed. She shut the door. Gazed through glass. Pressed HIGH and watched, astonished as the bits exploded. (207-208)

The “shock of arrival in the new world” is here staged on a micro scale. What the fate of Alexander’s Sandhya indicates is that the upheaval of personal life by travel is a common immigrant experience, yet not the same for everyone. The Indian American character—like her real-life models of the “new” Indian diaspora (Rai 66-81)—has to navigate not just her old Indian and new American home but also a number of overlapping but incongruent im/migrant spaces in the city. In the next passage of the second chapter, Alexander redirects the thoughts of her protagonist, still lingering on the edge of Central Park, to her welcome dinner given by her new Jewish American in-laws and, thereby, to yet another diaspora.

ANOTHER D IASPORA If Sandhya’s first, Indian name marks her as a figure posed on the threshold, her Jewish American surname Rosenblum indicates that she finds herself, in fact, not

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only in-between India and the U.S.A. but also between different diaspora experiences, namely Indian and Jewish. Sandhya’s fate as an immigrant is shown to be related to and yet quite different from that of the Rosenblums. Her motherin-law’s dishes are “brought over from another world,” which here means Europe, and the photo of “the immigration officers on Ellis Island tugging head scarves off the little girls to check them for lice, cold wind on their cheeks” means nothing to her. Yet her in-laws have a “housemaid from Trinidad, whose skin is the color of” Sandhya’s (Manhattan 8). She came neither from Europe nor as a third- or fourth-class passenger by ship, and she feels close to the service personnel. When her mother-in-law exhorts her, “‘[n]ever forget that you are marrying into this, Sandhya. […] But you know this is the land of opportunity’” (ibid. 8), the message is well meant but (European) geography, (low) class heritage, and (light) skin color are so foreign to Sandhya’s experiences that it turns from welcome into warning. The scenes at the Rosenblum’s illuminate again the fact that national and ethnic differences have not at all lost their meaning. They stage encounters between representatives and heirs of two very different waves of immigration and diaspora. Sandhya’s in-laws represent not only an older wave of European immigrants to the U.S.A. but also what Robin Cohen has called a “victim diaspora” (18) which is significantly different from the diaspora represented by Sandhya—or the Trinidadian housemaid, who might, for all we know, be a descendant of the “old” Indian diaspora. Sandhya, we do know for sure, is part of a “new” South Asian diaspora that “falls outside the strict definition” of Cohen’s terminologyxii as Clifford has correctly observed (249). The potentially explosive class, ethnicity/race, and diasporic differences of different immigrant groups in the “land of opportunity” surface in the apparently innocuous scene at the Rosenblum’s coffee table. This is strikingly highlighted in Sandhya’s visit to Ellis Island, where Stephen takes her once the facility is reopened after an extended renovation, “[s]oon after they settled in New York” (Manhattan 35). True to the official image of Ellis Island as “a place where families and individuals celebrate and honor those family members who made the arduous journey to a new life in America” (Ellis Island), Stephen could not resist a sense of pride in the fact that the broken fixtures from the contagious hospital, where one of his great-grandmother’s sisters had been interned, were tucked neatly behind plexiglass. They saw a stovepipe, a blue-painted bed frame, a bit of an ancient toilet bowl, a sign THIS WAY UP with a red arrow pointing skyward, all arranged as if the passerby might enter through the immaculate show into a past so cleft

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from its indices of dirt and disaster that the magnitude of dislocations the immigrants had suffered might be cast afresh in a time without before and behind, well-lit and clearly palpable. (Manhattan 35-36)

The passage renders Sandhya’s impression of the memorabilia of the collective hardships immigrants at Ellis Island had to endure. She clearly objects to the “immaculate show” that repackages “dirt,” “disaster,” and “dislocation”—the “shock of arrival” of thousands of immigrants—for the consumption of national and international mass tourism. The cleansed exhibits behind “plexiglass” do not remotely recreate the experience of the immigration station through which, for instance, European Jews like Stephen’s relatives had to pass—if they were allowed to pass—into the country. They are part of “the spiritual [and] material […] luggage that immigrants” (George 280) coming through Ellis Island had to encounter in their lives. Yet, enshrinement and memorialization of collective memory can lead to as much falsification of and nostalgia for the past as enshrining personal memorabilia like the “little bits and pieces [in their] readymade niches” that could not ground the protagonist’s life (Alexander 207). In fact, the “immaculate show” distracts from more than one use of the space of Ellis Island, in particular from its years-long use as a detention center, which becomes a pivotal point for Pease’s sketch of C. L. R. James’s “extraterritorial literary strategy” (“From” 36) in his article on post-national narratives from which I quoted at the beginning of this essay. He explains that it was Ellis Island where “the State herded up all of its unwanted residents in preparation for their complete removal” (Pease ibid. 24) after the passage of the Internal Security Act in 1950, and where C. L. R. James also came to be interned. “While he was detained there awaiting deportation hearings, James began work on Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In” (ibid. 27). As Pease characterizes the adoption of the island as deportation center and the ensuing change in the meaning of the place from pre- to cold-war usage: Ellis Island had been consecrated in the national imagination as port of entry through which strangers, exiles, and political refugees passed on their way to become naturalized as U.S. citizens. But in turning Ellis Island into a deportation center, the Immigration and Naturalization Services disaggregated the Island as well as its population from the national territory. (ibid. 24)

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In other words, Pease stresses that the service (and myth) of Ellis Island as “port of entry” (Pease ibid. 24) for immigrants “who made the arduous journey to a new life in America” (Ellis Island) was interrupted and reversed. It is worth noting at this point that Pease makes it very clear that it was C. L. R. James’s exclusion from the U.S. public sphere and his deportation from the U.S. national territory to Ellis Island that was the origin for his rewriting of Moby Dick. After having been uprooted from his everyday habitat by agents of the national security state, […] James turned his detainment on Ellis Island into the occasion to return to his interpretive labors. […] James also depicted the site of generalized social death on Ellis Island as a historical correlative for the catastrophic shipwreck that the crew were compelled to undergo at the conclusion to Melville’s novel. […] Construing Ellis Island as a site of resistance to the system’s powers of emplacement and exclusion, James produced a mode of literary survivability for the mariners, renegades and castaways whose catastrophic deaths had been had been justified by the americanist interpretive community. (“From” 29-31)

James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castawaysxiii would not have been written without the nation state’s incarceration of him and his fellow castaways on Ellis Island. It became for him an “occasion,” “a correlative,” “a site of resistance.” It was a specific site that was not just outside of the national territory of the United States but contiguous to it and under U.S. jurisdiction. Hence, the extraterritoriality that Pease characterizes as precondition for the utopian dimension of the book is very much the result of national boundaries and territories, without which it could not have transcended them (Pease “From” 24). To return to the history of Ellis Island: in November 1954, the detention center on Ellis Island was finally closed. In 1976 the main building on Ellis Island opened to visitor tours and, finally, in 1990 “[t]he Ellis Island Immigration Museum was open[ed] to visitors and over 20 million people have visited to this date” (Ellis Island Timeline). In the time between 1954 and 1990, a tremendous change in the ways in which the U.S. enacts and propagates its role at home and in the world has occurred. This change can be measured precisely in the different role that the space of Ellis Island has played in American immigration politics and, consequently, in the way it is rendered in Manhattan Music. In the 1950s, when the U.S. “state had defined its role in the world in terms of its global opposition to communism,” life in America, the American way of life, the American Dream was only for those who had “normatively internalized th[e] values” of “the free market, private property and the autonomous

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individual” (Pease “From” 23). “America” as discourse was extremely represssive on a national and very exclusionary on a global scale. Ellis Island’s use as a deportation center signaled this phase in American politics in especially strong terms. By the 1990s, some version of the repressive and exclusionary discourse of the imperial nation state still existed, yet the American discourse of neoliberalism had become much more effective nationally and internationally by “enabling possible struggles for rights through consumerist practices and imaginaries” (Grewal 2). This becomes strikingly clear in Sandhya’s perception of the bewildering transformation of Ellis Island from space of internment and exclusion—“dirt and disaster that […] the immigrants had suffered” (Alexander Manhattan 36)—into a place to be consumed—a “show” (ibid.). The place that historically still connotes the exclusionary power of Anglo-American whiteness on racist and classist grounds has become the cleaned-up scene of multicultural and multinational consumption of an exceptional history: “the boat [is] crammed with tourists from all corners of the globe: Japanese, Nigerians, Australians, Danes, even tourists from […] the broken-up Soviet Union” (Manhattan 36). As Grewal argues, “America at the end of the century and the beginning of the twenty-first, came to connote both whiteness and multiculturalism within the framework of an American exceptionalism in which neoliberal discourses provide the possibilities of multiple changing national affiliations” (7). The new official meaning of “America” as multicultural, open, and welcoming is the reason why Stephen expects Sandhya to fit in easily—in the City, in his family, and in immigration history as displayed in Ellis Island. Nevertheless, Sandhya is “reluctant to enter the boat”; there is “a dazed look on her face,” and she gets lost (Alexander Manhattan 36). While the symbolic entry into an America as show and all-inclusive museum is offered to the protagonist by the space of Ellis Island, and while her husband is eager for her to pass, “[i]t was as if he were proposing a past she might enter, but her flesh resisted” (38). This bodily resistance has a number of reasons. One is, as indicated above, that Sandhya resists her inscription as a consumer into a simulacrum that translates a contradictory history into an easy-to-swallow nostalgic “show” (Manhattan 36). Moreover, Ellis Island is not at all symbolizing the experience of the “new” Indian diaspora, which started only after the shutdown of the detention center and includes mostly well-educated, English-speaking migrants who are better off than the steerage passengers sent to Ellis Island for inspection. Yet, what is even more important and explains her bodily revulsion, is that the new nationalist narrative has not ceased to be exclusionary. It may now be multicultural and “provide the possibilities of multiple changing national

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affiliations” (Grewal 7), but it is still white and welcomes some national affiliations more than others. While for the Jewish American Stephen today’s white multiculturalism is secure enough and he can easily pass, his Indian American wife is stuck in her body and her nationality. When he, panicking, searches for his wife everywhere in the exhibition and, finally, finds her in the room with Anti-Asian images that he had not wanted her to see, she stands in front of “an enlarged image of a Moroccan, or was it Algerian in djebella and turban, […]. She seemed to be staring but not really seeing” (37). It is at this moment that “her sense of lostness had seeped into his own soul,” and also for Stephen “the clear walls he had constructed to make himself feel at home” dissolve (37). For a short moment, he perceives the crucial difference that her dark body and her Indian descent make for her life in America. He, just like Sandhya, has to accept the persistence of ethnic and national distinctions not only because the American society is neither post-racial nor postnational in a utopian sense but also because these differences are important constituents of individuals, groups, and societies and their particular histories and memories. Manhattan Music deconstructs the new, neoliberal national narrative of the U.S.A. that finds one of its materializations in the Ellis Island National Museum that, in the words of Pease’s definition, “recovers a lost national origin” (immigration until 1945) that is projected “onto a national future” (multi-culturalism without borders) and meant to inspire “a ‘national people’ that [it] inspired simultaneously to consolidate and represent” (“National” 4). In the novel, Stephen and his Jewish American family are the “national people” consolidated and represented by the Ellis Island national narrative. In the plot, the national narrative is in manifold ways countered and transcended—by the experiences and actions of Sandhya and her family (the “new” Indian diaspora), of Draupadi (the old Indian diaspora), of Jay (the cosmopolitan), of Rashid el Obeid and his friends (the Middle Eastern “non-resident aliens”), and the margi-nalized people Sandhya meets in the streets of Manhattan and at the meeting of the group of women refugees. Yet the novel at no point turns into a postnational, or even less into an extraterritorial, narrative. Alexander’s text is thoroughly transnational. It focuses on the “new” Indian Diaspora, which is developing as a result of the latest phase of globalization and is changing the make-up of the U.S. population, and in particular the face of big cities and metropolitan areas. It stages in particular the ways the “new” diasporic Indians construct identities across national territories and borders and interact with representatives of “older” or other diasporas, and with marginalized people in U.S. society. Alexander has projected a pluri-locale imaginary space between

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the U.S.A., India, and the Middle East in which characters move without final utopian arrival—yet the book does not finish without a hopeful prospect. At the end of the novel, Sandhya is back at Central Park, no longer sitting still but moving and “no longer fearful”: She stood her ground. […] There was a place for her here, though what it might be she could never have spelled out. And she, who had never trusted words very much, knew she would live out her life in America. [...] For a moment longer she stood at the edge of Central Park. Then, slipping sandals onto feet still damp with lake water, Sandhya Rosenblum walked quickly into the waiting city. (Manhattan 227-228)

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Featherstone, Mike. “Global Culture: An Introduction.” Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. Ed. Mike Featherstone. London, UK: Sage: 1990. 1-14. Print. Fisher Fishkin, Shelley. “The Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies.” Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004. American Quarterly 57.1 (March 2005): 17-57. Print. Fluck, Winfried. “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies).” Transnational American Studies. Eds. Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt and Ingrid Thaler. Special issue of REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 23, 2007. 59-77. Print. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” In: The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 1998. 237-244. Print. Gairola, Raul Krishna. “Western Experiences: Education and ‘Third World Women’ in the Fictions of Tsitis Dangarembga and Meena Alexander.” Jouvert 4.2 (Winter 2000). E-Journal. N. pag. Web. 20 March 2015. George, Rosemary Marangoly. “Traveling Light: Immigration and Invisible Suitcases in M.G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack.” Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literature. Eds. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1994. 278-304. Print. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print. Gruesser, John Cullen. Black on Black: Twentieth-Century American Writing about Africa. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2000. Print. Gunn, Giles. “Globalizing Literary Studies.” PMLA, 116.1 (2001): 16-31. Print. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Iyer, Nalini. “Sisters and Brothers of America: Problematized Belonging in the Works of Meena Alexander.” In: Passage to America: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander. Ed. Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 137-149. Print. Jain, Anupama. “Reading Hybridity in Postcolonial Theory and Meena Alexander’s The Shock of Arrival.” IPassage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander. Eds. Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 150-171. Print. Jay. Paul. “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English.” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 32-47. Print.

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Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discources of Displacement. Durham: Duke, 1996. Print. Kudaisya, Mehda. “The Age of Colonial Capital.” The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora. Ed. Brij V. Lal. Honolulu: The U of Hawaii P, 2006. 4465. Print. Lal, Brij V. “Introduction.” The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora. Ed. Brij V. Lal. Honolulu: The U of Hawaii P, 2006. 1-15. Print. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991. McCormack, Donna. “Illicit Intimacies, the Ramayana and Synaesthetic Remembering in Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter.” Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature. Eds. Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai. New York: Routledge, 2013. 203-228. Print. Mehta, Parvinder. “When the Fragmented Self Remembers and Recovers: Transfiguring the Past and Identity Through Memory in Manhattan Music.” Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander. Eds. Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 232-249. Print. Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diaspora’s Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. Papastergiadis, Nikos. The Turbulence of Migration. Cambridge: Polity P, 2000. Pease, Donald. “From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature: The Emergence of Literary Extraterritoriality.” Transnational American Studies Ed. Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt and Ingrid Thaler. Tübingen: Narr, 2007. 9-35. Print. ---. “National Narratives, Postnational Narration” Modern Fiction Studies 43.1 (1997):1-23. Print. Pries, Ludger. “The Approach of Transnational Social Spaces: Responding to New Configurations of the Social and the Spatial.” In: New Transnational Social Spaces: International Migration and Transnational Companies in the Early Twenty-First Century. Ed. Ludger Pries. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. Radway, Janice. “What’s in a Name?” Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 20, 1998. American Quarterly 51 (March 1999): 1-32. Print. Rai, Rajesh. “The Age of Globalization.” In: The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora. Ed. Brij V. Lal. Honolulu: The U of Hawaii P, 2006. 66-81. Print. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. 2nd ed. New York: Random House International, 2001. Print.

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Rowe, John Carlos, ed. Postnational American Studies. Berkeley: U of Cal. P, 2000. Print. Shankar, Lavina Dhingra. “Postcolonial Diasporic Writing in Search of a Homeland: Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music, Fault Lines, and The Shock of Arrival.” Literature Interpretation Theory 12.3 (2001): 285-312. Print. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 1999. Print. Wald, Priscilla. “Minefields and Meeting Grounds: Transnational Analyses and American Studies.” American Literary History 10.1 (Spring 1998): 199-218. Print. Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Print. Zhou, Xiaojing. Cities of Others: Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2014. Print.

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Pease writes: “But postnationalism has also fostered chauvinistic reactions from Americanists who have invoked the term to describe the United States as the superstate empowered to inscribe the foundational terms in the U.S. political vocabulary—capitalism, free enterprise, freedom of expresssion and access, competitive individualism—within the new globalized economic order.” In a footnote he quotes Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America as an example for the latter (“From” 10). For a critical analysis of this New Americanist evaluation of national narrative see Winfried Fluck, The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism (passim). The move from deterritorialization to resistance can also be found occasionally in the social sciences, as is obvious for example in Basch’s observation: “Within the situations of political and economic domination and racial and cultural differentitation, building transnational social fields and imagining a deterritorialized nation-state can be seen as a form of resistance” (Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schillert, and Christina Szanton Blanc 46). In his reading of C. L. R. James, he downplays the attachment to and the role of the territory of the United States and of the deportation center on Ellis Island. See, e.g., Hawthorne’s U.S. artists marveling about the Roman marble faun in the eponymous book (1860) or Henry James’s upper middle-class travelers in “Daisy Miller” (1897).

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See John Cullen Gruesser’s Black on Black: Twentieth Century American Writing about Africa. There he argues that “African American depictions of Africa published between 1902 and 1982 either invoke or react against one or more aspects of Ethiopianism, the teleological and uniquely African view of history inspired by the Psalms verse ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God’ (68:31)” (1). The structure of Manhattan Music follows the classical initiation pattern, as the titles of the six parts indicate: “Sitting” (5-42), “Stirring” (49-85), “Going” (94-117), “Stoning” (125-159), “Turning” (176-203), and “Staying” (206-228). See e.g., Peter Freese’s detailed account in chapter III of Die Initiationsreise: Studien zum jugendlichen Helden im modernen amerikanischen Roman (1998 [1969]) or, in more general terms, Kenneth Millard’s Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction (2007) She is the epitome of Alexander’s South Asian American characters that display, according to Anupama Jain, “noticeably […] that which various hybridity studies theorize and debate; namely, the value of understanding identity to be a combination of multiple, potentially conflicting, influences” (159). As “kala pani” is a transliteration from Hindi, a number of different notations in English exist; the ones used in the essay follow the choices of the respective authors referred to or quoted from. All references in the quotation by Shankar are to the chapter “Another India (Draupadi)” in Alexander’s Manhattan Music, 1997, which tells Draupadi Dinkin’s story. For a discussion of Draupadi’s “ostensibly nostalgic and self-constructed bond with India” see Gairola, paragraphs 21-24. The “ideal types” of diaspora that Cohen offers are “victim,” “labour,” “imperial,” “trade,” and “deterritorialized” (18). The novel was privately printed in New York in 1953 and it was reissued in London by Allison & Busby in 1984.

Barrio Spaces as Alter-Narratives Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running and The Republic of East L.A. J OSEF R AAB

In his gang memoir Always Running—La vida loca: Gang Days in L.A. (1993) as well as in his collection of short stories The Republic of East L.A. (2002) Luis J. Rodriguez concentrates on the hardships of a variety of Mexican American characters. These hardships are linked to ethnicity and place, they are grounded in what Setha M. Low calls “the ethnic city,” “the divided city,” and “the contested city” (5-9, 10-11). The spatial settings of both books are prominently marked—mostly as barrios. Factual and fictional occurrences in these barrios are repeatedly complemented by historical depth—the life story of an individual, family, or community or the development of a neighborhood over time. In this way Rodriguez’s memoir and story collection function as barrio scripts that also address urban transformations, especially the ways in which the changing dynamics of an urban space affect those living in it. Specifically, Rodriguez focuses on Latino neighborhoods in East Los Angeles, Watts, and the San Gabriel Valley. While violence and abuse are central to Always Running, the individual pursuit of happiness and the obstacles that impede it are the focus of The Republic of East L.A. In either case, space and location determine the plots. The barrio spaces in which Rodriguez’s narratives take place are home to community spirit and dreams but also to conflict, despair, and death. They are, in Henri Lefebvre’s terms, like all spaces/neighborhoods “socially produced,” determined by relationships and interactions, race and class, gender and power dynamics, traditions and agency. Most of Rodriguez’s characters are Mexican American. Their world is that of the have-nots, the barrio. In the opening story of The Republic of East L.A., “My Ride, My Revolution,” told from the perspective of a young Mexican-Indian limousine driver who parks the car in his East L.A.

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neighborhood, this is “a segmented society of ‘who has’ and ‘who hasn’t,’” a scenario in which East L.A. and other barrio spaces feature as neighborhoods “where limos don’t belong” and where “this intrusion […] seems to smirk at [the residents’] poverty” (1). Like the narrator in “Oiga,” the overweight Ysela, who is at a religious revival meeting, waiting to tell her life story, the narrators and characters in The Republic of East L.A. and Always Running are eager to share their views on racial and spatial segregation, on inequality and perils, on police harassment and institutional discrimination, on aspiration and resignation, on trouble and self-assertion in the barrio. Ysela’s “Now it’s my turn, oiga. I’ve been waiting a long time to tell my story. And I have a good one, too” applies to all of Rodriguez’s narrators (Republic 136). In his rendering of barrio spaces in Always Running and The Republic of East L.A. (also in his later novel, Music of the Mill [2005] and in much of his poetry) Rodriguez concentrates on the ways in which the circumstances of the barrio determine individual fates. The memoir and stories are firmly grounded in Latina/o Los Angeles. They use episodic narratives and frequently switch back and forth in time. What holds them together is the urban space of the Los Angeles metropolitan area; so it is no surprise to find the city’s name appearing in the titles of both books. Rodriguez’s Los Angeles emerges from alter-narratives, insider engagements with a population and locations that often tend to be marginalized or othered by mainstream media. These tales come from within the barrio, they give a voice to people who tend to be misrepresented or silenced. A political activist, Rodriguez pulls his readers into barrio spaces marked by distinct social practices and individual agency. Since, as Henri Lefebvre notes, “an already [socially] produced space can be decoded, can be read,” and since space “also serves as a tool of thought and of action,” Rodriguez creates politically charged urban spaces (Production 17, 26; emphasis in the original). By including a historical dimension, he invites his readers to gain an understanding of enduring and worsening inequalities, of how the barrio spaces of the present came to be, since, as Doreen Massey remarks, “time and space must be thought together” (18). This essay will demonstrate how Rodriguez’s historically founded decoding of barrio spaces in Latina/o Los Angeles as sites of social interactions foregrounds dreams and aspirations, urban transformations, Latina/o diversity, segregation, and hardships. The interactions of those who live in the barrio and those who venture into the barrio from the outside shape the barrio spaces of late twentieth-century Los Angeles that Always Running and The Republic of East L.A. create. As the barrio spaces are turned through literary means into what Lefebvre calls “representational spaces,” the focus shifts to “space as directly

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lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence [to] the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users,’” an experienced space (Production 39). Rodriguez’s alter-narratives thus produce “representational space,” which Lefebvre characterizes thus: “Representational space is alive: it speaks. It has an affective kernel or centre […]. It embraces the loci of passion, of action, and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies time. […] [I]t is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic” (Production 42). Rodriguez’s literary creation of barrio spaces invites Latina/o and non-Latina/o readers alike to engage with those spaces and their inhabitants affectively. It promotes awareness and empathy. The barrio spaces that appear in Rodriguez’s tales are derived from his own experiences. They shaped him as a person and they ground his work as an author. Born in El Paso, TX and raised primarily in and around Los Angeles, from where he later moved to Chicago, Luis J. Rodriguez tries to tackle the inequalities in current U.S. society through a variety of venues, including those of literature, community activism, and political action. Apart from the gang testimonio Always Running, the story collection The Republic of East L.A., and the novel Music of the Mill, he is the author of four collections of poetry (his preferred genre), two children’s books, the essay collection Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times (2001), and the follow-up memoir It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (2011), which chronicles the time after the author left gang life at age eighteen to commit himself to social and political causes. For 2014 through 2016 Luis J. Rodriguez has been selected as Los Angeles poet laureate. His writing reflects a childhood in poverty, getting into gang life even before his teens, working in a number of professions, and eventually dedicating himself to community causes. As B.V. Olguín summarizes, Rodriguez has eschewed the accoutrements of literary fame in favor of a life of service to the masses of people living on the margins of society. After all, their story also is his story. Drawing upon his own life experiences as a gang member, drug addict, high-school dropout, homeless person, prisoner, factory worker, truck driver, carpenter, pipe fitter, and steel worker, Rodriguez has chronicled these lives in a broad corpus of literary works. (441)

In doing so, as I will show, Rodriguez focuses on the ways in which family, community, neighborhood, and city enjoy ethnic pride and a sense of belonging, while also suffering from poverty, crime, unequal power relations and regimes of repression. Their stories are invariably spatially grounded.

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U RBAN S PACES Most of the urban spaces that appear in Always Running and The Republic of East L.A. are ethnically marked. Ethnic neighborhoods (we may think of Harlem in Manhattan or Chinatown in San Francisco) developed in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, usually combining attributes of race/ethnicity with social class. As Mark Gottdiener and Ray Hutchison remark, “[t]he image of the American city as a mosaic of ethnic neighborhoods emerged at the turn of the century as a consequence of competition for settlement space within the industrial city” (159). Since then “the history of ethnic settlements has long been one of diverse neighborhoods within the city and constant movement to the suburbs” (Gottdiener/Hutchison 166). Ethnic neighborhoods keep shifting and evolving, as illustrated by the fictional neighborhood in Chicago, whose development from 1959 to 2009 Bruce Norris’s drama Clybourne Park (2010) traces. The interaction of the people living in the neighborhood, the arrival of a different ethnic group, their economic struggles, the influx of crime, and the subsequent gentrification all mark and shape that urban space as a social space. According to Henri Lefebvre, (social) space is a complex dynamic process, the “outcome of past actions” that affect the space’s present and future developments: (Social) space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity—their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder. It is the outcome of a sequence and set of operations, and thus cannot be reduced to the rank of a simple object. At the same time there is nothing imagined, unreal or ‘ideal’ about it as compared, for example, with science, representations, ideas or dreams. Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others. (Production 73)

Taking her cue from Lefebvre, Doreen Massey has called for an “understanding [of] space as a product of interrelations” (10) and has argued that space is where “in the negotiation of relations within multiplicities, the social is constructed” (13). Space, in Massey’s view, is thus foremost relational; it is “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality” (9), “the sphere of openended configurations within multiplicities” (91), “the dimension of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far […] [,] the dimension of a multiplicity of durations” (24). Especially in an urban space like the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which is marked by stratification, mi-

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gration, mobility, and demographic shifts, territoriality is dynamic and defies closure. The development of barrio spaces from the 1960s to the 1990s and the interaction of those living in them as well as their relations to realms outside the barrio underlie the representational spaces of Luis J. Rodriguez’s alter-narratives. His Latina/o neighborhoods have their distinctive stories, rules and routines. Mike Davis reminds us of the multiplicity, complexity, and spread of Latina/o spaces in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. He observes that while we may speak of a “primate barrio with small satellites” in 1960, by 1990 Latina/o Los Angeles is a “city-within-a-city” (Magical 40, 43). The earlier concentration of the Latino population in East Los Angeles has evolved into “the complex fractal geometry that characterizes Latino Los Angeles [by the 1990s] with its hundred Spanish-speaking neighborhoods and subdivisions radiating from the old Eastside core” (Magical 43). We can thus no longer speak of a barrio, but we need to acknowledge a myriad of “barrio spaces,” with which the books of Luis J. Rodriguez engage, as they explore a variety of Latina/o lifeworlds in late twentieth-century Los Angeles. Through the many episodes and narratives contained in Always Running and especially through the variety of narrators and life stories in The Republic of East L.A. Rodriguez conceives of Latina/o Los Angeles as a complex, diverse, dynamic, open and interrelated space. Suffering and fear characterize Rodriguez’s barrio spaces, as do pride and resilience. “In spatial configurations,” Massey notes, “otherwise unconnected narratives may be brought into contact, or previously connected ones may be wrenched apart. There is always an element of ‘chaos.’ This is the chance of space; the accidental neighbor is one figure for it” (111). This description also fits Rodriguez’s spaces. Rather than focusing on what Lefebvre terms “representations of space” (like maps), Rodriguez fashions a “representational space” filled with empathy and interpretations, admiration and visions. Whereas a map constitutes an “ordering representation” of space fixed in time, a representation of “a discrete multiplicity of inert things,” a representation in which the mapmaker positions him-/herself outside the represented space (Massey 106, 107), Rodriguez’s narratives create what Massey calls a “sphere of dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined (and therefore always undetermined) by the construction of new relations” (107). The episodes and stories present us with “a heterogeneity of practices and processes,” with “space as a simultaneity of multiple trajectories […] [, with] space as a multiplicity” (107, 61; emphasis in the original). In them the narrators and characters actively participate in the shaping of the barrio spaces.

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As Raúl Homero Villa notes, barrio spaces emerge from the social relations of their residents and they often determine their population’s options and actions. Villa speaks of “the place-based interpersonal networks that make barrios such important resources—physically, culturally, and economically—for their residents” (12). Relations within the barrio as well as the interactions of its inhabitants with spaces and people outside the barrio underlie the assessment of and the affection for the barrio space. As Manuel Castells writes: Space is the expression of society. […] Spatial forms and processes are formed by the dynamics of the overall social structure. This includes contradictory trends derived from conflicts and strategies between social actors playing out their opposing interests and values. Furthermore, social processes influence space by acting on the built environment inherited from previous socio-spatial structures. Indeed, space is crystallized time. (343; emphasis in the original)

The past and present developments that Massey calls the “stories-so-far” (24) determine the urban space and make it the site of aspirations and achievements but also of conflicts and suffering. Inequality characterizes both the relationship between barrio spaces and non-barrio spaces and the dynamics within barrio spaces, in which gender inequality is most salient.i While Rodriguez illustrates gender inequality in Always Running through the male narrator’s sober accounts of abuses and rapes, three of the twelve stories contained in The Republic of East L.A. revolve around women and are told from their perspectives. Like Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971), the urban narratives of Luis J. Rodriguez intervene in the barrio spaces with a political agenda. They can be seen in the larger framework that Raúl Homero Villa has outlined: With their complicated conjuncture of internal and external forces, the barrios of Los Angeles and other California cities have been real and rhetorical locations from which, and about which, to enact ideologically expressive critiques of domination, whether this comes from within or from outside their social spaces. The collective Chicano communities, past and present, as well as […] specific activists, writers, and artists […] are, in varying balance, intervening in this intimate social space while interrogating the larger landscapes of power through the political culture of their expressive works. (15)

These “activists, writers, and artists” recognize, according to Villa, that “the everyday practices of cultural and social reproduction in the barrios are often unselfconscious responses to the external degradations of Chicano social space” and their works respond to that situation with a politically engaged “critical

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consciousness” (15-16). Therefore Villa argues that “we must understand the urban barrio as a literal ‘place of difference’ and a complex site of material and symbolic production” (16). Rodriguez’s symbolic production is grounded in the barrio spaces of Los Angeles toward the end of the twentieth century, a period that Edward Soja has characterized as the city’s development into a “postmetropolis.” Soja foregrounds what he calls the “metropolarities” of late twentieth-century Los Angeles, “the multiple axes of differential power and status that produce and maintain socio-economic inequality” (265; emphasis in the original). He believes that in a postmetropolis like Los Angeles the magnitude and meaning of this recent surge in inequality and its embeddedness in urban restructuring processes has been obscured in both the academic and public arena by what can be described as a reactivated counter-discourse that insistently normalizes social inequality and represents it as an intrinsic part of all contemporary capitalist societies. (267)

In order to account for what he calls “the restructured social mosaic of the postmetropolis” Soja uses the term “fractal city,” which, in his view, captures the complexity, chaos, and instability of the “social and spatial mosaic of Los Angeles” (282-83; emphasis in the original). Ethnicity plays a major role in this complexity and heterogeneity. As Soja remarks, while the population of the Los Angeles metropolitan area was “about 80 percent Anglo” in 1960, there is now “a ‘majority of minorities,’ another of those provocative oxymorons that describe the postmetropolis” (283-84). Rodriguez approaches the postmetropolitan barrio spaces of his narratives not primarily through descriptions of streets, parks, buildings, and apartments, but through the dialogues, actions, and relationships of their inhabitants. In doing so, as the following sections will illustrate, he foregrounds dreams and aspirations, urban transformations and their effect on the people, Latina/o diversity, segregation, and hardships.

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The barrio dwellers in Rodriguez’s narratives are hungry, a condition that is also reflected in the title of Rodriguez’s later poetry collection, My Nature is Hunger (2005). In Always Running we encounter the father’s hunger for recognition (having been a school principal in Mexico and being able to find work only as a

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lab janitor in the U.S.), the mother’s hunger for a stable marriage and home, the brother’s hunger for upward mobility, the sisters’ hunger for independence, and the narrator’s hunger initially for companionship, later for “la vida loca” of gang life, and eventually for community activism. This hunger marks the memoir’s barrio spaces as sites of lack but also of hope. For the narrator of Always Running hope comes through new relationships, a new school, and new tasks. It also comes as a result of reading Down These Mean Streets (1967), an autobiographical memoir by Nuyorican writer Piri Thomas. Young Luis identifies with the descriptions of racial discrimination, violence and gang life contained in that book and suggests to his high school English teacher that he could do a report on it—only to be told that, like everyone else in that class, he will have to read Wordsworth’s Prelude instead. Thomas’s book is like a guide for the teenage Luis as well as for the later author of Always Running: And then there was Piri Thomas, a Puerto Rican brother, un camarada de aquellas: His book Down These Mean Streets became a living Bible for me. I dog-eared it, wrote in it, copied whole passages so I wouldn’t forget their texture, the passion, this searing work of a street dude and hype in Spanish Harlem—a barrio boy like me, on the other side of America. (Always Running 138)

Although occurring thousands of miles apart, the barrio experiences are similar. Implied is the hope that if this “barrio boy” from Spanish Harlem can turn his practical local knowledge into meaningful prose, then Luis, too, might be able to create representational space based on his life in the barrio.ii In all stories contained in The Republic of East L.A. there is likewise a sense of hunger, of dreams and aspirations. The limo driver of “My Ride, My Revolution” seeks success as a rock musician, the homeless protagonist of “Shadows” seeks to forget his failures as a son, breadwinner, husband, and father, the teenage girls in “Las Chicas Chuecas” seek female strength and (especially in the case of the protagonist) a future career, the two brothers in “Finger Dance” seek a deathbed reconciliation with their father, the two exconvicts in “Boom, Bot, Boom” seek fair wages and steady non-discriminatory employment, the protagonist of “Mechanics” seeks to disengage himself from the wife who left him and to maintain his close relationship to their children, the narrator of “Oiga” seeks to tell her story and that of her family, the mentally retarded girl in “Chain-Link Lover” seeks the attention of a truck driver, while he is pursuing romance with a different woman, the immigrant boys in “Pigeons” seek something to eat, the young reporter in “Miss East L.A.” seeks renown as a

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journalist and a future as a writer, the residents of illegally built shacks in “La Operación” seek a way of making a living and being able to support family in Mexico, and the protagonist of “Sometimes You Dance with a Watermelon” seeks to get some temporary relief from struggling to provide for a daughter, her boyfriend, and four grandchildren. In each of the twelve stories, the barrio spaces are filled with dreams and aspirations for a better future. Their representational space is marked by desire, as in the case of the narrator of “My Ride, My Revolution,” who enjoys the attention he gets by parking the limo in his neighborhood, although it is only fleeting: “So I bring the limo to the block—and pay for the extra car washes because of the kids—and I’m special here. A local hero. But, you know what? This won’t last long. Because life goes on. The streets don’t stop being crummy. The cottages are still sullen matchboxes” (Republic 7). The barrio space will remain “crummy” and “sullen;” the display of a luxury item will ultimately remind its residents of social inequalities. Nonetheless, most of Rodriguez’s barrio residents aspire to change their situation and circumstances. The barrio is not necessarily a place which those in it wish to leave, but more a site in and through which opportunities present themselves. Fittingly, “La Operación” tells also of two boys living in a village of Mexico’s Copper Canyon who are eager to join their cousins in East L.A. to find work there.

U RBAN T RANSFORMATIONS Henri Lefebvre underlines the factor of time in the conception and production of space: “If space is produced, if there is a productive process, then we are dealing with history,” he writes (46).iii Luis J. Rodriguez integrates historical events and developments into his narratives, reminding readers of the power dynamics and inequalities that brought about the barrio spaces of the present. For example, in “Oiga” the narrator Ysela tells her story and that of her ancestors, Californio ranchers, who lost their land (including what is now Griffith Park) to Anglos in the wake of the U.S. war with Mexico. While such processes have converted formerly Latina/o spaces into gentrified Anglo areas, Francisco A. Lomelí suggests that there has been a simultaneous inverse development, which he calls “barrioization”: Barrioization, understood as a transformation of urban space contrary to gentrification, however, is acquiring a renewed significance for it now reveals as much about general American society as it does about Chicanos. Although the barrio served urban Chicanos as

172 | J OSEF R AAB an implicit expression of nationhood during the height of the Movement period (19651975), it no longer embodies an exclusively Chicano space; neither is it perceived to be the dirty little secret we either avoided or succumbed to. (145-46)

Rodriguez engages with barrio spaces in his writing, as do authors like Helena María Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Héctor Tobar. In doing so he includes a historical dimension as a way of explaining the present situation or of inviting readers to empathize. For example, in Always Running he recounts the establishment of a Spanish mission in the San Gabriel Valley in the eighteenth century, the arrival of the railroad in the nineteenth century, and the concurrent influx of Mexican laborers who established the first barrios there. However, Rodriguez continues, their spaces were soon contested: It didn’t take long for middle-income Anglos, primarily fleeing L.A.’s inner-city as it filled up with people of color, to move in and around these barrios and create the first suburbs. New tracts of home suddenly appeared on previously empty space or by displacing the barrios. In later years, large numbers of Asians from Japan, Korea and Taiwan also moved into the area. Sections of Monterrey Park and even San Gabriel became known as Little Japans or Chinatowns. It wasn’t hard to find an unpaved road cluttered with shacks on one block while a row of stucco townhouses graced another. The barrios which weren’t incorporated, including Las Lomas, became self-contained and forbidden, incubators of rebellion which the local media, generally controlled by suburban whites, labeled havens of crime. (40-41)

Descriptions of this sort help readers better to understand the dynamics of the present, the struggles within barrio spaces as well as the conflicts with surrounding spaces. In a location like the Los Angeles metropolitan area, territories and turfs keep shifting and neighborhoods keep changing. Latina/o L.A. is no longer confined to the barrios of traditionally Hispanic neighborhoods. As Mike Davis reminds us, “[a]s emergent Latino pluralities and majorities outgrow the classic barrio, they are remaking urban space in novel ways that cannot be assimilated to the earlier experiences of either African-Americans or European immigrants” (Magical 39). These experiences that are “remaking urban space,” however, aggravate inequalities and reinforce the contrasts between the haves and the have-nots, which is why the have-nots seek alternative means of self-assertion and new tactics of survival, of which gang membership is one. Luis’s troubles with law enforcement start when, as a ten year-old, he and a friend are chased by

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police for playing basketball in a locked schoolyard after 4:30 p.m.—a chase that leaves his friend dead.iv The barrio spaces in Always Running are drawn as sites of poverty, police harassment, institutional neglect, and conflicts. A case in point is an episode in which Anglo American and Mexican American students clash at a high school. The white students bring in two carloads of youth armed with bats to assist them and challenge the Latinos. Fighting erupts. The events that follow clearly illustrate racial discrimination, which only exacerbates the animosities: Soon the police came. As usual, they went after the Mexicans. The white dudes got into their cars and split without any trouble. But the rest of us were pulled to the ground, hands forced behind our backs. Guns pointed at our heads. School officials had the police take us to the office. The police left after they had resumed some order. Santo and Tiburón, who were drop-outs, were dragged to the police station. Those of us still in school were expelled. This was fine with me. I hated school. And I loved fighting. (100)

Rodriguez conveys a sense that this kind of institutional discrimination has a long history in barrio spaces and that it keeps leading to bitterness, violence, and substance abuse, which he labels an “epidemic”: I fooled with all kinds of pills, with mescaline and meth. I sought the death in Silver Satin and muscatel, and then pure tequila and vodka. I snorted heroin and PCP with Payasa. By the time I turned 15, smack was everywhere. The epidemic followed a pattern in the barrio. It began with the pachucos. Most of the old-timers in prison, the pachucos of the 30s and 40s, were incarcerated because of chiva. Then every ten years or so a generation of ex-gang bangers became hooked. Now it was our time. Already, the older dudes in the Tribe were hypes; most of them behind bars. (125)

Because of the “pattern” traced in this passage Monica Brown calls Rodriguez “an inheritor of the pachuco legacy” of the 1940s (xxxiii).v Focusing on the spatial level, we should add that there is also a legacy of barrio spaces: regardless of the urban transformations that occur, social practices in the barrio are passed on to subsequent generations. As Rodriguez shows, barrio spaces need not stay in the same geographical location to retain their marginal quality. They are established, grow, and time and again they are pushed out to less desirable locations once their original sites attract developers and becomes gentrified. In the story “Miss East L.A.” the narrator recalls: “The Mexicans moved into the most undesirable areas like the ravines and hills and set up their own housing, sometimes without plumbing or

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sewage. Eventually, the city and county provided basic services. So it’s not unusual for small, dilapidated homes to be torn down, added on to, undergo a metamorphosis—like butterflies” (Republic 177-78). Richard Griswold del Castillo remarked that “whatever its implications for the socio-economic fortunes of Mexican-Americans, the creation of the [East Los Angeles] barrio was a positive accomplishment. The barrio gave a geographical identity, a feeling of being at home, to the dispossessed and poor. It was a place, a traditional place, that offered some security in the midst of the city’s social and economic turmoil” (150). But Rodriguez underlines that the residents only have a limited say in the transformation of their barrios, as a politically engaged young man experiences in the story “Pigeons” when he returns to Boyle Heights after graduating from Berkeley: Miguel saw the destruction of Aliso Village as another example of Mexicans being pushed around, without a say-so, without the respect afforded anybody needing to change their community. There were many other such examples—the Chavez Ravine barrios that in 1950 were destroyed when poor Mexican families were forcibly removed from their homes so Dodger Stadium could be built. Also when the freeways were constructed—the western section of East L.A. had several freeway interchanges to accommodate the suburban commuters driving into downtown, although whole barrios were removed to create them. Miguel conceded that something had to change, that barrio warfare had claimed too many lives and that the poverty in the area was only getting worse. But “change from the heart of the people,” as he called it, is different from urban planners, city officials, and major developers meeting in plush offices to carve up the barrio so they can profit on the renovations. (Republic 171-72)

By giving only one concrete date in the above enumeration of transformations forced upon barrio spaces and by mentioning a variety of examples Rodriguez creates a feeling of an ongoing condition, a timeless situation of being at the mercy of external decision-makers.vi Historical events and developments are mentioned in The Republic of East L.A. to complement the general impression of timeless struggles in barrio spaces. Among them are the turn-around of Garfield High School (56-57), the killing of Rubén Salazar (60), the closing of steel mills (123), the expansion of East L.A. (138, 139), the increasing deadliness of gangs (165-66), and the growing animosity of some U.S. Latinas/os against recent illegal immigrants from Mexico, Central, and South America (169-70, 172).

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L ATINA/ O D IVERSITY Doreen Massey’s characterization of space as a “dynamic multiplicity” is relevant to Rodriguez’s barrio spaces (55). By presenting a large variety of fates and life stories in his alter-narratives, the author counters the notion of East Los Angeles and other Latino neighborhoods as all one easily definable mass onto which one can project stereotypes. Such a homogenized setting would amount to what Lefebvre calls “abstract space,” whereas Rodriguez creates his barrio spaces as “differential space,” which, according to Lefebvre, “will […] restore unity to what abstract space breaks up—to the functions, elements and moments of social practice. […] [I]t will distinguish what abstract space tends to identify—for example, […] social relationships and family relationships” (Production 52). In the abstract, barrio spaces are often marked as poverty-stricken, untidy, and gang-ridden. But Rodriguez creates nuanced and multi-faceted “differential spaces.” For example, in the second half of Always Running the autobiographical narrator becomes more politically involved in the Chicano movement, which gives Rodriguez a chance to address the activism of a community center and of a Mexican American student club—positive counter-images to the abstract sense of barrios as failed spaces. But Rodriguez is well aware that the neighborhoods which the rival Lomas and Sangra gangs are ready to kill and die for are but of little interest to policy makers (see also Brown 73). Working against generalizations by the outside world, Rodriguez presents especially in The Republic of East L.A. a considerable variety of characters. There is the single mother who used to be a Chicana activist (4), the rock musician/limo driver who espouses his indigenous roots (3), the embittered father who will not get out of his car after injuring his homeless son (44), the welder who uses Aztec motifs in the pieces of art that he welds for neighbors (78), the exploited ex-convict Chicano carpenter who bonds with an Anglo in the same situation (94), the young steel mill mechanic and father who stifles his wife through his protectiveness (119-21), the obese gospel singer who struggles to make a living as a single woman (“Oiga”), the truck driver who tries to impress the woman with whom he wants to go out (“Chain-Link Lover”), the beauty queen who works as a nurse’s aid (“Miss East L.A.”), the “hometown social clubs” whose members send money to their home regions in Mexico (205-06), and a young grandmother who is married for the third time (“Sometimes You Dance with a Watermelon”). The extent to which characters use Spanish is a further factor in establishing Latina/o diversity.

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The story “Pigeons” compresses Latina/o diversity into probably the smallest set of characters who are, for the most part, closely related to each other. It features immigrant Mexican boys who kill pigeons in Arroyo Seco Park in order to provide food for their families, the assimilated Lujan family as opposed to the non-assimilated Duran family, Latinas with Anglo husbands, the grandmother who is still homesick for Sinaloa after decades of living in Los Angeles, the single mother living with her boyfriend, and especially the brothers Monte and Miguel with their opposing views on illegal immigration. Through this group of people sharing a public space Rodriguez illustrates the intra-ethnic diversity of Latinas/os.vii

S EGREGATION While barrio spaces are not homogeneous, they are nonetheless identifiable and distinct from non-barrio spaces. In 1990 Mike Davis wrote in City of Quartz, a book which Rodriguez mentions in the introduction to Always Running, that in Los Angeles there is an “architectural policing of social boundaries, [which] has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s” (223). Davis contends that “redevelopment massively reproduced spatial apartheid” (230). This spatialization is also visible in census figures. Based on the results of the 1990 census, Edward Soja has identified various “census tracts,” i.e., neighborhoods in Los Angeles with a high concentration of residents sharing the same ethnicity: Densely Latino census tracts, in which more than 37 percent of the county’s Latino population lives, are located in a remarkably obverse relation to the densest white census tracts, a spatial polarity that dominates the map of mono-ethnic Los Angeles. People of Mexican origin, by far the largest Latino population, have their densest clusters (in some places reaching close to 100 percent) in the huge barrio of (still unincorporated) East Los Angeles and the adjacent Boyle Heights community (once a center of the county’s Jewish population), with almost continuous extensions east to Pico Rivera and Santa Fe Springs; northeast into such San Gabriel Valley communities as El Monte and Duarte, and most recently south into communities that were once the heartland of (predominantly southern) white working-class suburbia (Huntington Park, South Gate, Downey, Lynwood, Cudahy, Bell). This expanding southward wedge has experienced one of the most rapid demographic transformations in urban history, shifting from 80 percent white in 1965 to, in many areas, over 90 percent Latino today. (292; emphasis in the original)

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Census figures on the ethnic composition of individual neighborhoods in Los Angeles thus support Manuel Castells’s notion that “societies are asymmetrically organized” (347). Luis J. Rodriguez mentions in Always Running that “[f]or decades, L.A. was notorious for restrictive covenants—where some areas were off limits to ‘undesirables’” (17). The L.A. River and the railroad tracks mark geographical boundaries that separate the home turf from the world outside it (AR 19-21). The notion of a “home turf” makes sense here because, as Castells points out, “the overwhelming majority of people, in advanced and traditional societies alike, live in places, and so they perceive their space as place-based. A place is a locale whose form, function, and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity” (354; emphasis in the original). When members of different ethnic groups come to use the same space in Always Running, often, conflict ensues. For example, there is segregation at high school (83-84), and inter-racial fighting breaks out in the parking lot of a high school football stadium (97). Crossing the boundaries from one’s home turf into a different territory involves inexperience in reading other neighborhoods and thus danger. In Always Running Luis and a number of his friends take a trip to Huntington Beach and get into a skirmish there with a group of “surfers” who call them “beaners,” challenge them to a fight, and eventually turn out to be plainclothes Huntington Beach policemen who provoke and mistreat the Latino youth. In “Las Chicas Chuecas” a group of young women attend a party “in another ’hood” and get into a fight there (Republic 51). These episodes illustrate how urban spaces can confine the individual who is unable to decode their unwritten rules. As Lefebvre writes: “The subject experiences space as an obstacle, as a resistant ‘objectality’ at times as implacably hard as a concrete wall, being not only extremely difficult to modify in any way but also hedged about by Draconian rules prohibiting any attempt at such modification” (Production 57). Moving out of the barrio requires financial means. When Rodriguez’s father receives a substitute teaching position in a white neighborhood, he decides to move the family there and to buy new furniture and a new television on credit. Once his substitute position ends, however, the family cannot afford to live in the new house any longer and their recent purchases are repossessed. This episode illustrates Gottdiener and Hutchison’s remark that “[s]ocioeconomic standing also involves the ability of the household to establish residence in a particular place. Thus, a significant component of socioeconomic status is determined by one’s address and the symbolic reputation of particular neighborhoods within the metropolitan neighborhoods” (141). The “symbolic

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reputation” of barrio spaces is generally low. Rodriguez makes this point in Always Running: Unincorporated county territory was generally where the poorest people lived, the old barrios, which for the most part didn’t belong to any city because nobody wanted them. Most of Watts and a large section of East Los Angeles were unincorporated county territory. Sometimes they had no sewage system or paved roads. (38)

When Rodriguez’s Latina/o characters venture into shared city spaces, they are prone to abuse, as when, in Always Running, Luis’s mother wants to sit down on a park bench only to be told by an Anglo woman: “Look spic, you can’t sit there! […] You don’t belong here! Understand? This is not your country!” (19). We are reminded here of Lefebvre’s position that “Space is not a scientific object removed […] from ideology or politics; it has always been political and strategic” (“Reflections” 170). But at other times the incursion into non-Latino territory is successful, as in the case of the Chicano police officer in “Oiga,” who tells his girlfriend, “I’m the white man’s worst nightmare—a Mexican with a badge” (Republic 140). As Villa points out, “the city [of Los Angeles] is a meeting ground of contending social forces and contentious wills to being-inplace” (241).

H ARDSHIPS As alter-narratives Rodriguez’s memoir and stories are also barrio scripts. In their engagement with barrio spaces, suffering and hardships occupy a prominent position. The same sense of peril and vulnerability emerges from Rodriguez’s poem “Watts Bleeds,” which begins: Watts bleeds, leaving stained reminders on dusty sidewalks. Here where I strut alone, as glass lays broken by my feet and a blanket of darkness is slung across the wood shacks of nuestra colonia. Watts bleeds, dripping from carcasses of dreams. Where despair is old people sitting on torn patio sofas with empty eyes and children running down alleys with big sticks.

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Watts bleeds on vacant lots and burned-out building[s] —temples desolated by a people’s rage. (My Nature 15)

The extended metaphor of bleeding defines this barrio space as an injured space, a site of danger and “despair.” In Always Running barrio spaces are likewise never safe, always a reason to be afraid, as the following passage, which inspired the memoir’s title, suggests: It never stopped, this running. We were constant prey, and the hunters soon became big blurs: the police, the gangs, the junkies, the dudes on Garvey Boulevard who took our money, all smudged into one. Sometimes they were teachers who jumped on us Mexicans as if we were born with a hideous stain. We were always afraid. Always running. (36)

In this fear zone, the police are notorious for their harassment, for provoking suspects by throwing sand in their faces, for vicious beatings, and for their racial profiling. One place-based tactic is to apprehend gang members on their home turf, drive them to the turf of a rival gang, force them to spray-paint their gang insignia on walls in the rival territory, and leave them there to fight the other gang (Always Running 72). Such tactics are possible because of the rivalry of barrio spaces and because of the state-sanctioned domination that the police force can exert on any of them. As Castells notes, “[t]he fundamental form of domination in our society is based on the organizational capacity of the dominant elite that goes hand in hand with its capacity to disorganize those groups in society which, while constituting a numerical majority, see their interests partially (if ever) represented only within the framework of the fulfillment of the dominant interests” (347). A somewhat similar intrusion of state authority into barrio spaces occurs in the story “La Operación” in The Republic of East L.A. The tale combines the incursion of drug lords into a rural community in Mexico with the incursion of zoning officials and the INS into a neighborhood in East L.A. in which it is common to find in the backyards of residences illegally built shacks with illegal immigrants living in them. In the Mexican scenario two men are stopped by armed private guards from using a public passageway claimed by a drug lord (222-23), and in the East L.A. scenario dwellings built without a permit are bulldozed and residents without papers are deported (216-20). By juxtaposing these two narratives and by making the victims in one location relatives of the victims in the other location the story illustrates the interdependence of the local and the global, which Doreen Massey calls “mutually constituted” (184). As

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Massey writes, “The ‘lived reality of our daily lives’ is utterly dispersed, unlocalised, in its sources and in its repercussions” (184). But it is not only outside forces that cause hardship in barrio spaces. In Always Running we read about the violent gender dynamics of gang life: Rapes became a common circumstance in the Hills. They began as isolated incidents, then a way of life. Some believed this ritual started with outsiders, not from within the Hills. Others said it began with one guy who happened to be crazy, but the rest followed suit as the attacks signified a distorted sense of power. One dude was said to have raped 17 girls one summer. (121)

And in the story “Las Chicas Chuecas” we read about the self-destructiveness of a single mother who cannot get away from heroin; her daughter who puts herself at danger through alcohol, is raped when passed out, later wanting to kill herself as she finds out that she is pregnant and eventually has a miscarriage; and her sister, a tough lesbian who keeps getting into fights and is expelled from school. The sisters and some other girls become a close-knit group, calling themselves “las chicas chuecas,” which translates as “the crooked girls” or “the bent girls.” Experiences in the barrio spaces have kept their lives from following straight paths: The way the girls used the word, “chueca” stood for bent lives, bent minds—not the narrow, straight existence that girls were expected to have. Not these girls—abused by drunken fathers, humiliated by scornful mothers, beaten by raging brothers. They were pushed into all kinds of shape by forces stronger than their innocence could withstand. They also felt harder than most girls, survivors, who took the worst beatings, sexual assaults, putdowns, and were still able to stand up without tears and declare, “you ain’t changed me.” (Republic 50)

While an external or abstract description might focus on the deviance of the girls (their failure to fulfill what is “expected” of girls in more comfortable lifeworlds), Rodriguez’s alter-narrative addresses some of the reasons behind the girls’ behavior. Rather than pinning labels on his characters Rodriguez’s barrio scripts from within create empathy for the marginalized.

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C ONTINUING T ENSIONS The barrio spaces of Always Running and The Republic of East L.A.—and Los Angeles in general—are, as Rodriguez writes in “Sometimes You Dance with a Watermelon,” “thick with tension”: What a puzzling place, this Los Angeles, Rosalba thought. Factory whistles all day long; the deafening pounding of machinery, with cars and trucks in a sick symphony of horns, tires screeching, and engines backfiring. Added to that were the nauseating odors from the meatpacking plants. Rosalba felt the air thick with tension, like a huge rubber band hanging over the streets, ready to snap at any moment. (Republic 231-32)

This tension arises from the urban transformations, segregation and hardships addressed in this essay. It arises from the history and present dynamics of the barrio spaces which Rodriguez scripts. As Henri Lefebvre puts it: “Every social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents, signifying and non-signifying, perceived and directly experienced, practical and theoretical. In short, every social space has a history” (Production 110). Rodriguez’s factual history in Always Running and his felt history in The Republic of East L.A. are among the constituents of this representational space. Therefore Doreen Massey’s characterization of space as “a simultaneity of stories-so-far” is particularly apt (24, 130). Rodriguez’s representational space is indeed shaped by a myriad of stories; his episodic style allows him to integrate past and present, a large number of characters and their situations, as well as his own autobiographical experiences of barrio life. In all of these respects relationships are tantamount, as they are in the social production of space and in the literary creation of representational space in general. As Massey notes, “[i]f space is really to be thought relationally then it is no more than the sum of our relations and interconnections, and the lack of them” (184). In Always Running and The Republic of East L.A. the depicted “relations and interconnections” are rife with tension. Out of the existing and lacking relationships that Rodriguez’s alter-narratives portray emerge the dreams and aspirations, the urban transformations, the Latina/o diversity, but also the segregation and hardships that his barrio scripts foreground. Rodriguez’s barrio spaces are lived, experienced spaces, in which the individual keeps facing boundaries in a colorful, chaotic scenario, as expressed at the beginning of his poem “The Concrete River”:

182 | J OSEF R AAB Our backs press up against A corrugated steel fence Along the dried banks Of a concrete river. Spray-painted outpourings On walls offer a chaos Of color for the eyes. (28)

W ORKS C ITED Brown, Monica. Gang Nation: Delinquent Citizens in Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Chicana Narratives. Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Print. Castells, Manuel. “The Space of Flows.” The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Ed. Ida Susser. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 314-66. Print. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London & New York: 1990. Print. ---. Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City. London & New York: Verso, 2000. Print. Galarza, Ernesto. Barrio Boy. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1971. Print. Gottdiener, Mark, and Ray Hutchison. The New Urban Sociology. Third ed. Boulder, CO: Westview P, 2006. Print. Griswold del Castillo, Richard. The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890: A Social History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Print. Gurr, Jens Martin. “The Multicultural Marketing of Urban Fiction: Temporality, Language, Genre, and Readership(s) in Luis J. Rodriguez’s The Republic of East L.A. and Music of the Mill.” E Pluribus Unum? National and Transnational Identities in the Americas/Identidades nacionales y transnacionales en las Américas. Ed. Sebastian Thies and Josef Raab. Münster: Lit-Verlag & Tempe, AZ: Bilingual P, 2009. 263-76. Print. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print. ---. “Reflections of the Politics of Space (1970).” State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 2009. 167-84. Print. Lomelí, Francisco A. “Remapping the Post-Barrio: Beyond Turf and Graffity.” (Mis)Representations: Intersections of Culture and Power. Ed. Fernando

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Galván, Julio Cañero Serrano, and José Santiago Fernández Vázquez. Bern: Peter Lang, 2003. 145-56. Print. Low, Setha M. “Introduction: Theorizing the City.” Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader. Ed. Low. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005. 1-33. Print. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. Print. Olguín, B.V. “Luis J. Rodriguez (1954—).” Latino and Latina Writers. Ed. Alan West-Durán. New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 2004. Vol. I. 441-53. Print. Rodriguez, Luis J. Always Running—La vida loca: Gang Days in L.A.. 1993. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Print. ---. The Concrete River: Poems. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone P, 1991. Print. ---. Music of the Mill: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print ---. My Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems: 1989-2004. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone P, 2005. Print. ---. The Republic of East L.A.: Stories. 2002. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003. Print. Soja, Edward W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Print. Spain, Daphne. “Space and Status.” Cities and Society. Ed. Nancy Kleniewski. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 43-53. Print. Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets. 1967. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print. Villa, Raúl Homero. Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Print.

C OMMENTS i

ii

On the importance of gender in the social construction of (urban) space, see Spain, “Space and Status.” In his later poem “Mean Streets,” which he dedicated to Piri Thomas, Rodriguez calls the Nuyorican writer his “compadre” and his “barrio brother.” The poem establishes something like a symbiotic relationship between the two men. It begins: Your mean streets visited my mean streets one hollow summer day in the 60s and together we played ball,

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cracking sounds on the asphalt echoing from Los to Harlem. And every time I shot dope into a vein, you felt the euphoria in your prose and I saw me in you and I heard you yell and it was my voice tearing open the night sky. (Concrete 103) iii

iv

Similarly, Doreen Massey speaks of “the interpenetration […] of space and time” (24). Monica Brown presents this episode as the catalyst for Luis’s realization of his own marginality: he and his kind are marked as outsiders, delinquent and dangerous. This incident is but one that marks the beginning of a long and complex relationship with the ‘law.’ This marking occurs along a complex chain of associations and is exacerbated for young teenage males, who are ‘marked’ by the specter of criminality, danger. For Rodriguez, his entry into gang life is, in part, a response to a deep sense of alienation and powerlessness brought about by political and social structures decades in the making. (66)

v

vi

Brown puts Always Running in the context of Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1978) and Miguel Durán’s Don’t Spit on My Corner (1992): all three texts, she contends, “make visible the systemic denial of the rights of citizenship to Chicano youth […] [, each] is concerned with the problematics of identity, equality, and citizenship and each challenges the pervasive representation of Chicano youth as inherently criminal or worthless” (xxxii). Jens Martin Gurr has observed that there is a certain timelessness in the stories of The Republic of East L.A. as opposed to the consistent use of years and dates in Rodriguez’s novel, Music of the Mill (265-67): The short stories in The Republic of East L.A., on the one hand, can be seen as self-contained renderings of archetypal events and constellations in barrio life, as paradigmatic situations outside a temporal order, which do not require any dating. On the other hand, as far as the novel is concerned, a number of reviewers have pointed out that Music of the Mill is ultimately a historical novel. (271)

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vii

Both texts, however, are also spatial narratives in which barrios and the other urban spaces that the characters enter play a central role. Edward Soja points out that “the urban minorities […] in postmetropolitan Los Angeles have some of the highest levels of intra-ethic inequality in the industrialized world” (284).

Chinatown’s Lived and Mystified Foodscapes, 1880s-1990s S ELMA S IEW L I B IDLINGMAIER

Foodways is one of the most pervasive and ancient forms of sociality permeating all levels of a society’s everyday life. Various approaches have been employed to decipher its socio-cultural signification and functions. From an anthropological perspective, Mary Douglas explored ways in which “food categories encode social events” (61); from a structural, semiotic standpoint, Claude Lévi-Strauss theorizes a universalist “culinary triangle” that captures the triangulation of foodways from the raw to the cooked to the rotten revealing the intricate duality of culinary operations between nature and culture (587); in his essay “Towards a Psychosociology of Food Consumption,” Roland Barthes describes food as a system of signification, a trope of images that forms a protocol of usages as well as behaviors, and that determines social habitus (29); from the field of psychoanalysis, Julia Kristeva explicates the formation of subjectivity through the process of abjection describing the repulsion towards certain foods as the epitome of the abject. While the body of work on the sociocultural analysis of food has focused primarily on the social systems of communication and stratification (based on ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality), little attention has been paid to the relations between the sociality of food practices and the production of social spaces. Based on Henri Lefebvre’s work on the production of social space, this article explores some of the manifold ways in which the social, everyday practices of foodways have fashioned the dynamics of the spaces of Chinatown and its representations between the 1880s and the beginning of the twentieth century. I understand food practices as the material, corporeal practices (spatial practice) that, over time, secrete the “complex symbolisms”, the social “codes” that are embodied in the everyday, “clandestine” spaces of a society which Lefebvre has termed representational spaces or lived space (33). In other words,

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over time, a society’s food-based practices—manifested through a plethora of symbolisms, “associated images,” and codes—become the spatial syntax that allows subject(s) to “appropriate” space for everyday, social purposes. For instance, a specific type of peanut candy sold at a roadside stall where children purchase their treats after school could symbolize a community’s place of leisure and evoke certain memories and emotions related to childhood. Even if the cityscape changes and a factory is built on the site the candy stall once occupied, peanut candy would still continue to represent the space associated with childhood and play. Foodways are also deeply embedded within discursive representations of space or conceived space. Conceived space is the space devised and construed by “experts” through specialized knowledge of space. It is a space where “natural space” is usurped, becomes dominated by certain “orders” tied to and imposed by the relations of production (33-38). Conceived space is “informed by effective knowledge and ideology” and “they intervene in and modify spatial textures” (42). Hence, although abstract, conceived space has physical and material consequences for space. Food can be utilized as a politicized symbol in the designation and contestation of space. Returning to the example given above, city health authorities might use the peanut candy vendor to justify their call for food hygiene reforms. By representing street food as unsafe for public consumption, health officials could persuade the municipality to make street food vendors illegal and make ‘improvements’ to the sites that housed these stalls. Peanut candy that might symbolize a lived social space for a community would then be reduced to a symbolic tool to further the agenda of the city’s health board. Concentrating on the dialectics between representations of space/conceived space and representational space/lived space, this essay highlights the role of foodways in the production of Chinatown’s social space. I argue that North American historical discourses and narratives of Chinatown’s foodways at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century served a multitude of municipal, state and national socio-political agendas that contributed to the alienation and mystification of the community and its lived space. Chinese culinary establishments such as restaurants, teahouses, and street food vendors became the stage on which social, political, economic, and cultural power struggle unfolded on city, state and national levels. Rendered as a spectacle, Chinatown’s food practices became objectified commodities in the economy of asymmetrical power relations. The reducing of Chinatowns foodways to an exoticized spectacle flattened the rich everyday life of the ‘real’ living community and its lived space to a one-dimensional, empty cultural sign of otherness and difference.

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The intention of this article is to elaborate on Lefebvre’s concept of lived space and conceived space within the context of Chinatown’s cultural history and literature. I analyze literature as a symbolic form, as documentation, as description, and as an expression of lived space. Lefebvre’s spatial practice/perceived space, conceived space and lived space are dialectical moments/dimensions of space that “coexist, concord or interfere” with each other making up everyday social space (41). This paper is an exploration of the dialectics of conceived space and lived space and the production of the two separate yet interrelated spaces of discursive China-Town and everyday, lived Chinatown. Tracing the development of Chinatowns in New York and San Francisco from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, I will tell a story of how the configurations of socio-political and economic power relations manifested in foodways shaped these Chinese enclaves both in their imaginary as well as their everyday spaces.

C HINATOWN ’ S C ULINARY S CENE : T HE L IVED AND T HE S PECTACLE The Lived In between poetry and fiction, Shawn Wong’s Homebase is an allegorical coming-of-age tale that illustrates Lefebvre’s two moments of the production of space: lived space and conceptual space. The lyrical narrative weaves in and out of protagonist Rainsford Chan’s vast, fragmented dreamscapes, stream of consciousness and memories of childhood, in search of the elusive, existentialist base he could lay claim to as home. The historiography of Rainsford’s life is mapped out in units of spaces and places: “I want to give all the moments of my life the names of places I have been to before, categorizing them so that I can lift them out of my memory, find the steady pulse of my life” (23). These places which Rainsford names are inscribed with deep symbolisms linked to the history of his patriarchal family line and in extension to the history of the Chinese in America. The places are spaces of the lived. One of the most intimate moments between Rainsford and his father unfolds in Chinatown. Rainsford recalls: It was that dark night in 1952 when my father and I were walking down the brick streets of Chinatown looking for a place to eat. At two in the morning there were a few old men walking along the streets in heavy dark overcoats, and most of the stores were lighted. These streets and alleys smell of discarded food in the gutters, smell of fish scales washed

190 | S ELMA SIEW LI B IDLINGMAIER out across the sidewalk into the gutters, and in the dark night this town smells wet, damp, penetrating […]. There is a pulse at night, when the neon lights shine in the scales of the street. You never drive through this town, only walk. (77)

Although Rainsford never lived in Chinatown, he was metaphorically “in it all the time” (79). Chinatown represents a main “root” within the rhizome of Chinese American history and collective consciousness; a symbolic, dialectical space of confinement and community, repression and expression. It is described by the protagonist of Homebase as a highly affective, sensual and metaphorical space teeming with smells of food waste and the sight of scattered fish scales. The smells and sights are not merely evidence of everyday life in Chinatown—the preparation and consumption of meals by residents earlier on in the evening—but for the Chinese-speaking reader, they take on a more symbolic meaning. The Chinese word for fish () is a homophone of the word abundance () and, traditionally, the consumption of fish symbolizes good fortune—an abundance of life. In the passage, the remnants of fish from dinner, its scales, which inundate Chinatown from the gutters to the streets, give the “town” its smell, reflect its light, provide the pulse that regulates the synchrony and the rhythms of the community’s everyday life. Thus, to stroll through and have a meal in Chinatown is to partake in this abundance of everyday life. Moreover, it is a process that involves all sensory faculties—a phenomenological feast mediated through the body and manifested in the symbols and images that these food practices have produced over time. Shawn Wong’s depiction of Chinatown exemplifies Henri Lefebvre’s concept of lived space. Lefebvre describes lived space as having three main characteristics. First, lived space “embod[ies] complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of life, as also to art” (33). He goes on to explain that this space is “directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and users,’ but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers” (39). In other words, lived space is constituted by a complex system of symbols that people inhabiting and using the space and people such as “few” artists, philosophers and writers have construed over time. The images and symbols are utilized on a daily basis in the negotiation and navigation of these spaces. Lived space is the outcome of the dialectical negation of conceived space—space that is “conceptualized […] [by] scientist, planners, urbanist, technocratic subdividers and social engineers” and produced through social and political practice and its “relations between objects and people” (38-41). In other words, the ‘disorder’ of real-life space is rearranged and ordered in the ways

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experts “conceive” them. This system of relations is “subordinate to a logic which will sooner or later break them up because of their lack of consistency” (41). Lived spaces, on the other hand, “need obey no rules of consistency and cohesiveness” as they are “redolent with imaginary and symbolic elements, they have their source in history—in the history of a people as well as in the history of each individual belonging to that people” (ibid.). Through foodways and the social relations that ensue, practices, various symbols and images are produced that form an important part of the foundation of Chinatown’s lived space. These myriad images and symbolic acts, as, for instance, the eating of fish in Wong’s description of Chinatown, carry layers of history, tradition and meaning. These meanings—be they shared collectively in a community, or within the private circle of a family, or be they just individual—are embedded within lived space (e.g. the kitchen that smells of Ginseng on Sunday afternoons, the dining room embellished with New Year decorations, the restaurant where the celebration of an anniversary is held, a corner of a street where one used to purchase candy from a street vendor, etc.). Second, Lefebvre asserts that lived space is “dominated—and hence passively experienced space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (39). Dominated space according to Lefebvre is “space transformed—and mediated— by technology, by practice” (164). He gives the example of a motorway, “brutali[zing] the countryside and the land, slicing through space like a great knife” (165). Dominated space is “closed, sterilized, emptied out;” it is the space usurped by the mechanisms of modernist capitalism, the processes of industrialization and post-industrialization. According to Lefebvre, although lived space is dominated and therefore experienced passively, lived space contains the revolutionary potential of change through imagination, and through appropriation.i Despite a century of racist political, economic and social policies since the mid-nineteenth century, confining Chinese immigrants within the physical and imaginary boundaries of Chinatown, the enclave is alive. It is a fluid space in which everyday practices such as foodways create moments of rupture within the hierarchical order of power relations. Countering the discursive tropes and representations of China-town as a dilapidated, closed space of aging male laborers, a ‘picture’ dominating the perception of Chinatown’s spaces since the nineteenth century, Wong sets Chinatown up as an outlaw’s outposts: “I was an outlaw in the dark night, walking alongside my father on the slippery brick streets of Chinatown” (63). Around them, there were “old men walking along the streets in heavy dark overcoats” (77). Chinatown in

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this instance is depicted as an appropriated, empowering masculine space that negates the effeminized space conceived through the politics of race. Third, from a phenomenological perspective, lived space is, alive: it speaks. It has an affective kernel or center […]. It embraces the loci of passion, of action, and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies time […]. [I]t may be qualified in various ways: it may be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic. (Lefebvre 42)

Lived space encompasses the phenomenological aspect of space. It is intimate: it contains a history and thus vivid memories; its production involves the body and its senses in constant deployment of energies and in this way it is both dynamic and ephemeral.ii It is through this affective dimension that imagination is stirred and transformation becomes a possibility. This “aliveness” is at the center of Wong’s rendering of his protagonist Rainsford’s and his father’s expedition through Chinatown: absorbing the smells, the tactile sensation of warm moist, the reflections emitted from the fish scales strewn on the streets. Eating, the practice and custom of consuming a meal, is contextualized here through the corporeal experience of space. It is an act, a performed ritual that has to be ingested slowly. Hence, “you never drive through Chinatown, only walk” for it is only through the body one can gain access to the lived aspect of the enclave. Lacking this insight, Rainsford’s indignant, allegorical bride named America insists that he take her to Chinatown in the following passage: “Can we go there sometime?” my bride had said. “Will you take me there for lunch sometime? Coffee? Anything.” “They make terrible coffee there.” […] “I don’t care what we have. I just want to see it.” “What do you want to see?” “Just see Chinatown.” “Okay. We’ll drive through sometime.” (77, emphasis mine)

As a cultural voyeur, America’s exigent desire is to “see” the mystified, exoticized Chinatown. Her ocular desire undermines all other sensory faculties, which reduces her experience of Chinatown to its discursive plain of ethnic and racial otherness.iii America does not even attempt to feign interest in participating in the everyday practice of foodways: she “doesn’t’ care” what they would eat or drink there. For America, China-town is an extension, or rather, a showcase of ancient China. Her knowledge of China reads like a description from a museum pamphlet: “the richest and oldest culture in the history of the world […] with all the inventions of modern life” (66). America’s obsession with Chinatown lies only in the spectacle. ‘China-town,’ the fetishized cultural

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commodity is emptied of life, and functions only as a dead symbol of America’s desires and trepidations. Realizing that her visit to Chinatown would merely amplify and perpetuate her ethnographical Weltbild, her ocular domination, Rainsford tries to dissuade her from visiting the enclave. Finally, irked, he agrees to “drive through sometime.” The Mystified Spectacle America’s desire to see Chinatown, her desire for the spectacle of the other, ties back to a long tradition of the Western cultural primacy of visuality that is connected to questions of objectification, subjectivity and power. Unraveling the metaphysics of the modern, post-Cartesian age, Heidegger describes it as a period in which the world has been becoming a picture. The world picture, he argues, is “not merely imitation,” a representation of the world in which we live; rather, it is “the world grasped as picture” (67). It is a “system” that “stands before us,” one that encapsulates all things, and in which all things stand together. The difference between the Weltbild of the modern world in comparison to the systems of representations of the ancient Greeks and of the medieval age is “that beings acquire being in and through representedness” (68). In other words, through the picturing of the world and the objectification and representation of all that is within it, the modern subject as observer, its being, is formed. This, according to Heidegger, had been made possible by modern methodologies of science and research that enabled the world to be rendered by means of abstract calculations (e.g. mathematics) and representations. The picturing of the world becomes a means of ordering, ‘arranging’ knowledge, and the forming of norms with visuality as its primary mechanism. This mechanism for the picturing-of-the-world was most lucidly manifested within a visual system Tony Bennett termed exhibitionary complex: a nineteenth century constellation of public spaces (e.g. museums, expositions, fairs, art galleries, and department stores) that were organized and designed architecturally by the state, in the guise of the promotion of art and culture, to create a self-regulatory society of nationalized citizenry through the “ordering of objects for public inspection and the ordering of the public that inspected” (74). The ordering of objects into anthropological and ethnological categories served to position the modern nation-states within a universal history of civilization and in connection to national narratives, while the objects displayed were transformed into a naturalized outcome of a “culmination of the universal story of civilization” (89). By connecting the histories of Western nations with other civilizations through an “interrupted continuity”—between modern civilizations

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and ‘primitive’ societies—ideological tropes such as imperialism were rationalized and new ideological distinctions such as nature and culture were ‘brought to light’ (90). The nineteenth century also witnessed the ‘democratization’ of museums and world fairs. With the reduction of admission prices and the change of opening hours, these state-administered (i.e. officially regulated and ordered) exhibitionary complexes were made more accessible to the working class, and they became a significant instrument of public education (84-85). The spaces of museums and world fairs were designed according to the principles of the Panopticon and its self-regulatory, introspective disciplinary regime and, simultaneously, the panoramic spectacle, “forming a technology of vision which served not to atomize and disperse the crowd but to regulate it, and to do so by rendering it visible to itself, by making the crowd itself the ultimate spectacle” (81). In the pamphlet entitled a Short Sermon to Sightseers at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, visitors were instructed to: “Please remember when you get inside the gates you are part of the show” (ibid.). The ‘worldgrasped-as-picture’ in the modern, nineteenth century American city served as an imperialist ideological apparatus that rendered things, people, places, and history into abstract, fetishized objects. Organized, classified, arranged through modern visual regimes, these exoticized objects juxtaposed with de-politicized, dehistoricized western objects formed the hegemonic ‘world’ in which the modern subjects, who envisioned themselves ‘in the picture,’ regulated and were regulated in turn. These two mechanisms of the exhibitionary complex, 1) the objectification and classification of ‘things’ in the world, and 2) the formation of the modern subject through its positioning within a panoptic ‘world picture,’ became a significant mode of ordering and mapping the rapidly changing urbanscapes of cities. To nineteenth century San Francisco’s and New York’s public, Chinatown with its illegible signs, its foreign, ornate social and religious establishments such as temples, opium houses, restaurants, and its Chinese residents with very different physical appearances and dress, represented a vastly different ‘world,’ a terra incognito. It was a ‘world’ often represented in travel writing, literature, media reports, political caricatures, and minstrel songs as indiscernible, inscrutable and chaotic. Chinatown had to be ‘worked into’ America’s ‘worldgrasped-as-picture’ through the mechanisms of the nineteenth century’s exhibition complex. While the public demonstrated tremendous curiosity towards Chinatown’s opium houses, joss houses and brothels, Chinese restaurants provided slummers and cultural voyeurs a socially acceptable and ‘safe’ space to ‘experience’ the Orient. The objectification of Chinese food and foodways and their pseudo-ethnographic classification became a means of

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ordering the world into binary positions: civilized versus barbaric, occident versus orient. Moreover, by positioning oneself within this world picture, the modern American subject created itself through the disciplinary apparatus of the visual regime. Magazine author Josephine Clifford from Santa Cruz wrote an extensive report of her visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown that was published in Potter’s American Monthly in May 1880. Hiring a policeman to act as both guide and “protector from the dangers of Chinatown,” Clifford and a company of four other slummers wandered through Chinatown beguiled and overwhelmed by the scene that unfolded. Like many slumming expeditions in Chinatown during that time, guides led their tour groups into homes, restaurants and joss-houses, oftentimes uninvited, hoping to catch the Chinese in their ‘natural,’ day-to-day lives. Clifford observed that: Every house in the Chinese quarter seems to contain either a restaurant, or a green-grocery and market-stall combined, and the odors we encountered from stale fish, shark’s liver, decayed vegetables, and over-ripe pork-steaks, is beyond all description. It cannot be imagined, and must be personally experienced to be fully understood. (343)

The smells of food, “beyond all description” and which “cannot be imagined,” according to Clifford, had to be “personally experienced to be fully understood.” Like many other accounts by slummers and travel writers of the enclave in the nineteenth century, this one also shows that Chinatown and its foodways were so foreign to the American public’s worldview that they could only be ‘grasped’— ordered and incorporated into one’s worldview—through “experiencing” it. Reverend Dr. Albert W. Palmer’s exposé Orientals in American Life, which sought to show “what’s behind the Oriental mask,” begins his task with a description of Chinatown, labeling it as “a sort of permanent exhibit of the Orient, colorful, and exotic, set down amid the gray uniformity of American city life” (3). Following the motto “to see is to know” attached to the anthropological exhibits at the White City’s 1893 World’s Columbian Expedition, to see Chinatown is to know it. Clifford’s “experiencing” of Chinatown’s culinary culture was limited to the mere visual field of experience. At a restaurant on Jackson Street, Clifford’s gaze and her ordering of the scene in the kitchen resembles a spectator browsing the anthropological displays at a museum: Naturally, we had the curiosity to inspect the cooling department […]. The raw material, so far as we could see with our inexperienced eyes, consisted of the sprouts growing out of pig’s (or dog’s) ears pickled, and green leeks. (Now I don’t want to say anything mean

196 | S ELMA SIEW LI B IDLINGMAIER about the Chinese; but I do believe that the funny little things we saw at the bottom of a deep earthen jar were rat’s tails skinned). The articles manufactured came out as tempting morsels, squares, round, diamond-shaped, octagonal, all covered with coating and icing in gray colors, and so tastefully laid out that we had seen them at a confectioner’s on Market or Kearny Street, we could not have resisted the wish to devour them. (355)

The two mechanisms of the exhibitionary complex, the objectification of things within the world-grasped-as-picture, and the formation of subjectivity, churn as Clifford visually ‘digests’ the scene before her. Clifford describes and makes an inventory of the “raw materials” and the “funny little things” she sees—“pig’s (or dog’s) ears pickled” and “rat’s tails skinned.” Clifford’s gaze was, in fact, an informed one, as dogs, cats and rats were commonly believed to be staples of the Chinese palate in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the level of national narratives, it was a popular belief in nineteenth century America that the Chinese ate cats, dogs and rats. Robert G. Lee points out that the consumption of domestic animals and street rodents is in stark contrast to antebellum political cultural discourse that constructed males as carnivorous hunters, eaters and colonizers. In her study of regionalism, Anne Norten argues that the act of eating was the “primary metaphor of the West.” According to her: eating provides an archetypical expression of the mythic process of regeneration through violence […] predominant features of Western politics—the importance of charismatic authority, the significance of territorial expansion and the legitimacy of authority obtained through conquest—also becomes more intelligible in the context of the Western preoccupation with consumption, digestion and elimination. (quoted in Lee, 38)

Illustrating this, Lee discusses Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s analysis of the construction of the mythical hero of the Jacksonian frontier: Davy Crockett. Smith-Rosenberg observes that Crockett is glorified for killing and eating wild animals, and even a take of cannibalism, killing two Indians, “smashing number one into Injun gravy with my foot, spreading it on number two and made a dinner for me and my dog” (Lee 38). Analyzing the heroic characters of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett in his well-known work Regeneration through Violence (1973), Richard Slotkin explores the mythic linkage between the hunter and farmer as “joint redeemers of the wilderness” and contends that it is Crockett, the hunter who “sets the hero apart from the yeomanic herd” (555). The killing of wild animals and the consumption of meat as an act of

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regeneration are deeply embedded within the anthems of manifest destiny, and hence, the fabric on which the narrative of the nation was imprinted. Robert G. Lee juxtaposes the myth of eating wild animals in American frontier narratives with the imaginary of the consumption of polluted, domestic animals and disease-carrying rodents by the Chinese in minstrel songs. Lady she am vellie good, make plenty chow chow She live way up top side house, Take a little pussy cat and a little bow bow Boil em in a pot of stew wit a little mouse Hi! hi! hi! Some say pig meat make good chow chow Too much largie, no muchie small Up sky, down sky, down come chow chow Down come pussy cat, bow bow and all Hi! hi! hi! (Schoolcraft, “Heathen Chinee”, in The Wedding of the Chinese and the Coon. Publisher and date unknown. Quoted in Lee, 38.)

If eating wild animals symbolically transforms the body, and the nation, into one of strength and vitality, the consumption of domestic animals and diseasecarrying rodents symbolized degenerate, weak and diseased bodies. During a period influenced by naturalistic ideology, by these and comparable representations of the dietary habits the Chinese were deemed to be not only an evolutionarily inferior race, but also a threat to the civility, health and vivacity of the American nation. In the American imagination, Chinese food and foodways symbolically demarcated opposing spaces of civilization and barbarism, as well as vitality and torpidity, disease and ultimately death. Chinese foodways were also used as an overarching symbol in political rhetoric by anti-Chinese, pro-White labor unions such as the American Federation of Laborers (AFL), to define gender norms as well as engender spaces. Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, and Herman Gutstad wrote a pamphlet entitled “Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood against Chinese Cooliesm. Which will survive?” as an appeal to Congress to renew the 1882 Chinese Exclusion act for the third time in 1902. Summarizing the main reasons for the renewal, Gompers and Gutstad argue that Chinese laborers “living on the most meager food, having no families to support, inured to deprivation and hoarding their wages for use in their native land” pose a grave threat to

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American labor as they “do not, will not and can not take up the burdens of American citizenship” (29, italics mine). Believed to be less evolved beings, the Chinese were imagined to be able to live “on the most meager of food”—rice. The widely held belief that Chinese men could live off rice alone was deemed the antithesis of American ‘manhood’ whose ‘savage strength’ comes from the hunting and consuming of wild beasts. Besides defining White American masculinity on the basis of what Slotkin terms the hunting myth, the dichotomy between rice and meat also “ascribes different moral qualities to Whites and Asians” (Mannur 2). James G. Blaine, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives and presidential nomination contender for the 1880 elections, brazenly declared: I am opposing to making them citizens […] You cannot work a man who must have beef and bread alongside of a man who can live on rice. In all such conflicts, and in all such struggles, the result is not to bring up the man who lives on rice to the beef-and-bread standard, but it is to bring down the beef-and-bread man to the rice standard. (quoted in Mannur, 1).

Blaine maintains that permitting Whites and Asians to work alongside each other would be socially and economically ruinous for the nation as well as morally irresponsible. The “standard” of the beef-and-bread man hinged on moral arguments used by Chinese Exclusionists since the late 1870s and pointedly expressed in the 1878 special report by the House Committee on Education and Labor addressing “the Chinese Question.” First, according to the committee, the Chinese male was an “undesirable citizen” because he does not come up to the American standard of industry. The central idea of our system is that the laborer shall possess courage, self-respect, and independence. To do this he must have a home. Home is the mold in which society is cast. There are the habits formed which give character; there the great and wakeful interest of the living center; there the fires of patriotism are kindled; there free institutions have their source and inspiration. The Chinese who come to this country have no homes; they have neither. (“The Chinese Question,” Sacramento Daily Union, 26 Feb. 1878)

The home in nineteenth century political rhetoric had a mythical quality, because it was extolled as the place “from which springs a spirit of self-respect and manly independence” (ibid., emphasis mine). According to the authors of the report, Chinese frugality—their ability to “live upon rice, tea and dried fish,”

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their sojourner way of life without a family to support, and hence without social, economic or political obligation towards the country—was an anathema to American norms, according to which males were breadwinners, protectors of the home and, therefore, the nation. Second, under the discursive guise of sanitation, the committee charged Chinese laborers with living under conditions that were deplorable, “threatening disease and death.” Following the denunciation of their “personal habits,” the authors of the report delved directly into the issue of their “treatment of women” as slaves sold into prostitution. This line of argument was guided by the belief that disease and plague were the corporeal manifestations of moral depravity, corruption and vice. In contrast to hegemonic American masculine norms that upheld men as defenders of morality, Chinese men fell far from those standards. Deconstructing late nineteenth century labor political rhetoric, Karen J. Leong demonstrates that the “concerns about the effects of perverse Chinese sexuality on the national body […] illuminate the ideological relationship between virility and economic health, morality and industry” (141). The cumulative statement presented by the House Committee on Education and Labor for the exclusion of Chinese laborers asserts that “mentally, morally, physically, socially and politically, they have remained a distinct and antagonistic race” (San Francisco Chronicle, 26 February 1878, quoted in Leong, 133). The presence of Chinese laborers compromised the values, morals and masculine roles of the ‘beef-andbread’ man, affecting American homes, and ultimately the social, political and economic health of the young nation. Josephine Clifford’s itinerary of the food items found at the Chinese restaurant’s kitchen was not a random, serendipitous list of a curious tourist. Her gaze, informed by the ubiquitous plethora of anti-Chinese discourses, transformed what she saw with her “inexperienced eyes” into “funny” things, objects belonging to a well-established, symbolic order. Chinese food and foodways in the national cultural glossary and imaginary of nineteenth century America were heavily charged politicized symbols that carried a myriad of meanings that reinforced national identity, racial, moral, and evolutionary superiority, as well as gender norms. The food on ‘display’ in the restaurant goes through a process of visual ingestion in the creation of Clifford’s differentiated self and its description brings to mind Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject: There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark re-volts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be

200 | S ELMA SIEW LI B IDLINGMAIER assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. (Kristeva 1)

Clifford’s sight falls on, or rather unconsciously and intentionally seeks out, items of food objectified within the popular discourses of Chinatown. The tabooed, revolting objects are then transformed into the abject of desire—“the articles manufactured came out as tempting morsels, squares, round, diamondshaped, octagonal, all covered in coating and icing in gray colors, and so tastefully laid out…we could not have resisted the wish to devour them” (355, emphasis mine). As with the national myths of Davy Crockett killing and consuming the abjected ‘Indian,’ this phase evokes the symbolic violence of the desire to consume the Other in a display of power and superiority that also impacts the formation of subjectivity. However, this ‘fascinated’ desire is not consummated in the physical ingestion of the food. Rather, the food of Clifford’s gaze symbolically returns to the state of being mysticized and alienated objects ordered by the visual regimes of knowledge/power: “Our appetites having been appeased by looking at these delicacies, we advanced five steps and stood on the pawnbroker’s premises” (Clifford, 355, emphasis mine). The process of visually objectifying and classifying things reinforces one’s world-grasped-as-picture. It also designs and situates one’s subjectivity within that picture as both an uninvolved observer and at the same time a participant within that constructed world. In both Clifford’s account, and in the eyes of Shawn Wong’s allegorical America, Chinatown’s culinary traditions, foodways and food function as visual symbols that mark a point of reference for subjectivity in the ‘pictured-world’ and, hence, the position of the abject. The items of food ‘on display,’ ordered and encapsulated within the ethnographic showcase of Chinatown, are ‘seen’ as mere exoticized, fetishized objects. The gaze reduces the everyday practices and lived spaces of an ethnic group into commodities in the asymmetrical economy of representation, knowledge and power. Despite the many accounts and representations that stressed the foreignness, dangers and difference of Chinese foodways, Anglo-Americans from across the country patronized Chinese restaurants in search of exotic culinary adventures. The discrepancy between repugnance and desire is complex and exposes the interplay between state politics, social stratification, gender roles, social norms and the embodied tastes of the Victorian society. To understand this process, it is important to note that food and foodways are

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objects [that] “materialize” cultural order—they render abstract cultural categories visible and durable, they aid the negotiation of social interaction in various ways, and they structure perception of the social world. The “system of objects” (Baudrillard 1996) that people construct through consumption serves both to inculcate personal identity and to enable people to locate others within social fields through the perception of embodied tastes and various indexical forms of symbolic capital. (Dietler 225)

Moreover, accounts of Chinese food and foodways stressed its strangeness and exoticism, thereby furthering the idea of the Chinese as the abject Other. In another nineteenth century guide, author Joseph Carey reported, “[t]hey eat things which would be most repulsive to the epicurean taste of the AngloSaxons. Even lizards and rats and young dogs they will not refuse” (quoted in Berglund, 19). On this level, Chinese food and customs functioned as materialized objects that rendered “visible” the gulf of difference between Anglo-Americans and the Chinese. While the politically charged, popular representations of the Chinese as diseased, evolutionarily inferior rat-eaters substantiated the truism of the culinary idiom ‘you are what you eat,’ Chinese food also functioned as a marker of class and gender difference and represented the inverse: ‘you eat what you are.’ The consumption of Chinese food as a fetishized object became a practice that came to signify social status and gender norms. The eating of a Chinese meal in the late 1880s became a fashionable trend among New York’s and San Francisco’s upper and middle classes. In New York, slumming exhibitions brought large numbers of ‘tourists’ to lower Manhattan in the 1890s which “fuel[ed] the rapid development of a tourist based economy revolving around restaurants catering to non-Chinese visitors” (Lui 38). Upscale restaurants such as Port Arthur, established in 1897, began catering to a respectable, non-Chinese, middle-class clientele. Fashioning their restaurant in elaborate, ornate Chinese decoration and promising ‘authentic’ Chinese cuisine, these establishments lured culinary adventurers and cultural voyeurs seeking a glimpse and a taste of the Orient. Nineteenth century travel guide writer Charles Keeler, sitting in a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown, sipping “tea with roasted almonds, dried lichis, preserved cumquats and ginger” in accompaniment with “some curious Chinese cakes,” while listening to “high-pitched sing-song voices,” the “rapping of drums, clanging of symbols and squeaking of fiddles” imagines himself metamorphosed into “a disciple of Confucius” and transported to “the heart of the Flowery Kingdom” (Keeler 62). Like the World Exhibition, Chinatowns were perceived as ‘true’ reflections of the Orient. They offered middle-class visitors an affordable opportunity to travel to the romanticized Far

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East without having to leave the country. Cultural voyeurism served as a class marker, and to be a connoisseur of exotic Chinese food was a cultural marker that distinguished middle-class identity from the less culturally affluent. The four most recommended sites in travel writings and tourist literature of the nineteenth century were joss houses, opium dens, Chinese theatres, and Chinese restaurants. The first three were sites of cultural voyeurism where tourists and visitors reaffirmed their world-grasped-as-picture by drawing stark contrasts between what they saw as uncivilized and barbarous and what they considered to be normative. These places were ethnographic showcases where the relationship between subject and object was clearly defined, the gaze falling solely on the abject. Chinese restaurants, however, were more ambiguous spaces, as they offered the public the possibility of not merely observing and objectifying Chinese culture. They also provided a space in which middle- and upper-class Anglo-Americans were able to ‘see’ themselves as ‘part of the show.’ By partaking in a Chinese meal, visitors had the impression they were ‘present’ and active participants in the ‘pictured-world’ (conceived world, the world-as-represented) of Chinatown, and in relation a verification of the differentiated ‘worlds’ of the Orient and the Occident. The consumption of a Chinese meal became a practice through which middle- and upper-class Anglo-Americans reinforced their world-grasped-aspicture and at the same time, solidified their position within that constructed world. The objectification of Chinese food, its cultural commodification and the ingesting of it became a ritualistic demonstration of social status. In time, Chinese food as a cultural commodity needed no longer to be contained within the context of Chinatown. In the late 1880s, Chinese-themed dinner parties became a popular social event, a performance of class identity, enacted in American homes and cultural institutions. On June 13, 1889, the newly inaugurated, exclusive Montauk Club of Brooklyn organized a Chinese dinner extravaganza.iv Interviewed by a Brooklyn Eagle reporter two days prior to the event, the organizer George W. Sillcox guaranteed readers: “This is to be a Chinese Chinese dinner, real Chinese, you know” and that attendees would be learning “real Chinese cooking, by native Celestial cooks” (Brooklyn Eagle, 11 June 1889, 6). The “celestial,” “heathen” dinner’s authenticity was stressed as a testament to the “young and vigorous” Club’s—and, by association, its members’—cultural capital. If Chinatown had been turned into an ethnographic showcase of the Orient open to public viewing, the “authentic” enactment of an elaborate Chinese feast in an exclusive club was a private show that only a few privileged members of significant social standing could afford. Sillcox boasted: “This is the first time any club in New York or Brooklyn, or I suppose the

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Atlantic Coast, ever gave a Chinese dinner at its club house. Of course many clubmen have gone to Chinese restaurants to dine, but that is a different thing” (ibid.). In addition to the meal, the clubhouse would be adorned in exotic decoration for a visual feast: “Chinese porcelains and silk hangings […]. The menu will be printed on red firecracker paper; the lamps will be Chinese, and fine bronzes will figure extensively in the decorations” (ibid.). The event was set up to be a spectacle, an ‘authentic’ showcase of ‘things Chinese’—a colonialist appropriation and exhibition of a culture that reaffirmed both the world-graspedas-picture as well as one’s place in that world. It was also a means of forming a unified group identity and consciousness as middle- and upper-class New Yorkers by posing their distinguished guests as objects of a spectacle. The last sentence of the newspaper article announced: “The eyes of the whole city will be upon these gentlemen when they take up their chop sticks” (ibid.). On one hand, the “Heathen Fare” was to be consumed within the confines of the exclusive Montauk clubhouse. On the other hand, the clubhouse was a stage for the performance of upper- and middle-class tastes, etiquette and social norms.

D E - MYSTIFYING C HINESE F OODWAYS As exoticized Chinese foodways proliferated in the everyday lives of San Francisco’s and New York’s residents, whether as symbols in anti-Chinese political rhetoric or as themes of elaborate middle-class dinner parties at the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese fluent in English responded in a variety of ways. Wong Chin Foo, the editor and founder of New York’s first Chinese paper Chinese American, a vocal proponent of Chinese civil rights in the late nineteenth century, audaciously challenged the public’s imaginary of Chinese foodways throughout his prolific career as journalist, lecturer and activist. An article appearing in the New York Times on August 1, 1882, beginning with the question “Do the Chinese eat rats?” reported an incident in which a Dr. Charles Kaemerer accused Mr. Wong, owner of Chung Kee grocery store, of cooking cats and rats in his back courtyard at 5 Mott Street. Dr. Charles Kaemerer, a former health inspector, was visiting a saloon at 199 Worth Street, when he had noticed a “very peculiar odor” emitting from the courtyard. His complaint was later found unverifiable by a sanitary inspector and a journalist who detected no traces of the remains of cats or rats. Instead, upon inspection of the cook working in the kitchen, the reporter observed:

204 | S ELMA SIEW LI B IDLINGMAIER The cook was as deft as a hotel chef, and did his work with much care and cleanliness. He shelled fresh peas, sliced a wholesome-looking cabbage head, and peeled fresh potatoes whose skins were almost white. There was nothing suggestive of rats and cats about the place and the doctor said that he should report that there was no cause for complaint. (quoted in Tschen, 267-68).

While Dr. Kaemerer was threatened with a slander suit by Wong, this episode incited Wong Chin Foo to retaliate by offering a 500 dollar reward to the person who could conclusively prove that the Chinese ate rats or cats—a wager no one claimed (Tchen 268, Coe 153). Wong also wrote numerous articles enumerating the various ingredients and spices used in Chinese cooking, describing the various methods of food preparation, and comparing the differences between American and Chinese gastronomy (Seligman 133). His first piece on food appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1884. The article entitled “Chinese Cooking” contrasts Western and American gastronomies, asserting that these two culinary traditions were “in some respects diametrically opposed” (Wong 4). In great detail, Wong describes the various ingredients used in Chinese cooking that were considered “extraordinary” by Americans, such as “sea worms” (known today as sea cucumbers), bird’s nest soup, and shark’s fins, and he explains how these costly delicacies were “wholesome, well flavored and thoroughly adapted for cooking and digestion.” He also explicates how “[m]any dishes peculiar to China are well adapted for cosmopolitan use.” For instance, instead of the use of “horse hoofs” in the production of gelatin, the Chinese use a “purer” form of gelatin extracted from Sturgeon bladders. Wong ends his piece adamantly denying that the Chinese consume rats: “As to rats, mice, cats and dogs, the stories are all fiction. Poor people in China, at times, will eat these, just as the starving do in every land, but they are not recognized articles of diet in the great restaurants, anymore than at Dalmonico’s or Braunswick” (ibid). Wong’s article not only demystified Chinese foodways but also demonstrated ways in which Chinese food could contribute to and improve American gastronomy and the food preparation in everyday life. While recipes for Chinese chop suey began appearing in popular periodicals and newspapers towards the end of the nineteenth century, the first Chinese cookbooks written by Americans for the American readership were published in the 1910s. The first Chinese cookbook, Chinese Cookery in the Home Kitchen, was published by the Chicago newspaper writer Jessie Louise Nolton in 1913 (Coe 185). Nolton’s cookbook mystifies Chinese foods, claiming that they were shrouded in “the mystery of their origin and the still greater mystery of the

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combinations used in their preparation” (Nolton 6). She continues: “While this mystery causes a natural hesitation on the part of the person who tastes for the first time, still when he has once tasted he is sure to taste again, and soon he, too, falls under the spell” (ibid.). A year later, Winnifred Eaton, writing under the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, collaborated with her sister Sarah Eaton Bosse to publish a peculiar cookbook entitled Chinese-Japanese Cook Book. The book was the result of a series of articles the two sisters had published on cooking and entertaining in Harper’s Bazar and the Ladies’ Home Journal (Birchall 107). Winnifred and her sister Sarah were daughters of Edward Eaton, a British merchant and Grace Trefusis Matheson Eaton, the Shanghainese adopted daughter of English missionaries. Winnifred, passing as a Japanese, was a literary celebrity at the time the cookbook was published in 1914. Her book Miss Numé of Japan: A Japanese American Romance, published in 1899, had launched both her constructed Japanese persona as Onoto Watanna and her career as a novelist. Her move to take on the role of an exoticized woman was a strategic one. Assessing her writings, works of fiction and personal history, Dominika Ferens elaborates on Eaton’s complicated racial and gender identity within the imperialist and geopolitical milieu at the turn of the twentieth century. She deduces that Eaton, passing for white when she first began to seek employment in the Midwest removed the disadvantage of race in the job market, her sex and class limited Winnifred’s opportunities to the lowest-paying and most tedious clerical positions […]. By becoming Onoto Watanna, Winnifred enacted mainstream Orientalist fantasies, exploiting the discourse that feminized and aestheticized Japan. (119)

Ferens disagrees with Yuko Matsukawa who paints Winnifred as an “archetypical trickster” (ibid.). Rather, she maintains that Winnifred’s decision to create and publish as a Japanese was “serious business […] in order to make a living at the turn of the century” and that the slippages of identity in her works were “unintended—evidence of the difficulty of managing personal information rather than an expression of playfulness” (119-120). However, the one must not necessarily exclude the other. The Eaton sisters were ‘committed’ to the personas they invented throughout their lives. Ferens argues that they took these identities seriously, which she finds proven by Winnifred’s own and her children’s birth certificates, which claim Nagasaki as their birthplace, as well as the obituary written by Winnifred for a third sister, Edith, in 1914 that stated that “the deceased was the daughter of a ‘Japanese noblewoman’” (119). One can only speculate as to Winnifred’s motivation and reasons behind the construction

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of these identities, but they certainly strike one as playful, maybe even a little vengeful subversions of the stereotypes and stigmas ascribed to Asian Americans during their time. Winnifred and Sarah Eaton’s Chinese-Japanese Cook Book attests to this dual impulse. On one hand, the cookbook demystifies Chinese and Japanese foodways by illuminating the ‘everydayness’ of their practice. The authors describe the ingredients used in the Chinese kitchen as “simple and clean” (1). Their declared aim is to ease “the Westerner[‘s] […] natural repugnance which assails one when about to taste a strange dish of a new and strange land (1-2). Besides the recipes which were “selected as would appeal to the Western palate,” the cookbook provides basic explanations of both Chinese and Japanese food practices, etiquettes and culture (4). For instance, they explain that rice is a staple in Chinese and Japanese gastronomy as bread and potatoes are in western cuisine. Moreover, they describe the proper way rice is prepared and eaten. They also liken soy sauce to Worcestershire sauce and, going one step further, claim many European sauces are “adaptations” of the “original Chinese syou sauce” and that “most of these European sauces contain syou in their makeup” (2-3). On the other hand, intermingled with recipes, cooking instructions and introductions to Chinese and Japanese food practices are snippets of ‘trickstery.’ In the preface, the authors inform readers that the Chinese recipes included in the book “have been handed down from Vo Ling, a worthy descendant of a long line of noted Chinese cooks, and himself head cook to Gow Gai, one time highest mandarin of Shanghai. They are all genuine, and were given as an especial expression of respect by a near relative of the famous family of Chinese cooks” (5). Vo Ling and Gow Gai are both fictitious characters and the authors’ claim that they are “genuine” playfully subverts the Victorian fetishism of ‘authenticity’ in the theatrics of chinoiserie. Under the heading “General Rules for Cooking,” the sisters sensibly advise that meat “should not be washed, but should be rinsed in cold or lukewarm water” but following that, they instruct readers not only that “all vegetables and fruit should be washed in cold water,” but “if necessary, in fifty different waters” (9). Another example of the Eaton sisters’ ‘witticism’ appears in the section on chop suey. At the time when the book was published, chop suey had become synonymous with Chinatown and Chinese food for North Americans. Various tales of mythical proportions were spawned in the early twentieth century that told of its invention.v The popular dish’s name normally “varies according to the kind of meat used for the dish: beef chop suey, chicken chop suey, pork chop suey and shrimp chop suey” (Yu 87). One of the five varieties of chop suey the Eaton sisters featured in their

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cookbook was “Extra White Chop Suey”—an “invention” that played on the “whiteness” of their readers (41). Characteristic of Winnifred’s chicanery, the cookbook combines two strategies of empowerment and demystification. First, by concocting fiction and false cooking instruction and blending them into a “serious” cookbook, the authors empower themselves by “turning the tables” and reversing knowledge/power positions. Using their cultural knowledge of Chinese culinary practices, the sisters render foodways as a weapon against the unsuspecting reader and call into question the line drawn between fact and fiction. This strategy might be especially effective if readers are, or become aware of these inconsistencies and examine their world-grasped-as-picture. However, by engaging in trickster tactics the authors may risk reinforcing and perpetuating the mystification of Chinese cuisine. On another level, the cookbook can also be read as a means of cultural “education”—the elucidation of cultural practices so as to dismiss popular stereotypes, as well as to de-exoticize and to make the mysteries of Chinese foodways disappear into something that is part of the mundane and everyday. At the beginning of the cookbook, the authors advise “any one who intends to cook ‘Chinese’ to go to some Chinese restaurant and taste the various dishes he desires to cook. A good cook always should know what a dish tastes like before he tries to cook it” (4-5). By instructing readers to test Chinese dishes at restaurants before they attempt making a Chinese meal themselves, the Eaton sisters urge their readers to venture beyond the cultural voyeurism of “seeing” and to consciously partake in a meal, tasting and identifying the ingredients. Wong Chin Foo and the Eaton sisters represented a small group of ethnic Chinese who received education in English and were in social positions that enabled them to respond to the tide of anti-Chinese sentiments and Orientalism prevalent at the turn of the century. Although the majority of Chinese during that period might not have been able to voice their dissent due to the limitations of language and education, many resourcefully employed other tactics and turned racist politics and the mystification of Chinese foodways into monetary profit. In the introduction to Chinese-Japanese Cook Book, the Eaton sisters reported, “Chinese restaurants have pushed their way out of Chinatown and are now found in all parts of large cities of America” (1). Fueled by competitive prices and their novelty among the middle and upper classes, chop suey joints by the 1910s had become “almost” ordinary establishments in American cities. Chinese food and customs became cultural commodities and their knowledge an indication not merely of social standing, but also of membership of the cosmopolitan class. The protagonist in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street, published in 1920, describes

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how “Chinese restaurants were frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on paydays. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Foo yung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan” (quoted in Coe, 188). A city was elevated to the status of an urban metropolis by the presence of Chinese restaurants, and Chinese proprietors took this opportunity to bank on the novelty that the American society seemed to have associated with Chinese gastronomy. By the 1920s, chop suey restaurants in San Francisco’s and New York’s Chinatowns were transformed into restaurant-nightclubs featuring live performances, dancing, and chow mein.vi The refurbishing of the public’s imaginary of Chinese foodways in the 1910s and 1920s brought significant changes to Chinatowns, which were transformed from ghettoized spaces into entertainment districts. These districts functioned as heterotopias, where the middle and upper classes could set aside social norms for an evening of uninhibited pleasure, although Chinatown was still perceived as an othered, mystified space: a dead symbol of difference. The increase of acceptance of and desire for Chinese food at the turn of the century created jobs and improved the livelihoods of Chinatown residents and the overall living conditions of the enclave. The dialectic of lived space and conceived space formed by Chinatown’s food practices in the early decades of the twentieth century might not have elicited an urban revolution as envisioned by Lefebvre but it paved the way for greater social and civil rights activism by residents in Chinatown in the decades to come. It also destabilized the imaginary and physical borders of China-town and “America-town” outside it by promoting a certain awareness of the porous, intricate, lived connections between these conceived spaces.

W ORKS C ITED Barthes, Roland. “Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption?” Food and Culture. A Reader. 3rd Ed. Eds. Carole Counihan and Penny van Esteik. New York: Routledge, 2013. 23-30. Print. Berglund, Barbara. “Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain: Representation and Racialization in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.” American Studies 46.2 (2005): 5-26. Print. Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4.1 (1988): 73102. Print. Beyer, William C. “Creating ‘Common Ground’ on the Home Front: Race Class, and Ethnicity in a 1940s Quarterly Magazine.” The Home-Front War: World

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War II and the American Society. Eds. Kenneth Paul O’Brien and Lynn Hudson Parson. Westport: Greenwood, 1995.41-62. Print. ---. “Langston Hughes and Common Ground in the 1940s.” American Studies in Scandinavia 23 (1991): 29-42. Print. Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna. The Story of Winnefred Eaton. Urbana: Illinois UP, 2001. Print. Bosse, Sara and Onoto Watanna. Chinese-Japanese Cook Book. Chicago: RandMcNally Press, 1914. Print. Coe, Andrew. Chop Suey. A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Dietler, Michael. “Food, Identity, and Colonialism.” The Archeology of Food and Identity. Eds. Katheryn C. Twiss. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2007. 218-242. Print. Clifford, Josephine. “Chinatown.” Potter’s American Monthly May 1880: 353368. Print. Douglas, Mary. “Deciphering a Meal.” Daedalus 101.1 (1972): 61-81. Print. Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton. Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: Illinois UP, 2002. Print. Gibson, Otis. The Chinese in America. Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877. Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” Vision and Visuality. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988. Print. Keeler, Charles. San Francisco and Thereabouts. San Francisco: Stanley-Taylor Company, 1902. Print. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature. An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Contexts. Berkeley: California UP, 1982. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print. Lee, Robert G. Orientals. Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. Print. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Blackwell, 1991. Print. ---. The Critique of Everyday Life. Trans. John Moore. Vol. 1. London: Verso, 1991. Print. Leong, Karen K. “A Distinct and Antagonistic Race. Constructions of Chinese Manhood in the Exclusionist Debates, 1869-1878.” Across the Great Divide. Cultures of Manhood in the American West. Eds. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau. New York: Routledge, 2001. 131-148. Print. Mannur, Anita. “Asian American Food-Scapes.” Amerasia Journal 32.2: 1-5. 2006. Print.

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Meloney William Brown. “Slumming in New York’s Chinatown.” Munsey’s Magazine September 1909: 818-830. Print.

C OMMENTS i

ii iii iv

v

vi

Lefebvre states that the concept of dominated spaces cannot “attain its full meaning” unless it is “contrasted with the opposite and inseparable concept of appropriation (POS 165). Appropriated spaces are spaces of work, spaces “transformed […] according to the needs of (social) man. For instance, “peasant houses and villages speak: they recount, though in a mumbled and somewhat confused way, the lives of those who built and inhabited them” (ibid). See Lefebvre’s Production of Space, 12-14. St. Augustin uses the term ocular desire in Confessions. The Montauk Club, founded in March 1889 was one of Brooklyn’s most prestigious private gentlemen’s clubs. Interestingly, it was named after the Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe from eastern Long Island, New York who lost their lands to English settlers in the seventeenth century. The clubhouse was designed by the acclaimed architect Francis H. Kimball who used terracotta clay ornamentation to depict scenes from the Montauk tribe on the club’s friezes. See Renqiu Yu’s “Chop Suey: From Chinese Food to Chinese American Food” in Chinese America: History and Perspectives (1987) Andrew Coe’s chapter American Chop Suey in his book Chop Suey provides an interesting account of the development of these restaurant-nightclubs in New York City and San Francisco in the 1920s.

The Transformation of Manhattan’s Chinatown in Hungarian Travel Writing E RIKA M IKÓ

In this article, I examine representations of New York’s Chinatown in twentieth century Hungarian travel accounts with regard to the way they represent spatial and communal transformations of the enclave as well as the historical contexts in which they occurred. I have selected two books from the first decade of the twentieth century—Károly Vértesi’s Körutazás Amerikában (My Journeys in America) and Árpád Pásztor’s Amerika Kanadától Panamáig (America From Canada to Panama)—and two from the communist era—Endre Harmat’s Hello, New York! and István Kulcsár’s Tudósítás Átlagamerikából (Reports from Everyday America). At the turn of the century, Hungarian travel accounts about Chinatown adopted the tropes of slumming literature in describing key sites of the neighborhood’s tourist terrain; however, the accounts also reflected on racial discrimination against the Chinese. Later, in the communist period, an antiAmerican rhetoric was adopted for ideological reasons, although this orientation gradually disappeared as the regime lost its control over publishing. Accordingly, more reliable journalistic accounts were published about the United States towards the end of the communist regime in the late 1980s. These did not emphasize harmful capitalist exploitation, but strove to give differentiated reports about the neighborhood that was widely considered the key symbol of cultural diversity in New York City. In the second half of the nineteenth century, New York became a popular tourist destination for Hungarian travelers, and information about the United States emerged as part of everyday life in Hungary. Alongside these developments, some Hungarian travel writers decided to write about their experiences upon their return. At the turn of the twentieth century, advancements in transportation triggered large-scale travel to the United States, making New

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York City the most famous entry point to the country. The city had become the world’s largest metropolis by the 1910s, and, as a result of large-scale immigration, ethnic enclaves developed. These ethnically marked places brought new immigrants together, and they soon became distinctive and unique sites in the city. The primary and major example of New York City’s extraordinary diversity is Manhattan’s Chinatown, which has a long history of neighborhood tourism. Outside the door an automobile stops, and elegantly dressed wealthy American women and young men appear. The women are wearing ball gowns and diamonds, and the young men are in tuxedos. After theater and dining, they come here to wallow in the mud a little, escorted by a detective or two. The laughter, the racket, and the fuss stop, and the rich and the poor—the most ancient of enemies—face each other for a second, and then the clamor and the waltzing of girls erupt again.i (41)

According to Chad Heap, due to its rapid urbanization New York City became more spatially and socially divided along race and class lines at the turn of the twentieth century, and the changing conceptualizations of race and sexuality manifested themselves in the increasingly popular practice of slumming (7). He further argues that “slumming was centered on the ‘slum,’ designating both a physical urban space and a white middle-class idea about that space and the people who inhabited it” (18). When slumming tourists decided to visit these places, they became complicit in the process of racial containment that “reinforced the notion that racialized others could be safely cordoned off in discrete urban spaces where they could be visited—or avoided—at will” (118). However, slumming was not merely entertainment. In the 1900s, growing concern about the social and moral conditions of slums motivated incursions by many white New Yorkers. The term was also employed to describe the endeavors of ‘sociological workers’ who labored to understand the social and physical conditions of poverty […]. Even the muckraking journalism of Jacob A. Riis, George Kibbe Turner, and others was perceived as a type of slumming—albeit one that prompted readers to partake of a little ‘armchair slumming’ of their own as they followed such authors on their sensationalistic forays into the cities’ immigrant […] neighborhoods. (21)

At the same time, in the Hungarian metropolis, Budapest, a very different kind of urban ethos instructed locals to practice self-restraint, sobriety, and above all, silence. The so-called “Budapest Guide,” published annually starting in 1902, was the manifestation of a new code of social behavior that limited sociability in

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public spaces and was based on the imperative of self-control. In fact, the subtitle of the manual was “The Order of the Street.” Policemen and civilian guards kept public spaces under surveillance to ensure that the rules were followed. The ideal behind this policy was an urban culture controlled by traditional values and codes of behavior (Gyáni 85-86). The spatial elaboration of social life was also different in the Hungarian capital due to the city’s different physical scale and demographic composition. While in New York City numerous ethnic groups were able to sustain their distinct ethnic cultures, in Budapest only the Jews developed a substantial complement of cultural institutions. Overall, metropolitan cultural pluralism was significantly limited by conservative nationalism. The small place-oriented group identity of New York’s ethnic neighborhoods was unfamiliar to Hungarians and thus sought after by Hungarian travelers who visited the city. This, too, made Chinatown an attractive setting for travelogues by Hungarian writers (Bender, Schorske 17). Budapest at that time had a contradictory place in Hungarian public opinion. Due to its rapid development and urban achievements, the Hungarian capital strengthened the self-esteem of the nation. However, [t]here was such a large gap between the urbanization and modernization of the capital and the rest of the country that Budapest almost did not fit into the general conditions of Hungary […]. [W]ith its modern social structure and new metropolitan values, [it] seemed to be alien from the point of view of national society and a traditional mentality. (40)

By the turn of the century, Budapest’s cosmopolitanism was increasingly identified with urbanism, liberalism, and Jewishness and was constantly challenged and antagonized by traditionalist provincial values. This older value system was well-reflected in the writings of the two authors who gave a detailed account of New York’s Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth century: Károly Vértesi and Árpád Pásztor. Károly Vértesi was a lawyer, an orator, a travel writer, the president of a literary society based in Southern Hungary, and an outspoken advocate of the government’s assimilation politics. Árpád Pásztor, of Jewish origin, was a journalist, a writer, a traveling reporter, and a translator. When he did not travel, he lived in Budapest and worked for several newspapers. Both writers must have visited Chinatown around the same time. Vértesi published his book in 1908, and although Pásztor’s was not published until 1924, his journal entry about the enclave dates back to 1908.

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Each author dedicated a chapter to the Chinese neighborhood. Both Vértesi’s “About the Chinese in New York” and Pásztor’s “The Chinese Quarter” follow the standardized tourist itinerary, but their points of view differ. While Vértesi’s description of the neighborhood mostly reinforced long-standing negative stereotypes about the place and its residents, Pásztor tried to “do the thankless task of showing well-known things from a new angle, a new perspective,” and “to peel off the stereotypes to show the skeleton of the unknown reality” in America (5). Both Vértesi and Pásztor begin by locating the neighborhood and describing the atmosphere and the residents. Vértesi wastes no time in warning of its perils: “Chinatown is a dangerous place; it has its secrets and underground hideouts. As if we walk the narrow zigzagged streets of Shanghai” (94). Likewise, Pásztor’s description also incorporates some well-known conventions about the place: Chinatown! Only three to-four streets in New York between the Italian and Jewish quarter. These dirty streets, namely Mott Street, Pell Street, and Doyer Street, run into the infamous Bowery downtown. The red-brick tenement buildings are poor, but the balconies are decorated with lampions, and there are fantastic iron bars on the windows, Chinese signs everywhere, and every second shop is a laundry. (39)

Chinatown was almost always represented as a ‘foreign’ place in American tourist literature at the turn of the century. It was not uncommon for travel writers to point to similarities with Chinese cities but “[w]hatever similarities authors of travel literature chose to draw, Chinatown was not Peking or Canton—a foreign land filled with foreign people […]. Rather, Chinatown, as many accounts pointed out, was a segregated place located in the heart of an American city and the Chinese who inhabited it were not colorful foreigners ‘over there’ but menacing aliens ‘over here’” (Berglund 18). Károly Vértesi’s description of the Chinese reinforced the notion that “the Chinese community was in America but not of America” (18). He states that while he was in Chinatown he heard some interesting and not quite interesting things about them. There are 10,000 Chinese in New York and they are disliked in America. In fact, recently they have been trying to stop their immigration, the steady stream of the Hong Kong herd. The Yankees are afraid of them; they consider them rivals. The Chinese hate the white man, too, whom they call the white devil. Luckily they are timid. (Vértesi 98)

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As he explains, “they are not only disliked because they do not learn anything from the resourceful English but also because they will do any dirty job. They are incredibly industrious and thrifty” (99). Barbara Berglund points out that “[t]ourist literature’s representations racialized the Chinese in terms of their unassimilability, their proclivity towards vice, the risk they posed to public health, and the threat they presented to white labor” (6). These stereotypes are echoed in Vértesi’s register of Chinese character traits: I heard a lot of bad things about them in America. Their sins and flaws are so many that I will only enumerate a few. They are unclean, and only a few of them clean their faces with a wet cloth. They apply for any job. They are selfish, stingy, envious (they are truly yellow with envy), lustful, even lecherous, unconscionable, cunning, conscious liars, perjurious, treacherous, poisoners with vengeance on their minds. (95)

It is important to note that by this hearsay characterization, Vértesi’s observation says just as much about the white perspective on the Chinese and the racial divide that existed in New York City at the time as it does about his own racism. For Hungarian travel writers, it was very tempting to write “from a point of view of a white, typically male spectator—the quintessential flaneur—who traversed the urban terrain and recorded his voyeuristic observations with the kind of detached yet possessive authority that similarly characterized the consuming gaze of the typical tourist” (Berglund 9). Yet Árpád Pásztor’s observations about the Chinese show a great sensitivity to their suffering: The Chinese make their living from diligently washing the dirty clothes of Americans in their tiny laundries under electric lamps. The laundries open at night because the Chinese work at night. Why? […] Who knows? […] Perhaps they are afraid of the daylight, the raw power of the Yankee, the persecution, and the mockery. They take refuge in the night, during which so many things are forgiven, even birth […]. When white men pass by them, they—almost unconsciously—lower their voices and withdraw. They are afraid because they are at the mercy of Americans, tolerated, and despised […]. How much do these people suffer here and how much concealed deceit and lechery do they pile up to balance the scale of life’s pain? (Pásztor 40)

This portrayal of the Chinese gives an insight into their position in New York’s racial order. It does not only convey information about ethnic and class differences but also shows the Chinese community’s status in the American body politic. In this way, Pásztor’s narrative fulfills a pedagogical function since

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through these images Chinatown and its residents entered the racial imagination of Hungarian readers. Before his visit to Chinatown, Pásztor spent some time in the Bowery while waiting for a New York Herald journalist who had promised to guide him and some of his colleagues. To kill time, the group went to a nearby saloon where the author observed through “thick clouds of smoke, the thugs of the harbor” (41). The adjacent Bowery district and Chinatown shared the same clientele and notoriety as the hotbed of urban vice and debauchery in New York City, which “gained national attention when Charles M. Hoyt’s musical comedy, A Trip to Chinatown, became a hit in 1892. ‘The Bowery,’ the lead song in Hoyt’s musical, swept America. Despite the song’s warning to stay away from the area, many did flock to Chinatown, and a profitable Chinese vice industry developed alongside the others already established on the Bowery” (McIllwain 107). Pásztor makes a comment about the popular song: “This is the infamous Bowery! Twenty years ago an American troupe popularized a song about it that was sung by all Budapest: The Bow’ry! the Bow’ry! / They say such things, and they do strange things, / On the Bow’ry, the Bow’ry! / I’ll never go any more” (41). Hoyt included “The Bowery” in spite of the comedy’s San Francisco setting because of its notoriety as a rough place. The song’s last line was almost an invitation to visit the place. At least it made Pásztor curious enough to write about the Bowery “where anyone can pull a knife or a revolver on you at an unguarded moment” and where “[t]he crackling of a gramophone gives strange rhythm to the yelling, the cigar smoke, the laughter, and the vulgar jokes” (41). However, he did not linger in the saloon for long because “the reporter, whom we have been waiting for, and who knows Chinatown very well, arrived” (42). Hiring a guide was a common practice when visiting the Chinese neighborhood. Tourists were usually escorted by Chinatown guides who were fixtures of the infamous neighborhood and in great demand because of the contemporary American tourist literature’s emphasis on the dangers of the place. The discourse was ubiquitous, “[w]hether it [Chinatown] was truly dangerous, a ploy designed to pump up business, or a by-product of the salaciousness of the urban exploration genre” (Berglund 10). Chinatown guides were Chinese— though sometimes they were entrepreneurial ethnic minorities from nearby neighborhoods—who earned easy money by showing tourists around the neighborhood. Pásztor notes that “at the beginning of Mott Street a nineteen- or twenty-year-old Jewish boy joined us: a China-town guide. He had come here from Poland when he was three and while growing up he learnt English and Chinese” (42). Because of safety concerns, tourists often hired police guides who were allowed to enter and pass through houses and rooms. It might have been

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part of a bargain share or “more baldly a product of police domination of the neighborhood” (Berglund 13). When Pásztor and a few of his colleagues from the New York Herald decided to see an opium den, he recounts an encounter with such a police guide: “[w]e were sneaking through alleyways and pushed into a door again, and suddenly we found ourselves in a Chinese bedroom. A surprised Chinaman greeted us with smiling humility and he was protesting with vivid gestures, but a man in our group threw open his coat and displayed his badge to the Chinese: Detective” (43). Tourist literature and travel writing capitalized on such encounters, which may have been staged specifically because violence and the secretive, mysterious character of Chinatown were expected parts of the tourist experience (Berglund 13). In his study Organizing Crime in Chinatown: Race and Racketeering in New York City, 1890-1910, Jeffrey Scott McIllwain sums up the fascination of Chinatown’s criminal notoriety by quoting the memoirs of former police officer Cornelius Willemse: It’s an old story to the police. Visitors are more or less of a nuisance in Chinatown and a good many times they’re disappointed. For they’ve built up such fantastic ideas of what goes on down there that if they don’t see a few Chinamen disappearing down traps in the pavement pursued by somebody with a hatchet or a long curved knife, they haven’t had any fun and they go home disappointed. (105)

While negative representations in tourist literature “drew heavily on notions of a Chinese proclivity for vice, images of opium dens also suggested a kind of naughty deviance in that a visit put tourists in tempting proximity to a forbidden pleasure” (Berglund 26). Indeed, opium dens were one of the key sites and sensational destinations in this supposedly crime-ridden, exotically foreign quarter of New York. Tourists were irresistibly drawn to these places to see the process of preparing and smoking opium. Hungarian travelers, too, were fascinated by opium dens, and like most Chinatown tourists, their “desire to see the racially abject—the epitome of which was the opium smoker in his lair—compelled [them] to seek out opium dens as part of their Chinatown excursion” (Berglund 27). Vértesi reckons opium smoking among the vicious and cunning activities of the Chinese, who “like gambling, smuggling, and organizing secret societies, but I should have mentioned foremost that they like opium” (97). Likewise, Pásztor began his tour at an opium den, and he recalls the atmosphere of the overcrowded space that was so characteristic of Chinatown: “we were climbing the narrow stairs when

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suddenly all of us were pushed through a door on the second floor. There must have been eight or ten people in the small room, in which there was a typical red round-shaped glass lamp, and paper butterflies. The curtains were saturated with cheap and heavy perfume, and a European woman was lying on the sofa” (42). For Pásztor, as for most tourists, merely taking in the scene was not enough. He also wanted to observe the method and ritual of opium smoking and recorded the process in vivid detail for his readers. However, his desire to see the “racially abject” Chinese was not satisfied because “the European woman” who greeted them “with a cold smile of an old prima donna” did not live up to his expectation of what he considered an authentic experience in this miniature China of New York City: “but we were disappointed and restless. What if the European woman cheated us of the experience? What if opium smoking is different from what we have just seen? Our little Jewish guide waved at us. We are going to a Chinese woman” (42). Only after seeing that “the Chinese woman smoked opium exactly the same way” he accepted that “the European woman did not deceive us” (42). Pásztor’s description of the Chinese woman in the opium den conjures up long-standing stereotypes of Asian women as exotic, sexualized Others: [h]er feet were the size of a one to-one and a half year old child’s. She could barely stand. She took two or three steps at the most. Women are not for walking, they are to be loved. Her hair was combed back and the roots were wonderfully soft. The veins on her forehead were like creeks under thin ice, her hands were gracious, her fingers were thin and white, her nails were long, bright, and shiny like the feathers of a hummingbird. (43)

The Oriental woman is also characterized by obedience, submissiveness, subservience, and passivity. According to Vértesi’s account, “Chinese women are the most miserable women in the world,” they “have no voice, only destiny” and “no rights or obligations,” and “their most appealing features are their bodies, especially their crippled feet” (98-99). Actually, Chinese women were scarcely seen in Chinatown. In fact, the Chinese population was considered a bachelor society due to the Exclusion Act that denied the permanent settlement and immigration of Chinese women. Even Jacob Riis commented on this phenomenon: “All kinds of men are met, but no women—none at least with almond eyes. The reason is simple: there are none. A few, a very few, Chinese merchants have wives of their own color, but they are seldom or never seen in the street. The ‘wives’ of Chinatown are of a different stock that comes closer home” (94). While Chinese women were not necessarily cast in the role of the typical opium smoker, Pásztor’s gendered representation of

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the opium den he visited accentuated tendencies—which have continuously feminized the Orient and expressed Western domination in spatial terms. Like opium dens, Chinese restaurants were routine stops on the Chinatown tourist’s itinerary. Travel accounts stressed the difference of Chinese food and the eccentricity of customs that “often further developed the idea of the Chinese as alien contaminants by representing the Chinese diet as filled with polluted foods—or at least unpalatable to European tastes. In this configuration the Chinese were literally what they ate” (Berglund 19). Vértesi recalls his dining experience: “I ate unimaginable Chinese dishes” like “shark’s fins soup, noodles, and some square-shaped meat,” and he adds, “I am not saying that every dish was bad […] but it was enough to taste them once” (95). Then he notes that “[e]verything tasted all the more delicious for a fullblood Chinese. He ate minced meat soup with stringy worms, and perhaps even roasted rats” (96). Berglund calls the claim that rats and worms were served at Chinese restaurants sensationalist, but finds that “the idea that many strange, unknown and possibly taboo and polluting things were served up in Chinese cooking was pervasive” (20). While Vértesi’s account focused on food, Pásztor was more aware of the physical surroundings: There are eight or ten restaurants in Chinatown and some more in other neighborhoods of New York as well. It is worth visiting them for the interior. There are expensive embroidery and artistic pictures from China on the walls. They put forks, knives, and spoons in front of white visitors but if you wish they serve the meals with chopsticks. (44)

In social terms, visiting a Chinese restaurant might have been interpreted as softening social lines and racial differences, but “simply observing and describing unfamiliar and supposedly unpalatable food also reinforced the otherness of the Chinese and the whiteness of patrons that was at the core of anti-Chinese sentiment” (Berglund 21). The Chinese theater, another routine Chinatown stop, was a specific site of urban ethnic and ethnicized leisure. It was also a popular form of entertainment and a familiar institution for tourists, which made it easy for them to compare style, content, and audiences of Chinese and American venues. In travel writings, “these comparisons resulted in reviews of Chinese theatrical performances that did not find much to recommend them and also generally concluded that a culture that produced such retarded theater had to be barbaric and antiquated itself” (Berglund 23). Likewise, Károly Vértesi was less than impressed with the Chinese theater and he was not the least bit shy about

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conveying this to his readers: “It was enough to visit the Chinese theatre once. It was not really a theatre, but more like a hot chamber like the ones in the Turkish Bath in Buda […]. The actors […] were monotonously whining, clanging a copper cauldron, drumming, whistling, and yelling. We did not really know what to make of their performance” (95). According to Barbara Berglund, this was not an uncommon experience among tourists: “[s]ince tourists so rarely ever reported that these performances were enjoyable or even understandable, it seems likely that they went to the Chinese theater more to learn about Chinese culture than for entertainment” (24). This was certainly true for Vértesi for whom attending the theater performance in Chinatown was more about observing the locals than about seeing the show. In his conclusion, Árpád Pásztor reflects on racism while at the same time distancing himself from it: For a second we looked at the exteriors and saw the people, the colors, and we captured the atmosphere. But the soul, the essence remained impenetrable. That foreign something, which separates the whites from the Negroes, and from the yellow race, which generates so much fear, hatred, and disgust just because it is entirely different, is completely foreign to us. (44)

Pásztor also shows that behind the scenes of Chinatown’s tourist terrain, there was the reality of a slum the dwellers of which were acutely aware of their Otherness. Both Vértesi and Pásztor point out the racial tensions that existed between white New Yorkers and the Chinese and that placed the Chinese at the bottom of the racial ladder in New York. By the early 1900s, slumming in Chinatown had become a widespread form of voyeuristic pastime in New York City. Hungarian travel writers could not ignore such a major cultural phenomenon and their narratives resonated with some of the familiar tropes of contemporary tourist literature. At the same time, they were also aware of the stereotypes produced by the tourism industry, which effectively manipulated the way in which the neighborhood and its inhabitants were represented. Due to their different cultural background, Hungarian travelers noticed the developments of ethnic spaces more acutely than their American counterparts, and they foresaw ethnicity as the driving force that would determine the urban development of New York City. They also questioned the melting pot as an accurate metaphor to describe the dynamics of ethnic diversity and acculturation. Coming from a country where ethnic neighborhoods and slumming were unfamiliar concepts, and where an entirely different code of

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behavior determined social conduct in public spaces, these Hungarian writers portrayed Chinatown from a unique perspective.

T RAVELING AND T RAVEL W RITING IN THE C OMMUNIST E RA The United States and Hungary fought on different sides in the Second World War, and eventually Hungary fell under Communist rule. The cultural and political battle lines of the Cold War settled in, and the new political and intellectual elite of Communist Hungary followed the Soviet lead by generating anti-American propaganda that depicted the United States as imperialist and neofascist. However, the Communist era was not a monolithic period. After the initial Stalinist terror and the heightened tensions after the uprising in 1956, the early 1960s brought about the easing of the official rhetoric and an improvement of the cultural relations between the two countries. This gradual thawing also manifested itself in the possibility of travel and publishing (Glant 179). After the initially rigid travel restrictions, traveling abroad became relatively easier at the beginning of the 1960s. Hungarians who wanted to visit other socialist countries could increasingly do so as the Eastern Bloc countries gradually lifted visa requirements between each other. Considerably fewer people could travel to the West. If someone wanted to visit relatives in Western countries, they were able to do so only biennially, but in order to be able to travel, they needed to provide a visa and an invitation letter. Tourism was also possible, but only triennially and with a limited amount of convertible currency. Still another way for Hungarians to visit the United States was through official programs that “varie[d] from musical invitations through medical exchange programs to journalism” (Glant 181). Trips to the West often forced Hungarian travelers to re-evaluate the ideological assumptions they knew through the propaganda, cultural stereotypes, or even everyday cultural practices, but still they had to adopt a strongly antiWestern rhetoric when they wrote about the United States. Despite—and maybe perversely because of—the negative propaganda, there was a great demand for books about the United States in this era. Travel restrictions made travel literature a highly popular genre throughout communist Europe and Hungary was no exception. Like their earlier counterparts, some Hungarian travelers to the United States decided to write about their experiences upon their return, and, as a consequence, these authors had to deal with the nuisances of the centralized publishing and distribution system. Under the socialist system, books, among

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other cultural products, were banned, tolerated, or promoted depending on how well they served the interests of the regime. By allowing the publication of travel books, the system could, to some extent, control the image of the United States in Hungary, and prevent dissatisfaction generated by a comparison of meager socialist realities with an imagined West. Initially, travel literature was strictly controlled and censored; however, with the loosening of the system’s stranglehold, this control had gradually disappeared by the end of the 1980s.

R EPRESENTATIONS OF C HINATOWN IN E NDRE H ARMAT ’ S H ELLO , N EW Y ORK ! (1967) AND I STVÁN K ULCSÁR ’ S R EPORTS FROM E VERYDAY A MERICA (1988) Considering the restrictions placed upon travel to Western countries during the communist era, it is not surprising that only a small and highly select number of Hungarians were able to visit the United States. For most of these travelers, the first stop was again New York City—and the city’s ethnic diversity was certainly one of the most striking aspects these travelers recounted in their books. Most of these accounts dedicated a section to Chinatown, but the two most detailed sections of this kind can be found in the accounts of Endre Harmat and István Kulcsár. While Harmat’s account is in line with standard antiAmerican rhetoric, Kulcsár, who still is a well-known and well-respected journalist and author, approached the topic with less prejudice and more journalistic curiosity. Manhattan’s Chinatown continued to be a popular destination for visitors after the Second World War, though the voyeuristic entertainment of ‘slumming’ disappeared with the emergence of television. Another reason why slumming and urban nightlife gradually lost their popularity in Manhattan was white suburbanization, which moved former slummers into distant residential areas. However, Chinatown still attracted a great number of people who visited the place for culinary delights, shopping, or walking through the city’s past (Lee). Harmat begins his chapter on ethnic neighborhoods by noting that America was not the Promised Land many immigrants had dreamed of before they left their countries: They were led by their flock mentality and voluntarily settled in ghettos. Although this new world was wealthier than their old, it was also inhospitable and strange. Try as they might they could not really take root in this foreign and often hostile place. They worked like slaves, they lived, bred, preserved their languages and traditions, and sometimes their

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poverty as well. Today I am visiting a few of these ethnic islands. There is no place that has as many of them as New York. (38)

Of course this introduction contains not only resentment but also a warning against the empty promises of the American Dream whose inaccessible glory was still inviting for many behind the Iron Curtain. Harmat follows the same reasoning in his introduction of Chinatown. He begins describing the neighborhood by explaining, almost apologetically, why the Chinese settled in America: Most Chinese did not come here with the intention of settling down. There is a simple explanation for the large Chinese influx of the nineteenth century. Some could not provide the basic needs for themselves and for their families so a few able men from each indigent family came to the United States to work, but only to work. They wanted to make a fortune, send back some money to support those who stayed in China, and then return home for good. This was the aim of almost all of them. (45)

After this short and pointed criticism, Harmat continues to recount how America exploited the Chinese by signing the Burlingame Treaty that paved the way for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. He claims that behind the scenes “Big Business” and “American businessmen” treated Chinese workers unfairly and imposed huge taxes and other “administrative expenses” on them (45). He goes on stating how “their situation was not much different from the Negroes. They were insulted and humiliated” (45). After having reviewed the context and conditions of the early history of the Chinese in the United States in a clearly deprecating manner, he claims that New York’s Chinatown is somehow less repre-sentative of the Chinese experience in the Unites States: “I was told that San Francisco’s Chinatown is the real deal even today, and that is the one I should see because one can feel the breeze of the Pacific Ocean there already. However, San Francisco is very far so I have to make do with New York’s Chinatown” (45). Harmat’s first observation about Chinatown is that it is fundamentally different from all the other ethnic islands of the metropolis. Not mainly and not only because of the food and the architecture that reminds us of the magical Orient. If that were the difference, it would be completely alright. The difference is that this neighborhood is now a tourist attraction and accordingly everything here is very Chinese, almost suspiciously Chinese. (46)

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He goes on to describe the streetscape: “everything is pagoda-shaped here, even the phone booths and the wrought-iron street lamps and I think every selfrespecting dragon of the ancient Heavenly Kingdom makes an appearance in the local advertisements and in the street signs. The street signs are not ordinary either: Quon Hing Company, Restaurant and Laundry” (46). He remarks on the double function of the place with fascination, and adds: “The smaller laundries in New York and in most parts of America are owned by the Chinese. The interior is more modern, and the profit is obviously more than back in the time of Jack London. However, one thing has never changed: the owner and his family work fourteen-seventeen hours a day” (46). At the same time, he also mentions that the neighborhood is one of the safest parts of New York City, observing that there are hardly any policemen in the streets. Harmat found this so characteristic that he put the following caption under the only photograph of Chinatown in his book: “Where there is almost no crime and family life is exemplary: Chinatown” (45). In the photograph, there is an old Chinese woman with a small child and Chinese signs in the background. Finally, he talks about “the catering flexibility” of the world famous Chinese restaurants that offer refined and delicious meals adapted to Western tastes in order to attract more guests and make business more profitable. In fact, this latter remark sums up the communist criticism of tourism as a capitalist device that promotes social inequality and other social evils and brings Hello, New York’s section on Chinatown to a close. Twenty-one years after the publication of Harmat’s book, István Kulcsár’s book was published in 1988, bearing the marks of change. The cracks in the communist system had begun to show in the mid-eighties, and by the end of the decade, the Kádár regime was destabilized, which also manifested itself in the cultural discourse on the United States. Kulcsár was a foreign correspondent of the Hungarian National Radio in New York whose journalistic accounts offered an insight into everyday life in the United States. The book is the concluding product of his journalistic endeavors that took him through the whole country. In his chapter on New York City, he discusses Chinatown and gives an astute characterization of the neighborhood regarding Chinese immigration into the United States, the location of Chinatown, its industries, and its underworld. Kulcsár begins his chapter on Chinatown commenting on the unique character of the neighborhood: “[w]e may believe that a miracle happened and a shrewd dragon flew us to the Far East from America if at the end of the streets— depending on where we turn our heads to—the well-known silhouettes of Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the World Trade Center did not catch our eyes” (66). His introduction shows the reader that in spite of the colorful whirl of

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Chinese signs, paper dragons, lampions, and pagoda roofs, the Manhattan skyline reminds the visitor that this Chinese microcosm exists within boundaries: [w]e may not have arrived in China but, by all accounts, we are in a Chinese town more specifically in the Chinese town. This is the translation of the English ‘Chinatown’ expression, which is the name of the Chinese quarter in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Toronto, recently in Montreal, and some other North American metropolises. (66)

Reviewing the historical immigration of ethnic groups is obviously a familiar trope in Hungarian travelogues about the United States. Kulcsár, too, follows this line and recounts the history of the Chinese in New York with an emphasis on the more contemporary immigration wave of the seventies and the impact it had on Chinatown: In the seventies, after the liberation of Indochinese countries, 400,000 Chinese—allegedly partly encouraged by Beijing—thought it would be best if they moved overseas […]. Apart from them, in the Sixties and the Seventies thousands of people arrived in America from Taiwan and—I have no idea how—from the Republic of China as well. Due to the enormous influx of immigrants, Chinatowns in America started to expand rapidly. New York’s Chinatown, for example, transgressed its borders and spread beyond East and West Broadway, the Bowery, and Canal Street. The Yiddish and Italian signs in the neighboring streets gave way to Chinese signs almost overnight. Besides Chinatown was expanding vertically as well. Wealthy Chinese, who immigrated from Hong Kong and Saigon, purchased apartments in quickly appearing tall buildings, and many of them made a fortune in the real estate business. (67)

According to Min Zhou and Mingang Lin’s study “Community Transformation and the Formation of Ethnic Capital: Immigrant Chinese Communities in the United States,” the immigrant wave of the Seventies brought drastic economic changes to Chinatowns in America since “many wealthy Taiwanese investors poured money into real estate development [,]” which “played a crucial role in reinvigorating a formerly inactive economy and boosting real estate values” (275-76). Chinatown’s economy is also theme Kulcsár highlights in his book. He notes that a disproportionately high percentage of Chinatown residents work in the same area where they live and that most of them are occupied by the garment industry. Twenty thousand people—almost exclusively girls and women— worked in approximately five hundred smaller or bigger garment shops that operated in basements and tenement buildings and that were categorized as

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“sweatshops” (Kulcsár 68). This could be explained with the mechanisms and cultural components of the ethnic enclave economy: “Immigrant Chinese women with little English and few job skills often find working in Chinatown a better option despite low wages, because the enclave enables them to fulfill their multiple roles more effectively as wage earners, wives, and mothers” (Lin and Zhou 264). It is a well-known fact that “[t]he second most significant aspect of Chinatown’s industrial circulation is tourism” and that “the entire city is full of very expensive or cheap but equally excellent Chinese eateries” (68). The great number of tourists who arrived in the neighborhood every day also purchased china, toys, lampions, and real or fake Chinese art pieces, and “the local catering, and arts and crafts industry employ[ed] tens of thousands of people” (68). According to Kulcsár, This explains why local residents are extremely “tourism conscious.” I judged this by the photographing opportunities. In Harlem or in the black neighborhood of Bronx, locals turn their backs at you if you are lucky. If you are not, they will break your camera, and you will suffer a similar fate. In some Indian Reservations Native Americans put their hand up to block the visitors’ cameras. In Chinatown, however, people completely ignore the photographers. They may not like it, but, in any case, they do not show it. (69)

Then he continues to talk about the “tourism conscious” quality of Chinatown: I was roaming the streets of the neighborhood for two days to take some photos and I had only one incident when a fishmonger waved his knife at me and gestured that I get out at once or else! Apparently he did not have a vendor license and did not want me to record his illegal activities. On the other hand, I was able to take some photos of a scene that can be considered symbolic in more than one way: in Confucius Square, or rather at the feet of the statue of Confucius, a European (more specifically white) shoe shiner laboriously polished the footwear of a Chinese client. (ibid.)

Obviously this scene was symbolic of the changed circumstances of racial and ethnic relations, which demonstrated themselves in other ways as well. Tourism was the major pillar of Chinatown’s economy and the numerous stores and places of business made Chinatown appear as a self-contained environment where “[t]he sociocultural life of the community was set apart from the rest of the city,” and where gang operations appeared to be a systemic process deeply ingrained in cultural and business practices (Lui 32):

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It is common knowledge that where there are illegal operations, the Italian American mafia rears its head to act as protectors. But not in Chinatown! This tightly-knit community is almost impenetrable for the outsider: the guards of gambling dens and the moneylenders are Chinese too. Since the end of the seventies, however, local gangs have become independent and spread their influence to the entire Chinatown and other neighborhoods as well. Beyond the obvious potentials of the place, this is attributed to the boost in population, the groundlessness of newly arrived immigrants, and the dividedness of the traditionally cohesive Chinese community. (Kulcsár 70)

Chinese gangs have a long history in the United States. Kulcsár briefly relates to this, too: “the appearance of Chinese American gangs is not a new phenomenon. The Hip Yee Tong smuggled women to brothels in San Francisco’s Chinatown as early as 1882 while the Hip Sing Tong controlled the casinos in New York’s Chinatown since the beginning of the twentieth century” (70). Since Chinatown residents did not trust American courts, they settled disputes among each other. The order was maintained by the Tongs, and soon these vigilante groups became business and fraternal societies and also bitter enemies to each other (Maeder 79). Partitioning territories, extortion for business protection, and other illicit activities were still the main economic resources of powerful Tongs. The business district of Chinatown was divided up by Tongs, and according to Kulcsár’s description: Mott Street is the Ghost Shadows’ turf, Pell Street and Moyer Street are the Flying Dragons,’ the White Eagles operate in Division Street and so on. These smaller-bigger tongs consist of young people and make money from extortion. They visit storekeepers and restaurateurs in their territory and ask them to support “the studies of their little brother” or “contribute to their friend’s medical bill.” If they refuse it (which is not a oneoff payment but a monthly ransom), they may stab them in the stomach or shoot them, or they start shooting randomly in their restaurant to make sure that guests would never return to the place. (70)

These organizations were viewed as acceptable and important parts of the social and economic networks that make up the community in spite of the illicit nature of their services. The reason why travel books at the time considered Chinatown a safe place was exactly because of its self-sufficiency. Kulcsár concludes the chapter by saying that “[d]espite all this Chinatown is still among New York’s safest neighborhoods. Its delinquent residents deal mainly with each other and they leave strangers alone” (71).

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Harmat and Kulcsár wrote in an era when anti-American sentiment influenced the general tone of travel accounts. The more than thirty travelogues that were published during the communist era prove that travel books on the United States were popular in Hungary in spite of the negative propaganda. As long as these books contained some token criticism, they were acceptable for the regime. Criticism of consumerism was a recurring theme in travel books on the United States during the Communist era. According to these accounts, Manhattan’s Chinatown continued to be a major tourist attraction during the second half of the twentieth century, and commercial tourism was flourishing, which in turn encouraged consumerism in the neighborhood. Since in communist Hungary consumerism was seen as the cultural expression of capitalism, it was a popular target of criticism as becomes evident in Endre Harmat’s and István Kulcsár’s chapters on Chinatown. Although the tourism industry is undoubtedly the major theme in these books, these accounts also give an overview of the history of the Chinese in the United States, their position in the racial hierarchy of the country, and the economy of Chinatown. It is not obvious to what extent criticism in these books came from the writers’ own point-of-view and to what extent it was just a charade to satisfy the ideological expectations of the regime, but they certainly provide useful information on the Chinese neighborhood as well as on the ideological processes in communist Hungary at the time of their writing and publication.

C ONCLUSION Hungarian travel narratives contain observations on the transformation of Chinatown, but in many respects these accounts report on a neighborhood that remained remarkably unchanged. Due to its exotic qualities, the neighborhood always attracted Hungarian travelers both at the turn of the century and during the Communist era. In the late 1900s Árpád Pásztor and Károly Vértesi represent a Chinatown that provided a space for slumming tourists to encounter a different culture and experience racially charged urban dangers from a safe distance. They also show a Chinatown that emerged as a result of racial exclusion that solidified negative stereotypes and racial ideologies against the Chinese to which they were quick to adapt. Their adaptation manifested itself in the formation of a selfcontained ethnic enclave whose residents embraced the lucrative potential of slumming, and their entrepreneurial spirit helped them gain a sound economic foothold in New York City.

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The second half of the twentieth century finds Chinatown in the same area, but by the eighties the neighborhood had expanded its borders. The exterior of the original place kept its ethnic distinctiveness, but both Endre Harmat and István Kulcsár talk about the intensely commercialized streetscape as the result of Chinatown’s thriving tourist industry. Along with the restaurant and foodservice industry, and the garment industry, it made up Chinatown’s economy, something that had not changed since the turn of the century. Initial ethnic constraints strengthened social networks in the neighborhood, including trade, craft, as well as criminal organizations. Although organized crime was present, the neighborhood was considered one of the safest ones for tourists in New York exactly because of its self-contained culture. The different cultural and ideological background of Hungarian travel writers enabled them to reflect on American culture from a new perspective because they held the privileged position of the external observer. It also showed their own convictions, which, in a circular relationship, defined and influenced the attitude with which they approached Manhattan’s Chinatown. Precisely the external, “foreign” perspective thus seems to provide insight into the dynamics of urban change. This is especially true for a place like New York’s Chinatown, which, due to its long-term touristic heritage, constructs itself with a view to outside, including non-American, observers. This touristic perspective may also explain the continuity of many aspects of Chinatown—tourists often like to find their preconceived notions confirmed. Travel narratives such as the ones I have considered here may thus provide insight into an aspect of urban transformation that is often neglected, namely the certain inertia aiming at retaining the character and identity of an urban environment. These travel narratives are not merely personal accounts, but they also provide an insight into the social and historical contexts in which they operated and out of which they emerged.

W ORKS C ITED Bender, Thomas and Carl E. Schorske. “Budapest and New York Compared.” Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 19701930. Eds. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994. 1-28. Print. Berglund, Barbara. “Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain: Representation and Racialization in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.” American Studies 46.2 (2005): 5-29. Print.

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Glant, Tibor. “Travel Writing as a Substitute for American Studies in Hungary.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 16.1-2 (2010): 171-84. Print. Gyáni, Gábor. “Uses and Misuses of Public Space in Budapest: 1873-1914.” Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 19701930. Eds. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994. 85-107. Print. Harmat, Endre. Hello, New York! Budapest: Gondolat, 1967. Print. Heap, Chad. Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife. 1885-1940. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print. Kulcsár, István. Tudósítás Átlagamerikából. Budapest: Gondolat, 1987. Print. Lee, Jennifer S. “When ‘Slumming’ Was the Thing to Do.” The New York Times City Room Blogs. New York Times 6 Jul. 2009. Web. 3 May 2014. Lin, Mingang, and Min Zhou. “Community Transformation and the Formation of Ethnic Capital: Immigrant Chinese Communities in the United States,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 1 (2005): 260-84. Print. Lui, Mary, and Ting Li. The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. Woodstock: Princeton UP, 2005. Print. Maeder, Jay, ed. Big Town, Big Time: A New York Epic: 1989-1998. New York: New York Daily News, 1999. Print. McIllwain, Jeffrey Scott. Organizing Crime in Chinatown: Race and Racketeering in New York City, 1890-1910. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. Print. Pásztor. Árpád. Amerika Kanadától Panamáig. Budapest: Világirodalom Könyvkiadóvállalat, 1924. Print Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. 1890. Carlisle: Applewood Books, 2011. Print. Vértesi, Károly. Körutazás Amerikában. Budapest és Zombor: szerzi kiadás, 1908. Print.

C OMMENTS i

Translations of Hungarian sources are all mine.

Liminality and the American City

Detecting Chinatown New York, Crime Fiction, and the Politics of Urban Inscrutability T HOMAS H EISE

Contemporary crime fiction is the American literature of place. Or to be more exact, it is the American literature of cities. The red herrings, detours, false leads, and dead ends that are a signature of the crime narrative allow the genre the time and space to do what it does best: immerse readers in the human architectures, streets, sartorial styles, commodities, cuisines, and languages and dialects with all of the grit and granularity that define our built environment. In closely reading the city’s signs through the scopic eye of the detective, crime fiction proffers a richly textured portrait of urban life’s semiotic density, a depiction of the city crisscrossed and piled high with differing ethnicities, races, classes, and lifestyles competing—often violently—for cultural standing, political power, and physical space. Its thick description of urban grime, familial dysfunction, personal pathology, and bureaucratic malfeasance amounts to an imaginative ethnography of urban American life. As a species of realism, crime fiction is invested in the rhetoric of verisimilitude and authenticity. Yet as a genre, it promises readers the added value of an interpretation of the contemporary city, rather than simply a representation of it. Its hermeneutics of suspicion take nothing at face value, as it pledges to help us see an underlying meaning in the disorder and confusion of the city. The city in crime fiction is nothing if not duplicitous and dissembling, a place where nearly all social exchanges are characterized by misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies that conceal darker motivations. It is a place whose density and duration is deceptive, for the city in crime fiction is one of ephemeral, ever-shifting alliances between individuals and groups and one where built space itself is in motion as the physical borders of fought-over territories are shown to shift. Vowing to decode

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urban complexity, contemporary crime fiction delves into hidden and shadowy terrains so as to help readers constellate randomness into order, to turn contingency into intentionality and to give meaning to the delirious urbanism of late capitalist postmodernity. American crime fiction seeks to expose the machinations and intrigues of the city as a whole often by linking them to murky national and international conspiratorial criminal networks and organizations of great intricacy. Yet in doing so, crime fiction’s demystification of urban complexity may appear to render the city even more opaque, leaving us further removed from the truth than ever. No less an authority than Fredric Jameson has dismissed conspiracy narratives as a “poor person’s cognitive mapping. […] [a] degraded figure of the total logic of late capital,” rather than a truthful discourse that “map[s] the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (“Cognitive” 356; Postmodernism 44). In the pages that follow, I propose that it is possible to recoup contemporary crime fiction as a site for thinking through urban transformations at multiple geographical scales, if we can read for the global in the local—that is, if we can think globally about the urban places that crime fiction renders in detail. More specifically, this also entails that we read for the class dynamics of urban territorial struggle that I argue are the true dramas of crime fiction, conflicts in which poor persons—a phrase Jameson appears to use in a casual manner—are often front and center. I take as my object of study in this endeavor the recent trilogy of crime novels—Chinatown Beat (2006), Year of the Dog (2008) and Red Jade (2010)—by Henry Chang, the first Chinese-American crime novelist to write about the neighborhood of Manhattan’s Chinatown. I turn deliberately to this particular body of literature about this specific urban terrain because of Chinatown’s long-standing cultural association with urban inscrutability and conspiratorial criminal triads as well as its current association with rapid urban gentrification, which, as Chang’s work implies, is fueled by local actors working in concert with global capital. Globalization is an idea that is only made real at the local level. Hence, the logic of crime fiction is to focus its investigatory operations on a particular crime in a particular urban neighborhood that it examines both for its extreme localness and singularity and for its part in the larger urban system’s interlocking class, race and ethnic orders, all of which are invariably tied to intertwining global trajectories of labor and capital. In addition to Henry Chang’s work, I am thinking here of Chester Himes’s Harlem series, Walter Mosley’s novels set in Watts, and Richard Price’s recent portrayal of crime in the Lower East Side of New York, among other examples. These texts function as an iteration of what

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Carlo Rotella has called the “neighbourhood novel,” or what Carrie Bramen has labeled the “urban picturesque,” which explores transformations of city life within a delimited urban core, where the mores and manners of its ethnic, racial and working-class residents—and the built environment that houses their way of life—are surveyed with precision (Rotella 123; Bramen 444). As a variant of this discourse, urban crime fiction can be said to use the study of a crime’s perpetrators, victims, motives, as well as fallouts within a distinct district to show the ways the neighborhood’s Old-World customs and ethnic differences are linked to geographical realities further afield. Competition over scarce urban resources—especially property and territory—and the tight proximity of differing value systems frequently leads to violent frictions over who has the right to the neighborhood, frictions that ignite the crime novel’s plot. In Chang’s work, what are initially presented to readers as individual, familial, or ethnic rivalries are eventually revealed to be profoundly shaped by the swift-moving flow of capital across urban geographies. Thus, like contemporary crime fiction more generally, Chang’s fiction performs the cultural work of dramatizing the breakdown of communities and institutions as well as the destabilization of sedimented pieties and values in the wake of these flows. Moving us away from the language of the bounded enclave, Chang’s work anatomizes the urban neighborhood caught in the disorienting transformations of globalization that have rapidly restructured the built environments and reshuffled the tiles of the ethnic, racial and class mosaic of major cities. As modernizing processes have accelerated in the last quarter century, they have given rise to new storylines of cultural and territorial conflict spurred by heightened feelings of social and economic precarity. As a result, the sense of place in this literature of place has been profoundly disrupted as the boundaries of neighborhoods have been torn up and remade and as the real and imagined communities in them have been displaced or have fought for a physical foothold and a sense of rootedness. For a fiction in which physical and cognitive mapping of the city by police officers and private detectives is a method of control and knowledge production—a means of inscribing physical boundaries in space and forcing social legibility within them—the wide-scale recent transformation of the urban landscape presents new narrative challenges and possibilities. No major American city has been rebuilt and reinvented more in the last two decades than New York City. This fact is largely attributable to local redevelopment projects that have been stimulated by New York City’s status as a global center of finance and migration, and safeguarded by highly invasive, zerotolerance policing with the help of highly sophisticated anti-crime technologies allowing police to quickly and accurately map crime block-by-block. In contem-

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porary crime fiction set in New York—such as Richard Price’s Lush Life (2008), Ivy Pochoda’s Visitation Street (2013), and Henry Chang’s Chinatown trilogy (2006-2010)—abstract processes of globalization are given flesh, and no small amount of blood, as they are written into the fabric of urban neighborhoods with finely rendered empirical detail. In effect, these texts are themselves a kind of map. Global processes are decoded, refracted and lent local color in this literature through plots revolving around fights over how space is lived and defined. These fights are most often set in historic African-American neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves because these are the spaces that are being spectacularly remade by the free flow of capital, trade and labor that are aided and abetted by urban policing. Thus, I turn to Henry Chang’s work for another reason—in order to understand the strategies by which crime narratives map the surface of urban ethnic neighborhoods, in particular, that are caught within these transformative processes. “The books are less conventional mysteries than studies in Chinese-American culture,” Chang has proclaimed about his work (Kurutz). As we will see, New York’s Chinatown in Chang’s narratives is an unsettled and contested site of intense territorial conflict for at least three reasons. For one, new global inflows of illegal Fujianese immigrants alter its character and spark intra-ethnic rivalries. Second, mysterious Chinese triads, whose matrix of relations links the neighborhood to several sites across the globe, are redefining Chinatown’s sense of boundedness. And finally, gentrification on the borders of Chinatown, along with police suppression of Chinese culture inside the neighborhood, compromises the neighborhood’s territorial and cultural integrity. Studying the representations of Chinatown in Chang’s crime narratives not only provides an opportunity for understanding how urban transformations in America have been signified in contemporary US literature, but also serves as an opportunity for better understanding the genre of crime fiction itself. As I will demonstrate, representing Chinatown poses formal and sociopolitical hazards for Chang because xenophobic stereotypes—in particular, charges of inscrutability—are rife in the profuse cultural discourse on the neighborhood. Racist typologies of Chinatown by ethnographers, sociologists and the political class as a nest of secrets, the ultimate riddle of cultural hermeticism and ethnic inassimilability, become complexly manifest in crime narratives that by design traffic in mystery, intrigue and voyeurism. A related complication for Chang is the genre’s own history of Sinophobia, notably in its most famous characters: Dr. Fu Manchu and Detective Charlie Chan, who embody the Chinese stereotypes of cunning deception, malicious hyper-intelligence and male effeminacy. It is not surprising then that Chinese-American culture and its lived

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spaces might serve as a ripe territory for a literature invested in decoding mystifying and misleading urban signs. What makes Chang’s fiction particularly noteworthy in this regard is that it endeavors to decode Chinatown’s signs at the very moment that its riddle is being broken open by urban redevelopment. Until recently, Chinatown could claim to be the last ungentrified neighborhood in lower Manhattan, a fact that must be attributable at least in part to the social and economic barriers of entry that come with its so-called insularity. But that claim no longer stands as those boundaries have begun to crumble with recent urban development, according to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s 2010 report titled “Chinatown Then and Now: Gentrification in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.” Its authors observe that Chinatown evinces all the markers of gentrification, including new luxury condos and hotels; new high-end retail stores; growth in nonfamily households; and double digit decreases in the percentage of Asian residents and double digit increases in the numbers of whites. “At what point does Chinatown cease to be Chinatown,” they ask (Li 41)? It is only a matter of time, Peter Kwong, the author of The New Chinatown (1996), mournfully answers in a recent New York Times Q&A on gentrification: “Chinatown will eventually disappear, just like many other immigrant communities in the past” (Kwong). It is important to bear in mind, however, that high-income residential gentrification in Chinatown also exists cheek by jowl with deteriorated tenements, poverty and sweatshop labor that have long defined the neighborhood. In other words, gentrification produces more deeply entrenched juxtapositions between wealth and poverty, and not just the immediate spatial displacement of the latter. As Jan Lin remarks in Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (1998), this juxtaposition is a hallmark of globalization’s polarized urban cores (12). As Chinatown disappears—or at least as Chinatown as we know it undergoes a radical alteration in its built landscape and demography—crime fiction provides a platform for thinking through both how its older ways of life and its new emergent realities are symbolically signified in narratives of territorial struggle and cultural theft. It is the struggle over the control and possession of urban space and the personal, cultural, ethnic, and racial meanings and memories that layer the city landscape over time and that create what Dolores Hayden has simply and eloquently called “the power of place” (9). I would add that it is the assertion of place in the face of its rapid erosion that lends contemporary crime fiction its power.

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T HE P LACE

OF

C HINATOWN IN THE US I MAGINATION

Before turning to Chang’s fictions of Chinatown in detail, it is useful to briefly survey the neighborhood’s dominant significations in US culture and their relation to urban policing and spatial reconstruction, both of which have informed Chang’s work. Chinatown is an unsettled place in the American imagination, a place that ideologically and materially was, at its origins, a white construct. As Sau-Ling Wong asserts, the very word “Chinatown already presupposes an awareness of difference […] [and] [t]he very use of the word Chinatown may be considered to imply a certain complicity in an oppressive history” (253). From the moment of their arrival in San Francisco and New York City in the mid-and-late nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants were ghettoized by being forbidden from owning property outside of designated areas. Further contributing to the neighborhood’s complex status as a “place,” the signifier “Chinatown” is indeterminate and imprecise. Dozens of Chinatowns are scattered across American cities, with New York City alone containing three major Chinese enclaves—Manhattan’s Chinatown, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, and Queens’s Flushing neighborhood—each with its own immigration histories and class and linguistic make-ups. While Manhattan’s Chinatown has been historically working-class Cantonese from Hong Kong and Guangdong province, over the last twenty years its south-eastern section along Eldridge Street and East Broadway has been home to a rapidly growing Mandarin-speaking Fujian population that also dominates working-class Sunset Park. For its part, Flushing was and remains the New York Chinatown of choice for Mandarin-speaking middle-class Chinese immigrants from Taiwan. Thus, far from being a singular community defined by ethnic solidarity, Chinatown exists in multiple iterations nested within different urban geographies. Moreover, each local articulation is often internally split by cultural divisions that map onto immigration patterns from various regions of China and Taiwan, by linguistic divisions that render communication between some residents difficult, and by contentious political divisions that can be traced back to the Chinese civil war between the nationalists of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China. Chinatown’s internal complexity and clashing differences, however, have been largely invisible in the dominant cultural discourse on the neighborhood that has tended toward crudely totalizing representations of urban blight and cultural pathology. Its associations with human trafficking, prostitution, opium smoking, tong warfare, informal-sector economies, overcrowded ramshackle apartments, and filthy streets have been long-standing. Bramen observes that the emergence of densely packed ethnic enclaves—Chinatowns among them—in the

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late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave rise to urban travel narratives that mapped the strange new social landscape of coastal cities for the period’s armchair voyeurs who were fascinated by how industrialization was turning America more and more foreign. In such discourse, the putatively unclean, odoriferous nature of Chinatown described not only the pungent reality of the neighborhood for visitors, but also served as a panic-filled metaphor for the geographical uncontainability of Chinese culture, its ability to waft, drift, and ultimately contaminate the city and nation. Such sentiments permeate, for instance, the descriptions found in Elodie Hogan’s travel report “Hills and Corners of San Francisco” (1893) of Chinatown’s “reeking sidewalks, foul with unknown trash” and of its “nauseous odors [that] vomited from black cellars” (qutoed in McClellan, 32). Chinatown’s uncanny ability to corrode the urban fabric around it was also proclaimed in California State Senate Hearings on Chinese Immigration in 1876, where the Fire Marshal of San Francisco, John L. Durkee, asserted: Property around here is constantly depreciating in value, because of the approach of the Chinese. The whites cannot stand their dirt and the fumes of opium, and are compelled to leave the vicinity […]. The only way I can account for our not having a great fire in the Chinese quarter is that the wood is too filthy and too moist from nastiness to burn. (quoted in Wong “Chinatown: Conflicting Images,” 5)

Durkee makes clear—perhaps unintentionally—that the profound animosity by city residents to Chinese newcomers was about territory, real estate and money. But almost as often as Chinatown was accused of being a metastasizing yellow peril that spilled across borders, it was accused of being an inward-looking community whose residents kept to themselves, clung to ancestral traditions, and refused to adapt to American customs. William Meloney brought both charges together in a 1909 exposé of Manhattan’s Chinatown—published in the wake of the murder of a young white woman, Elsie Sigel, by her Chinese lover, Leung Lim—in which he characterized the district’s inhabitants as “contemptuous, blandly mysterious, serene, foul-smelling, […] and implacable” (230). The Chinese, Meloney argued, were culturally and physically unreadable, their dar-ker motivations hidden until their corruption of American innocence was com-plete. Rather than revealing the truth of the neighborhood, contradictory images of Chinatown’s befouling porosity and maddening inscrutability in turn-of-thecentury anti-Chinese discourse “ha[s] much more to do with the agendas of the framers of these representations than they do with the residents of Chinatown,” writes K. Scott Wong (4). Reports on Chinese filth, murderous seduction and

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cultural contagion helped construct Chinese immigrants as delinquent and morally destitute Others who were “in all respects a permanently foreign element,” according to San Francisco’s nativist mayor James Phelan in 1901, who held forth constantly on the dangers Chinese laborers posed to white working-class men of the city (674). Such discourse helped legitimize the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1902 that sealed off national borders to Chinese immigrants until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted the ban. Phelan, who was instrumental in the Exclusion Act’s renewal, contended that the segregation of Chinese immigrants within Chinatown would ultimately prove ineffectual. The only solution, he argued, was to raze the neighborhood and rebuild it from scratch. “[T]here is no remedy for the evils of Chinatown apart from its utter demolition,” he announced (quoted in McClellan, 35). While such rhetoric speaks to the late-nineteenth-century heyday of antiChinese sentiment, the characterization of Chinatown as a blighted neighborhood beset with numerous social problems continued well into the late twentieth century. Lin argues in this 1998 study that to this day “Chinatown continues to be seen as a backward, somewhat byzantine society, an urban backwater” (3). It is important to note that Chinatown’s putative physical and cultural disorder and inscrutability licensed the intensive policing of the neighborhood, led to its current redevelopment, and provided the context for literary and filmic narratives that dramatize police crackdowns that work in concert with gentrification. “[T]he social problems perspective,” Lin emphasizes, “feeds popular cultural images of Chinatown as a defiled and degraded place that needs to be cleaned up by investigative cops and aggressive district attorneys” (3). At the conclusion of his article, Meloney quotes New York police captain Mike Galvin who calls for a “campaign for cleanliness” and the strict enforcement of “the sanitary provisions of the tenement-house law” in Chinatown (241). But as he makes evident, he would rather take quicker and more drastic measures. Like garbage, “pile all of it on a barge and sink it in the East River,” he recommends (241). At the other end of the century in Michael Cimino’s thriller Year of the Dragon (1985), the rhetoric remains largely the same. Over dinner in a Chinese restaurant minutes before its patrons are machinegunned down by Chinese gangsters in an unfolding tong war, the NYPD detective Stanley White tries to convince TV reporter Tracey Tzu to do an exposé on neighborhood blight. Lecturing her on the evils of Chinatown, the white detective declaims, “It [Chinatown] stinks […]. You got 30 people living in a room. You got the highest rate of TB and mental illness in any city neighborhood.”

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H ENRY C HANG ’ S T URF : L OCAL AND G LOBAL T ERRITORIES IN N EW Y ORK ’ S C HINATOWN Henry Chang’s Chinatown is a textual labyrinth built for a white audience whose guide is the twenty-seven-year-old protagonist Detective Jack Yu. A man “living in two worlds at the same time,” Jack does double duty as an investigator for the Fifth Precinct in Chinatown and as a cultural mediator for Chang’s readers (Chinatown 8). As a police officer, he is armed with the legal and institutional authority to enter into the depths of Chinatown. As a native informant, who “had grown up in Chinatown, knew what it felt like to look and breathe Chinese,” he is equipped with an intimate knowledge of everyday life in the area that allows him to cross borders, linguistically and symbolically, into domains inaccessible to English speakers (8). Sporadically deploying and translating Chinese, the novels rhetorically construct authentic linguistic difference, simultaneously joining and holding apart disjunctive cultural and linguistic realities without discomfiting monolingual English readers. But what is constructed turns out—at least at first glance—to be uncomfortably familiar: an image of Chinatown as a culturally illegible space knowable only in its unknowability. The point of view—detaching at times from Jack’s limited perspective—ranges over the cityscape, entering not only the private residences of police officers, gang leaders and everyday residents of Chinatown, but also dipping into and out of their minds in an example of total information awareness. The narrative transmits back to the reader a Chinatown in its utter foreignness as an exceptionnally violent locale, a place ruled by rival tongs (Hip Ching, On Yee, and Fuk Ching), a place of multiple dialects (Cantonese, Mandarin, Toishanese, Hakka), a place of Confucian concepts of social hierarchies, fortune tellers and mahjong players, a place of exotic foods and counterfeit merchandise, and a physically duplicitous place where brothels are concealed behind red curtains in barbershops and where gangsters confront each other in back alleys and concealed passageways. Rather than disclosing the hidden truth of Chinatown, such images would seem to compound the well-established discursive trope of its urban unfathomability, where bewildering cultural chaos is secretly bound by a tightly wound cultural riddle of ethnic criminality. At the end of the first installment in the series, Chinatown Beat, Chang sums up, leaving the threads of this mysteryous city within a city still neatly tied: “Chinatown is a paradox, a Chinese puzzle” (209). How should we understand such depictions from a Chinese-American writer? Chang’s deployment of well-trodden tropes of Chinatown as inscrutable, insular and violent may be seen as an extension of the hardboiled novel’s history

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of and formula for representing the city and its denizens. But ultimately, I want to suggest that one of the projects of Chang’s texts—deeply conflicted and contradictory as they are—is to demystify pathologizing images of Chinatown and reveal that they emerge from urban political economy, capitalist development and institutional and discursive racism, and not from some socalled immutable Chinese otherness. In this regard, Chang contributes to the ongoing effort by Frank Chin, Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston whose cultural interventions entail promoting rehabilitative representations of Chinatown and Chinese culture (Wong “Ethnic Subject” 257). But as a hardboiled crime writer, he recognizes that representing Chinatown as a fearful cipher lends his work irresistible atmosphere and drama, which he deploys to maximum effect. The dramatic and bloody storyline that Chang weaves across these three texts follows Jack’s investigation of Mona, a former Karaokehostess-turned-mistress to the abusive criminal godfather Uncle Four, whom she murders in Chinatown Beat, then after stealing his stash of gold coins and diamonds, flees across the country by Red Jade. Uncle Four’s death leaves others scrambling for power which, as with the assassination of the triad leader Jackie Wong in the opening scenes of Cimino’s film, sparks internecine war between tongs. Other plots are grafted into the dominant storyline, including the crimes of a Chinese pedophile, the gruesome murder of a teenage Chinese delivery boy in an African American housing project, two murder-suicide stories by Chinese men who have lost face over financial instability and probable marital infidelity, and the brazen shootout between two factions of a Chinese gang that leaves multiple people dead. “I didn’t have to make much of this up,” Chang confessed in an October 24, 2008, New York Times article. I would contend, however, that for much of Chang’s audience, the Chinatown they discover in his trilogy, if not made up, is most likely part of an increasingly fading past. The Chinatown of the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Chang’s books were published, is by numerous measures a rapidly gentrifying, low-crime neighborhood and a major tourist attraction. In fact, across the entirety of New York’s five boroughs violent crime in every category—murder, rape, aggravated assault—has precipitously dropped over the last twenty years to levels not seen since the mid-1960s (Karmen 23). During the high-crime era of the 1980s and early 1990s, as Robert Beauregard and Steve Macek have shown, American public discourse was often left searching for ever-more shocking and apocalyptic language for characterizing New York as a jungle, a wild and savage frontier, and a place of unremitting decline, despair and nightmarish violence. The sudden positive turnaround since the mid-1990s also left commentators without words to “capture the drama and

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novelty of the momentous reversal” (Karmen 2). As Andrew Karmen relates in his study of New York’s unexpected “crime crash” of the last two decades, “there was no appropriate expression in the terminology of criminology or even in everyday language to describe the opposite of a rapidly spreading epidemic of lawlessness” (1, 2). Confronted with this discursive and sociological reality, Chang leapfrogs back in time and sets the start of his series in 1994, when New York witnessed 1,561 homicides and its reputation, in Chang’s words, as an “unrelenting, unforgiving metropolis” of urban decay and bloodshed was, though ebbing, still intact (Chinatown 120). Early in Chinatown Beat, in a chapter titled “The City,” Jack maps Manhattan at night in its entirety for readers, sketching a landscape of ethnic poverty and crime that will be his setting for the next several books. Starting at “the corner of Mott and Bayard” in Chinatown in his “midnight-blue Dodge Fury:” He rolled through the extended communities of Fukienese, Malaysians, Chiu Chaos, settlements stretching east to Essex and north to Delancey, into areas longtime Hassidic, Puerto Rican. . . . He continued east. The Greater Chinatown Dream, the Nationalists had called it: an all-yellow district in lower Manhattan running from the Battery to Fourteenth street, river to river, east to west, by the year 2000. Then he turned the car north and made all the green lights through loisaida, the Lower East Side, past the Welfare Projects—the Wagner, Rutgers, Baruch, Gouverneur— federally subsidized highrises, which ran along the East River, blocs of buildings that stood out like racial fortresses. Blacks in the Smith Houses, Latinos in the Towers […] a patchwork quilt of different communities of people coexisting, sometimes with great difficulty. (14-16)

The tour continues “north through Gramercy Park and Murray Hill” and the Upper East Side, as Jack escorts the reader to “Spanish Harlem, the decay suddenly evident,” then “west toward Morningside Heights and the enclave of Dominicans, a drug-dealing hub that connected New York, Connecticut, New Jersey,” before he finally pauses to smoke and stare out at “the city spread out before him” (16). “Crime narratives are not only concerned with the authentic representation of the city and the exposure of its secrets,” write Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps, “but also with the possibility of reconstructing, remapping and, hence, recreating the city” (3). The putative truth of Chang’s survey of New York’s tessellated landscape is its extreme precision—a pinpoint accuracy that even

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names specific racial and ethnic communities within specific buildings. But like all maps, it is an ideological construction—a recreation—as much as it is an empirical description of urban space. In Chang’s text, ethnic difference and criminal behavior are so firmly wedded to criminalized geographies that they are difficult to distinguish. Predominantly white areas, such as Gramercy Park, Murray Hill and the Upper East Side, pass without comment, their unnoteworthiness serving to throw into greater relief ethnic and racial tensions, poverty and criminality of the city’s problem areas. For its part, Chinatown is figured as a colonizing force in lower Manhattan with the potential to displace all other ethnic residents on the east side below Fourteenth Street. While driving, Chang limits Jack’s commentary to brief but still exact snapshots, providing quick glimpses through the windows, and from his elevated, literally panoptic position in the Heights, another kind of knowledge surfaces. The statistical city where urban complexity and differences are reduced to frightful numbers comes into view: “One murder every three hours. One rape every hour and a half. One robbery every four minutes. An aggravated assault every six minutes. A motorvehicle theft every three minutes” (emphasis in original, 16). The catalog is not only descriptive, but also predictive, implying that crime continually and relentlessly happens like clockwork. “Computer statistics scrolled dimly inside his forehead,” Chang writes in a similar opening scene in Year of the Dog, “the blunt CompStat analysis of why and how people killed each other in New York City” (2). Not only are people dying in the city, but “[t]he city was dying,” Chang writes (Chinatown 16). The tour’s circuit is completed when Jack descends back into the city, driving south along its “sinking potholed streets and garbage-strewn parks” (17). Chang’s texts, however, steer us off the quantifiable map and into the terrain of the human heart and psyche, where urban ethnic divisions produce internal contradictions in Jack’s relation to the city and neighborhood he polices. Rejecting the typical hardboiled hero’s benumbed cynicism, Jack is roiled by guilt and sadness as “tears r[u]n down the hotness of his cheeks” when he crosses Canal Street back into Chinatown (17). Urban disorder and personal disquiet mirror each other in the wet windows of Jack’s Fury. In this moment, Chang’s New York morphs from an abstract space of statistics to an affectual space layered with memories for his protagonist. “The city of fact”—the city as a conceptualized space—becomes “the city of feeling—the city as a lived space (Rotella 3). “Entire lifetimes [that] were reduced to an NYPD short list of cold percentages, time and location, gender and ethnicity” reemerge as “the voices of the homeless, crying, begging, threatening […] [that] touched him [Jack] every time” (Year 2, Chinatown 17).

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Jack’s Chinatown is a place of real murders and metaphorical ghosts. The latter takes the form of memories of the death of his childhood friend Wing by local gangsters and the form of his freshly buried father’s words left in a letter: “I have seen that long shadow behind me, that shadow of our many ancestors […]. That shadow ends with you. Yet you have the responsibility to make that shadow as long as the one behind me, though I may not live to see it. Remember where you came from. Know who you are. Know where you are going” (emphasis in original, Chinatown 83). Haunted by Manhattan’s Chinatown, Jack leaves where he came from and goes to live in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, but throughout Chinatown Beat, Year of the Dog, and Red Jade, he is pulled back into “Chinatown again. […] going back to the place he’d left behind. […] back to unfinished business” (emphasis in original Red Jade 1). For Chang, the conflict over space and what it stands for allegorizes the second-generation ethnic subject’s internal conflict between assimilation and cultural purity, as well as the masculine subject’s assertion of cultural and spatial autonomy from the father’s shadow. “His jook, his Chinese newspapers, his particular baby bok choy. All his excuses to stay rooted,” Jack muses, thinking of his father and those “old-timers” who took “pride in their disdain for American ways, Jack’s ways” (emphasis in original, Year 67; Chinatown 9, 10). Here Chineseness and Americanness are constituted by differing responses to cultural objects that connote rootedness, responses which are repeatedly performed (“[a]ll his excuses”). Further, here urban space and identity are neither fixed sites nor stable meanings, but are contingently related, each defining the other. Inscribed by insiders and outsiders with instructions on how to be Chinese, Jack’s Chinatown is the testing ground where he works out his conflicted relationship to his own ethnic identity. Yet instead of proffering ethnicity as a timeless and reified ontological category, Chang’s narratives subtly offer up an image of ethnicity as an “unfinished business,” an ongoing, oftenrepeated social act of writing one’s own letters into physical spaces that are being contested by others. Whereas the father wished for nothing more than to stay within the familiar borders of Manhattan’s Chinatown, the son wishes to flee in order to redefine himself as something other than Chinese. He wants “to be free from the burden his past placed on him,” what he calls “fierce Chineseness” (Chinatown 10). Indigenous ethnic authenticity is for Jack a sticky, built-up residue of a dilapidated past—which the novels metaphorize as “tenement squalor” and “grime in the hallway”—that he tries to wash away, though he never can (Chinatown 10). What should be evident is that Chang’s three novels function as investigations of culture, ethnicity and territory as much as they do as investi-

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gations of crime. To put a finer point on it, they are investigations of the clash between residual and emergent cultures and spaces. And as such, they do indeed perform the work of the crime novel: “unlike their rural counterparts, cities are in a constant state of flux through decay and degeneration,” Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps remark, “and many crime writers find themselves acting as literary cartographers of an authentic but rapidly changing urban space” (1). Chang’s own relationship to Manhattan’s Chinatown, which he still calls home, is at stake in this endeavor as he attempts to record an older way of life— practiced by Jack’s fierce “old-timers”—that is fading away and retreating from sight. “I’ve learned to bring a pad and pen with me and I’m always noticing stuff—what things sound like, what they smell like,” the author disclosed in the New York Times. “Of course, you would come down here looking for the old Chinatown and you wouldn’t see it. And that’s a good thing. It doesn’t mean it’s totally gone, but it’s behind closed doors” (Kurutz). On a walking tour of the neighborhood for the Asia Pacific Forum, Chang elaborated further: “I have a special connection to the people down here who have a special connection to the stories. Because it is their story as well. They remember the places and the other people, many whom and which are no longer around” (“Henry Chang: A Chinatown Walking Tour”). Chang takes his insider knowledge as license to act as a community spokesperson and what he gives voice to fills Chinatown’s streets and buildings with stories of ethnic displacement, personal disorientation, cultural erasure, and territorial conflict that unfold as the urban fabric is restructured and long-term residents of the city sense the ground shifting under their feet. With this in mind, we might understand Chang’s decision to set his novels in the mid-1990s as a strategic choice not only to evoke a more dangerous New York appropriate for crime fiction, but also to imaginatively preserve a neighborhood and culture that he understands as materially eroding around him. At the level of the neighborhood’s spaces, the conflict takes the form of a contest between territorialization and deterritorialization—a contest between Chinatown and the rest of the city, the latter metonymically figured as the NYPD—and a contest between rival sub-ethnic factions inside the enclave that compete for turf and money. From the outside Chinatown might signify as an undifferentiated and incomprehensible Chinese mass that is cognitively unmappable. This is precisely how Chang’s police officers—who tellingly live in the suburbs—view the neighborhood they patrol: “Chinatown was like a foreign port to them, full of experiences confounding to the average Caucasian mind […]. They were able to dismiss it as a troublesome nightmare, halfremembered and unfathomable” (Chinatown 8). This totalizing Sinophobic description is, as Chang mockingly implies, a product of the limited imagination

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of whites who are easily confused by urban difference. The insider view, by contrast, represents Chinatown as a space of social complexity, a district comprised of carefully partitioned, but constantly disputed zones that are ruled by different gangs, whose names signify differing class alliances and regional origins. For instance, one of the larger criminal underworld operations is the Ghost Legion whose members—including the childhood friend of Jack’s, Lucky Louie—are wealthy Hong Kongese. They “sneered at the ship-jumpers, the waiters and dishwashers, the laundrymen, who joined the rival Hip Chings,” a gang that hails from “Mainland China, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan” and answers locally to Uncle Four (Chinatown 44). Both groups increasingly contend with the Fuk Chings, a new and rapidly growing force comprised of Fukinese immigrants at the bottom of the intra-ethnic urban hierarchy. “The earlier wave of immigrants had come from Canton,” Chang writes in Year of the Dog, “now known as Guangzhou, and had spoken Cantonese, as did their brethren from Hong Kong. They couldn’t understand the dialect of the recent Fukienese arrivals […] [who] recruited only from the desperate dregs of their community” (20). Rather than representing Chinatown as caught between bloodthirsty, greedy, but ultimately indistinguishable, warring tribes, Chang edifies the reader by tying the rivalries to material and cultural conflicts spawned by global migration. “Power was shifting,” Chang writes (Year 20). With the death of Uncle Four in Chinatown Beat, Lucky Louie’s hand strengthens, but only momentarily. From their stronghold on East Broadway, the Fuk Chings encroach on Pell and Division Streets, the heart of what Louie calls “his turf” (Chinatown 27; emphasis in original, Year 20). “[T]he Fukienese were driving the boundaries north and east,” reflects Louie, “their numbers swelling into the tenements that had housed the WASPS, the Irish, Italians, and Jews, and the Toishanese and Cantonese before them” (Year 71, 72). Chang further dramatizes the internal feuding between factions in Chinatown as subsumed by a larger battle with a mutual enemy, the city’s police department. These battles of turf too turn out to be battles over the construction of ethnic identity in and through place. From the perspective of the Ghost Legion, Hip Chings, and the Fuk Chings, the NYPD amount to another gang, “The Blue Gang,” loyal to no one and nothing other than its own power. “Read the papers,” Louie informs Jack, “Cops dealing drugs. Cops taking money. Cops fucking over anyone who ain’t white” (Chinatown 170). Though Chang does not depict the NYPD as a whole as crooked, he does leave Jack open to charges that his professional loyalty entails cultural disavowal. Standing on a Mott Street rooftop, Louie continues, asserting his ownership of the neighborhood while accusing Jack of selling out his own ethnic identity: “We own the streets, not

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them [the police]. See, to me, to the boys, Chinatown is our life. Not a job, not a paycheck. Every minute, every day, we’re here to stay” (emphasis in original, Chinatown 169). Jack retorts that Louie himself is guilty of opportunistic exploitation—“you rip off your own people”—and of fouling up Chinatown for everyday residents—“you deal poison to the junkies so they keep coming around fucking with our neighborhood” (Chinatown 170). But Louie gets the better of the exchange when he sarcastically counters, “When the fuck did you become Charlie Chan” (Chinatown 170). The reference is to Earl Biggers’s sleuth, played by Swedish actor Warner Oland in films in the 1930s, whom the novelist Frank Chin has excoriated as an image of racial minstrelsy and humiliation and whom the scholar Elaine Kim has decried as “a non-threatening, non-competitive, asexual ally of the white man” (Chin 65; Kim 18). Ironically, Louie’s words echo the very terms by which Jack is seen as too Chinese within the NYPD. “Jack wasn’t one of them. Any of them,” Chang writes, “He was becoming the loner in his professional life that he was in his personal life. So they couldn’t figure him out; the inscrutable Oriental, Detective Charlie Chan, they joked behind his back” (emphasis in original, Chinatown 98). The man who “live[s] in two worlds at the same time” is either too Chinese or not Chinese enough (9). Chang’s own position as a writer within the terrain of the detective tradition is at issue as he carves out a territory for himself within the context of embarrassing discursive embodiments that do not shadow white writers and their protagonists, such as Raymond Chandler’s solitary Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s reticent Sam Spade. In the detective genre the emotional remoteness and physical separateness of white masculinity are signs of strength and ethical purity that counter the corruption, duplicity and enervation that this fiction often associates with women and ethnic minorities. Yet Detective Jack Yu’s asociality and masculine reserve—he lives alone, has no serious romantic commitments, and has no family—are viewed as evidence of his Chinese hermeticism. His male subjectivity is inseparable from his ethnicity, both of which arise from his alienated relation to urban space. Moreover, underneath the putative inscrutability is no real Chineseness—and this appears to be Chang’s larger point—but only painful social contradictions that have been mystified as ethnic unfathomability. The urban neighborhood and the individual resident’s relation to it are not fully intelligible if treated as a microcosm in isolation from the shifting dynamics of the greater metropolitan context that frames it. Hence, the painful social contradictions that Chang negotiates through Jack rise to another level when Chang situates Jack’s fraught relationship to Chinatown and his Chinese identity within the larger designs the NYPD has on Chinatown and Chinese-

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American culture. It is with this that we arrive at another reason that Chang decides to launch his series in 1994. The year marks the inauguration of the former federal prosecutor Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose two-term tenure is widely remembered for a hard crackdown on crime. On Giuliani’s watch New York, which “was essentially written off as a symbol of urban decay,” in the mayor’s own boastful words, “has regained its true stature as the Capital of the World” (quoted in Karmen, 7). The city’s crime rate peaked in 1990—the bloodiest year in its modern history with an astonishing 2,245 murders—and was already in decline when Giuliani and his Police Commissioner William Bratton took the helm. Not surprisingly, the Mayor’s office and the NYPD rushed to claim credit for the dramatic plunge, which was already in motion and would continue long after Giuliani left office in 2001. The credit for the crime crash belongs to no single individual or municipal agency, argues criminologist Andrew Karmen. The reason for the sustained drop in crime was, and continues to be, overdetermined. New police strategies initiated under Bratton are one factor, Karmen notes, but so are many others, including the ebbing of the crack cocaine epidemic, a decline in the city’s young male population during the 1990s, a decline in unemployment and a lessening sense of relative deprivation with improvements in the economy, and, most morbidly, a drop in active offenders through attrition (263-65). Karmen has admitted as recently as 2013, “[w]e really don’t know why crime is down” (Louis). Giuliani is relegated to the background in Chang’s texts, appearing sporadically in Jack’s thoughts, but his presence looms large. In Year of the Dog Louie frets, “The incoming mayor was a law-and-order guy, an ex-DA who’d already stated publicly that he was going to crack down on organized crime. In the past that had meant the Mafia […] but now included […] the Chinese tongs as well” (21). More subtly, Jack’s use of CompStat analysis, a revolutionary new approach that is the “high-tech equivalent of pin-mapping,” was launched under Commissioner Bratton (Karmen 93). CompStat allows the police to construct microgeographies of urban crime by immediately feeding complaints and arrests from the field to precincts and then to headquarters “to spot crime trends and locate ‘hot spots’ of concentrated illegal activity” (Karmen 93). When Jack reads off a list of statistics in Year of the Dog—“Saturday was the most popular day both for killing and dying. Men and boys perpetrated 90% of the murders. The deadliest hour was between one and two AM”—Chang is citing the knowledge produced by this innovation (emphasis in original, 2). The aggressive policing tactics mobilized under Giuliani included not only the prosecution of “organized crime,” but also a clampdown on the hundreds of thousands of random, quality-of-life misdemeanors that the Giuliani

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administration controversially prosecuted with zeal, such as graffiti, panhandling, public drinking, subway turnstile jumping, littering, and the violation of noise ordinances. Karmen dubs such tactics “a full-scale war against the poor” (12). I would add that crackdowns on crime often become indistinguishable from crackdowns on culture when they occur in the context of gentrification, as they did in New York during the administration of Giuliani and the administration of his successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It was under the latter’s, mayoralty, known for its developer-friendly policies, that Chang wrote his series. Chang implies as much about the relation between policing and ethnic culture in a brief and at first glance unremarkable scene in Red Jade that I would argue is fundamental to understanding how policing, ethnic identity and urban restructuring are complexly interrelated in these texts. Sitting in a bar in Chinatown, Jack glances up at a TV where “the new Italian-American mayor […] was pitching the idea of banning fireworks in Chinatown, especially Chinese New Year celebrations” (89). “The mayor was citing fire safety concerns,” Chang laconically writes, though “[i]t hadn’t been a concern for a hundred and twentyfive years” (89). By clamping down on Chinatown’s most important festival of ethnic identity, though proposed under the pretext of safety, Giuliani follows in the footsteps of San Francisco’s Mayor James Phelan, New York City police captain Mike Galvin, and the fictional detective Stanley White of Year of the Dragon, who all promised to subdue Chinatown with force. With this in mind, the moment at the end of Chinatown Beat, when the mayor literally looks over Jack’s shoulder is both poignant and ominous. After being wounded in a shootout in an unsuccessful attempt to arrest Uncle Four’s killer, Jack is awarded and promoted. “Jack stood on the stage in his neatly pressed blue uniform, before the mayor, the commissioner and an array of the department brass,” Chang writes, “all applauding as the deputy chief pinned the Combat Cross above the gold badge over Jack’s heart” (206). Curiously, Chang calls this shield a “Yellow Badge”—not a “gold” one—in the chapter’s title, thus making it a signifier of ethnic difference, one standing for both ethnic pride and shame (205). “When he looked out over the auditorium, Jack felt exhilarated yet sad. There was no family in the audience waiting for him. He thought of Pa,” Jack muses, “and how proud he might have been. Maybe” (206). Given that Chinatown has been associated with dirt, disease and disorder since the mid-nineteenth century, one might think the neighborhood cleanup campaign that Chang hints is coming is simply yet another exercise of brute power by a state institution. To limit our purview and arrive at this conclusion would be to miss the fact that the clampdown transpires in the context of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century globalization. And it is within this

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context that gentrification and the prosecution of so-called “quality of life” laws in minority enclaves takes on new meaning. As Neil Smith argues, gentrification is “no longer about a narrow and quixotic oddity in the housing market,” but is now “the leading residential edge of a much larger endeavor” to remake the class landscape of global cities that house the industries, technologies and knowledge bases of finance capitalism and the highly skilled, high-income workers who are its beneficiaries (39). Globalization is always transacted locally and is concretized spatially, and as such depends on local governments and interests— governors, mayors, police commissioners, real-estate developers, and individual homeowners—who play a part in the restructuring of centrally located urban neighborhoods, Chinatown included. To this point, Joe Feagin and Michael Peter Smith maintain that “[c]hanging urban development patterns are best understood as the long-term outcomes of actions taken by economic and political actors operating within a complex and changing matrix of global and national economic and political forces” (17). Policing, gentrification, and Chang’s globalized Chinatown become inseparable when Detective Jack Yu in Year of the Dog looks out the windows of a “run-down projects apartment” and out over the East River at what was soon to be America’s most famous gentrified neighborhood, Williamsburg, Brooklyn: “[H]e saw dilapidated docks and crumbling warehouses along the piers, camouflaged by the clean cover of snow […]. An area slowly being converted to residential lofts and low-rise condos, with pioneering urban homesteaders paving the way for the gentrification that was sure to come, the reality of realty finding its way across the river from Manhattan” (161). The wave of gentrification is about to break over Chang’s detective, but as a cop not only is he powerless to stop it, his own actions inadvertently hasten its arrival. In fact, the global “reality of realty” is already present in Chang’s work, if one reads for it as the key to unlocking the puzzle and paradox of Chinatown. Throughout the series, Chang’s representations of the built environment provide the clues. Take, for instance, when Mona stands on her balcony in her modern China Plaza apartment, with its rooftop billboard advertising “Luxury Condominiums” for sale, and surveys Chinatown’s “ghetto detritus […] discarded mattresses and dismembered plastic dolls […] the carcasses of gutted refrigerators, air conditioners” (Chinatown 19). In this moment, Chang’s text asks us to contemplate capitalist spatial contradictions, to witness in condensed form the polarized but mutually interdependent urban geographies of the contemporary city. Later in Year of the Dog, the text takes us to “the tallest building in the area,” a “sixteen-story mirrored glass office” tower that is anchored to the street by a “Citibank branch and a tourist-trade gift shop” and is home to the “On Yee Merchants Consortium” on the third floor (70). Here, too, in one architectural

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image is a map of Chinatown’s position and role within the global economy. An older closed-economy governed by ethnic traditionalism shares space with the marketing and commodification of Chinese culture as cheap consumer goods to outsiders, which shares space with a multinational finance entity through which foreign and local capital passes into and out of the neighborhood. Along East Broadway, the text records “Chinatown vendors with outdoor ATM machines, a MoneyGram shop, and a Western Union at either end of the street,” portals for transferring remittances earned in Chinatown’s restaurants and garment factories back to the mainland (Year 109). A few pages later, Chinatown’s intercity “unregulated tour-bus business” is shown as a low-cost means of transporting freshly arrived “coolie workers,” supplies and cash “to restaurants and malls from Richmond to Rochester, as far west to Ohio, and north to Montreal” (Year 111). Even the mysterious triads that fight over turf in the neighborhood are eventually demystified. Their “Fu Manchu bullshit” is, in Louie’s revelation, just a cover for black-market global corporations dealing in illicit commodities—not only drugs, but “video camcorders, digital cameras, Walkmen and laptop computers” through a “network of merchants” “in Europe, and in Central and South America. More recently […] North America (Year 74, 123). “[E]verytime business was transacted, there were the lawyers, the brokers, the city officials, the bank regulators,” Chang notes (Chinatown 30). In other words, the tongs illustrate the “great global multinational and decentered communicational network” that Jameson claims this fiction cannot map (Postmodernism 44). “Chinatown doesn’t end at Delancey Street, Captain. It stretches to Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and China,” says Jack to another police officer (Chinatown 204). The discursive myth of Chinatown’s putative insularity is betrayed by the reality that it is a hub for the global circulation of labor and capital. Nested within these flows, Chang’s texts locate the everyday spaces of Chinatown’s residents—those impacted by globalization, gentrification and crime, but managing to secure a bit of territory for themselves nonetheless—and their untold stories. They are the stories of Sai Go, a small-time bookmaker who at fifty-nine and dying of lung cancer dreams of a vacation to Florida but ends up leaving his life savings to Bo Lan, a hairstylist who is struggling to pay off her smuggling debt from China to New York. Her “small storefront” salon is “sandwiched between a noodle shop and a poultry market on a dilapidated block of Henry Street” and has trouble competing with “the new and shiny hair, nail, and massage ‘emporiums’” popping up in the neighborhood (Year 79). They are the stories of Alexandra Lee-Chow, a lawyer working with abused women at the Asian American Justice Advocacy, whose offices are in a former bodega close to Chinatown’s “junkie parks” and “auto-repair garages” (Year 103). And they are

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the stories, too, of Jack’s lonely “workingman’s life in his “studio apartment” with a “convertible sofa bed” in Sunset Park, which is dotted with late-night Chinese takeout restaurants and a transplanted “Chinese garment industry that had followed low rents out of Manhattan” (Chinatown 60). As Jack stares out the window of his apartment, watching freighters loaded with goods moving through the New York harbor, Chang describes his life as comprised of “mostly portable, transient, disposable items, his life in flux” (emphasis in original, 60). In highlighting disposable cultures and lives in the context of flux, Chang’s words draw my attention to the concluding pages of his trilogy where everything, as it often does in crime fiction, comes together: Chinatown, crime, inscrutability, and the way all of these have been publically imagined are concentrated into one key moment. Jack and his counterpart in the Seattle Police Department, Detective Nicoll, are meeting at dawn on an icy pier in Seattle where hours before a bloody shootout left two hit men from an international triad dead, another badly wounded by a letter opener plunged into his eye, and Mona, whom everyone has been searching for, still missing after she escaped a second time by leaping into the riptides of the harbor. The conversation that ensues between the two detectives is a staple of the genre, the familiar scene when the secret links between the mystery’s clues are unveiled and the text’s larger social world of labyrinthine deceitfulness and opaque conspiracies is finally made legible. After hundreds of pages devoted to the paradoxes of Chinatown, Chang at last prepares Jack to make his case, a verbally unambiguous utterance that will lay bare its entangling webs of subterfuge and bring them under the clear, rational order of the law. But then, remarkably, he refuses. Here is how the short exchange unfolds: among the evidence gathered from the crime scene is what appears to be the novel’s most notable symbol of Chinese culture and the title of the book itself; a red jade bracelet worn by Mona as a protective charm. In truth, it is a cheap “gift-shop trinket,” the kind transported in bulk in shipping containers on freighters and sold as cheap souvenirs in “tourist-trade gift shop[s]” (Red 74; Year 70). So what does Chang make of this inscrutable commodity, which, according to Marx, is an “extremely obvious, trivial thing” that contains the secret of our global social relations in condensed form? Detective Nicoll points to it and ignorantly asks, “What is that? Some kind of voodoo,’” to which Jack replies, “‘It’s a Chinese thing. […] I’m not sure you’d understand’” (226). As they part ways, Nicoll answers back, “‘Well then, don’t worry about it, Jack, […] ‘Remember […]’” but before he can finish, Jack responds “wearily, ‘I know, I know […]. It’s Chinatown’” (226). The exchange cites the conclusion of Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir thriller Chinatown in which private investigator Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, is urged,

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“[f]orget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” as he is pulled away in disbelief from a scene that reveals that unholy union of civic corruption and incestual insularity in Los Angeles. Chang mocks Polanski’s use of the Sinophobic trope of Chinatown’s urban unfathomability, but also recognizes it as a widely circulated cultural code shared by the two detectives, as well as the reader. He hints at something else too. The Chinatown that we are to “forget” in Polanski’s film is the Chinatown that in Chang’s narrative we, as outsiders, are urged to “remember” that we will never fully understand. In the end, his fiction dispels the riddle of Chinatown’s inscrutability, only to suggest that in the context of relentless globalization and gentrification, which makes life increasingly porous and precarious, it might be resignified to provide a modicum of privacy and protection from the eyes of the police.

W ORKS C ITED Andrew, Lucy and Catherine Phelps. “Introduction.” Capital Crimes: Crime Fiction in the City. Ed. Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2013. 1-5. Print. Bramen, Carrie Tirado. “The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of Americanization.” American Quarterly. 52. 3 (Sept., 2000): 444-477. Print. Beauregard, Robert. Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Chinatown. Dir. Roman Polanski. Perf. Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston. Paramount, 1974. DVD. Chang, Henry. Chinatown Beat. New York: Soho, 2006. Print. ---. Year of the Dog. New York: Soho, 2008. Print. ---. Red Jade. New York: Soho, 2010. Print. ---. “Henry Chang: A Chinatown Walking Tour.” Asia Pacific Forum. 21 Apr. 2009. Web. 28 June 2014. Link: Chin, Frank and Jeffery Paul Chan. “Racist Love.” Seeing through Shuck. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Ballantine, 1972. 65-79. Print. Feagin, Joe R. and Michael Peter Smith. “Cities and the New International Division of Labor: An Overview.” The Capitalist City. Ed. Michael Peter Smith and Joe R. Feagin. New York: Blackwell. 3-34. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1988. 347-357. Print.

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---. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990. Print. Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Boston, MIT P: 1995. Print. Karmen, Andrew. New York Murder Mystery: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s. New York: NYU P, 2006. Print. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1982. Print. Kurutz, Steven. “Murder on Mott Street.” New York Times. 24 Oct. 2008. Web. 2 Mar. 2014.

Kwong, Peter. “Answers About the Gentrification of Chinatown.” New York Times. 16 Sept. 2009. Web. 2 Mar. 2014. Li, Bethany, et al. “Chinatown Then and Now: Gentrification in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.” Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Web. 2 Mar. 2014. 1-45. Lin, Jan. Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Print. Louis, Errol. “The Mystery Behind Our Crime Decline.” New York Daily News. 25 July 2013. Web. 2 Mar. 2014. Macek, Steve. Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print. McClellan, Robert, The Heatheen Chinese: A Study of American Attitudes Toward China, 1890-1905. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1971. Print. Meloney, William. “Slumming in New York’s Chinatown.” Tales of Gaslight New York. Ed. Frank Oppel. Edison, N.J.: Castle, 2000. 229-241. Print. Phelan, James D. “Why the Chinese Should Be Excluded.” The North American Review. 173.540 (1901): 663-676. Print. Rotella, Carlo. The Redevelopment of Urban Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Print. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.

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Wong, K. Scott. “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain.” MELUS. 20.1 (1995): 3-15. Print. Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. “Ethnic Subject, Ethnic Sign, and the Difficulty of Rehabilitative Representation: Chinatown in Some Works of Chinese American Fiction.” The Yearbook of English Studies. 24 (1994): 251-262. Print. Year of the Dragon. Dir. Michael Cimino. Perf. Mickey Rourke, John Lone, Ariane. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1985. DVD.

Lost in the Stacks Shipping Containers and Narrative Agency in the Posthuman City J ON H EGGLUND

For the visible evidence of a posthuman urban geography, you need only drive east on the San Francisco Bay Bridge toward Oakland. Or, alternatively, look north toward Elliott Bay as you cross the bridge that joins Interstate 5 to the residential neighborhood of West Seattle. Or, make a quick detour off of Interstate 405 and take the Seaside Freeway the length of Terminal Island, which sits between the cities of San Pedro and Long Beach. In each case the view will be similar, irrespective of local landmarks and geographical features: you will see a sprawling container terminal, with acres and acres of pavement devoted to neatly ordered stacks of forty-foot long metal boxes arrayed around long piers with giant cranes that periodically loom over large, flat-decked cargo vessels. In fact, with the help of Google Maps, one can zoom in on virtually any sizable port city in the world, and in a matter of seconds, locate a container terminal that looks remarkably similar—though perhaps varying in size and scale—to other terminals in other cities. An informal search quickly yields affirmative results. Monrovia, Liberia: it is small, but present, to the north of the city center. Sydney, Australia: there it is, south of the city on Botany Bay. Alexandria, Egypt: no less than three separate terminals arrayed along the city’s long, narrow harbor. Container terminals are notable for their simultaneous physical ubiquity and symbolic invisibility. Constructed mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, after it became clear that the containerization of global commerce had superseded the older method of breakbulk cargo shipping, container terminals have become the most important nodes of freight shipping across the world. These massive infrastructural works have become a truly global feature of the urban landscapes of any port city of size. No matter the distinctive terrains and built environments

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of their surrounding cities, container terminals reproduce variations on a theme: concrete piers with cargo ships in port, towering cranes to load and remove the identically-sized boxes, and the rows of metal containers themselves, waiting to enter the chain of commodity distribution, whether being land-bound onto a truck or train, or shipped off via a cargo vessel.i Yet, perhaps because of their relative lack of distinguishing features, container terminals are the invisible obverse of distinctive, recognizable cities. Where Seattle, or Tokyo, or Rio de Janeiro have their iconic and defining landmarks, they also have the less distinguished site of a massive container terminal. From the point of view of most residents, and nearly all tourists, the waterfront area of the terminal will be a dead space, an industrial blight of necessity, typically placed far enough from the city’s financial and cultural centers to be easily forgettable. You might dimly note the sprawling South Harbor container port as you travel northward from Sea-Tac Airport to downtown Seattle, but by the time you drive into the shadows of the skyscrapers, you will have likely forgotten the cranes, boxes, and ships amid the late-industrial mise-en-scène. Terminals have become repressed sites of a late-modern urban imaginary, an odd afterimage of heavy industry in the era of immaterial global flows and sleek, corporatized spaces of consumption. As a globally networked and standardized space with the particular urban fabric of individual cities, the container terminal is a central node of an alternative, scale-bendingii geography, one that layers a nonhuman city of material artifacts onto a mental map of the metropolis as a site for human inhabitation, organization, and achievement. In most major port cities, this dehumanized space has usurped the historical location of the “waterfront” as a bustling, crowded place with a thriving culture and community. As Marc Levinson describes in his history of the shipping container, The Box, the onset of containerization in the post-World War II era caused many waterfront districts to “decline with startling speed, unsuited to the container trade or simply unneeded, and the manufacturers that endured high costs and antiquated urban plants in order to be near their suppliers and their customers have long since moved away” (2). As Levinson notes, unions representing stevedores and longshoremen struggled to maintain bargaining power in the face of drastically reduced costs of labor brought about by the automated efficiency of container shipping, and their workers often suffered from the social changes “stemming from the disappearance of the timeworn pattern of waterfront work” (125). These economic and social transformations have dramatically altered the real and symbolic geographies of cities: container terminals are typically far removed from most urban dwellers’ cognitive map of the city, separated from residential or commercial districts by barriers to access such as rail lines, freeways, and

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areas that contain little or no consumer-based commercial activity. Beyond being removed from the localized urban fabric, container zones are conceptually and physically networked to identical spaces of material shipping and distribution; in other words, the port of Seattle is in many ways closer to container terminals thousands of miles away in Busan, Shanghai, or Tokyo than to recognizably local districts and iconic landmarks such as Pioneer Square, Green Lake, or The Space Needle. The ubiquity of container ports, along with the vast population of individual containers that forms the modular components of the shipping industry, suggests that containers are more complex than merely functional, inanimate objects. This essay considers the agency of the shipping container as an important element of material urban landscapes. Drawing on an object-centered approach informed by theorists such as Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, and Jane Bennett, I argue for the shipping container as a nonhuman actant that confounds conventional distinctions of both the spaces of, and narratives about, the contemporary city. My essay first draws upon strains of materialist ecocriticism to understand the shipping container within a larger context of networks that transform both human and nonhuman existence. I then proceed to a narrative analysis of Season Two of David Simon’s The Wire, in which the shipping container exerts an agency existing somewhere between the undeniably human sphere of action populated by the show’s characters and the backgrounded, panoramic image of Baltimore, which forms the setting for all five seasons of the show. While Simon (and his team of writers and directors) are especially attentive to the role that material space and artifacts play in both individual lives and the gestalt of an entire city, these musings are never more pertinent to the geography and built environment of the globalized city than when shipping containers become a foregrounded narrative participant. I conclude by drawing lessons from a particular narrative analysis that can be applied to the understanding of nonhuman agencies within contemporary cities: by placing significant nonhuman entities, such as shipping containers, on the same ontological level as human city-dwellers, we can better understand both the capacities and, more importantly, the limits of a specifically human agency.

T HE P OSTHUMAN C ITY ? The infrastructure and geography of shipping containers and container terminals speaks to an emergent posthumanization of urban areas, particularly port cities on or near major waterways and shipping destinations. Whether through the

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automation of previously human labor or through the depopulation of historical neighborhoods once supporting a bustling cultural and social life, the urban port area is a place recognized as both central to the commercial life of a city yet curiously devoid of human activity. This combination of economic centrality and social marginality suggests a type of posthuman landscape that carries different connotations than the most common uses of that term.iii By referring to a “posthuman” city, I do not mean to call up images of post-apocalyptic ruins as one might see in novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or recent films like Zombieland or I Am Legend, or even in contemporary images of cities suffering from a crisis-driven reduction in human population, such as deindustrialized Detroit or post-Katrina New Orleans. What I have in mind is an understanding of the city that rejects the premise that it is a mere setting for human action, a concept that is given life and animation through purposive human activity. In the sense I am using it, the “posthuman city” is one in which material processes and agencies are visible that are not encompassed by locally recognizeable human actors. Whether through container ports, electrical grids, financial centers, transportation infrastructure, or the nonhuman realms of animal and plant life, contemporary cities are increasingly host to material spaces and artifacts that seem peripheral, and perhaps antithetical, to the interests of human individuals and communities. While one can argue that such nonhuman materialities have always been a significant element of the modern metropolis, the passage from a human to a posthuman city can be marked by two historical transitions: first, the economic and cultural globalization of the city, and second, the encounter between the built environments of the city and the geological, hydrological, and climatological forces that have become more volatile and powerful in an age of global climate change.iv “Posthuman,” therefore, denotes a normative condition after the hegemony of anthropocentric ideas of the city rather than a post-collapse imaginary with reduced or eliminated human populations. Canonical understandings of the urban metropolis have relied on a hierarchy that implicitly sees the ultimate meaning of the city in terms of a transcendental humanism, as opposed to an immanent materialism. Paradoxically, perhaps, this human dominance has frequently been conceived of as being under threat. Georg Simmel begins his landmark 1903 essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” by asserting that “[t]he deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society” (11). Over and against an alien and alienating “society,” the main concern for Simmel is to preserve an essential “humanity.” In his 1937 essay, “What is a City?” Lewis Mumford maintains a distinction between the human and the nonhuman, but for him the human realm

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encompasses social institutions but remains alien to the material environment. “The city as a purely physical fact,” he writes, “has been subject to numerous investigations. But what is the city as a social institution?” (93). Mumford cuts the “physical fact” of the city off at the knees, implicitly deeming it unworthy of serious consideration; the truth of the city lies in its human, social activity, as evidenced by his thumbnail definition: the city is “a related group of primary groups and purposive associations” (93). While we need not take his voice as authoritative, his separation of the city into the “physical” and “social” realms— with the latter clearly taking priority over the former—is a fairly representative example of how the city has been viewed by urban planners, sociologists, and historians in the first half of the twentieth century. It is telling that utopian examples of the city—from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, to Le Corbusier’s City for Three Million, to Wright’s Broadacre City—see the design of the planned city in terms of its human outcomes: the reason for a wholly engineered urban space is to create a certain life for its human inhabitants. The imagined life of its people becomes the reality of the city, with all of its other objects, spaces, and dimensions to be valued or recognized only inasmuch as they were seen to create or sustain this activity. By contrast, a posthuman view of the metropolis does not consider an idealized human “life” as the Platonic ideal and ultimate goal of urban processes and environments. Humans are indeed the most important part of the puzzle, as many cities, particularly in the global South, are growing at an alarmingly unsustainable rate. According to a United Nations demographic study, Mumbai and Delhi are each projected to have more than 20 million residents by 2025, Jakarta and Manila are projected to each approach 15 million in the same period, and even Baghdad, nearly destroyed by two wars in the last twenty years, projects to grow to over 8 million within the next decade.v Clearly, there are plenty of people now in cities and plenty more to come; in fact, managing the density of cities will be a front-burner social, political, and ecological problem for urban planners, politicians, economists, and environmentalists in the foreseeable future. Posthumanism, in my view, implies that modernity’s attachment to the human as a scale, rationale, and agent of urban creation and transformation is no longer tenable, if it ever was. With recent insights from ecocriticism, demographic studies, and object-oriented philosophy, we no longer have the luxury of viewing cities as inert matter given life, meaning, and purpose through exclusively human endeavors and perceptions. Posthuman cities are cities after the hegemony of the human, after the human world is forced to accept its fate as an ensemble player in the complex structures and improvisations that make up urban life.

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Ever since cities began to expand beyond the scale of human cognition—that is, when the “city” became the “metropolis”vi—they have possessed an inhuman otherness that has been difficult to name or represent. Art and literature have been especially sensitive to this alterity. As Raymond Williams states in The Country and the City (1973), literary and cultural representations of the nineteenth-century industrial European city often began to take a turn toward the imagery of satanic, threatening darkness that converted its physical environment into a moral judgment. Early twentieth-century modernism began to register— admittedly in a less moralistic way—the shadowy places of being, where the city itself exceeded its human scale. The “unreality” of the city observed by T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land” (1922), for example, is not merely metaphysical; it refers to the moment when the city bodies forth things where one would expect to find an “environment:” instead of clear air, the city emits the “brown fog of a winter dawn” (61); rather than the atmospheric harmony of church bells, Eliot’s London gives us the malfunctioning music of St. Mary Woolnoth, which tolled “a dead sound on the final stroke of nine” (68). These modernist versions of the city as an entity that appears amorphous, sounds discordant, or simply feels strange point toward an environmental uncanny that is qualitatively different from the sublime associated with the nonhuman realm of nature. What confounds nineteenth- and early twentieth-century observers of the city is that its nonhuman otherness is a product of human minds and human hands: the brown fog, the clanging church bells, the factories, the motor cars, the waste that chokes the sewers and clogs the rivers. The all-too-human production of the city also set in motion a world of nonhuman activity and agency. When this othered realm came back to haunt urban observers, it did so in the guise of a nature gone wrong: air turned to smog, flowing rivers becoming stagnant sewers, pastoral countryside giving way to unregulated suburban development. This perception of nonhumanity, I would argue, was also registered in modernist narrative fictions, which attempted to displace or decenter human characters with the urban multitude. It is no coincidence that the city was the location for modernist experiments with mobile narrative perspective—for instance, the Bond Street scene of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or the different narrative modes of Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy published between 1930 and 1936. Among other things, these narrative experiments indicate a move away from the structuring device of the individualized human character, which in these modernist examples can give way to a shadowy intimation of the nonhuman. Yet, it should be said that while modernist narratives could multiply the scope of a given storyworld through a mobile perspective, they still use the measuring stick of the human as a guide to

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the city: Joyce returns to the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, Woolf’s crowd scene resolves into the intertwining narratives of a small number of characters, and Dos Passos’ “Camera Eye” sections record biographical rather than nonhuman experiences. Whether through a return of the repressed material of industrial production or a formal experimentation aimed at decentering the notion of the individual, urban narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries registered the nonhuman in indirect, distant ways. Recent turns in materialist ecocriticism, object-oriented philosophy, and sociology have given us the tools to think the urban interface between the human and the nonhuman in a more granular way. I briefly want to focus on one such theorization of the conative existence of the human and nonhuman, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), and explore its possibilities for thinking through twenty-first century narratives of the city. Bennett takes as her signal example of agency and causation an event that was both urban and not-urban, both human and nothuman: the 2003 blackout in the Northeastern United States. Where popular journalistic narratives tended to understand the blackout as an event from the material world that “happened to” humans, Bennett uses the incident as a model for theorizing the complex strands of causation that led to the failure of the electrical grid: the unpredictable behavior of electricity itself, understaffed power plants, the inherent limitations of transmission wires, a brush fire that damaged electrical lines, corporations such as Enron and FirstEnergy that traded energy on the open market, rising consumer demand for appliances using electricity, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which deregulated the sale and transmission of electricity in the USA. To fully untangle this knot of causation would require a mind conversant in many disciplines and in possession of nearly infinite stores of information. Bennett’s approach directs us on this quest—while we may never obtain a full account of the complex causes at work, we are less likely to apportion all agency to a single actor or agent. What is different about Bennett’s model is precisely its refusal to place human causes—consumer demand, corporate greed, or legislative shortsightedness—on a different ontological plane from causes located in the “material” world; while its ethical responsibilities and level of consciousness may differ, a failing transmission wire exists on the same plane of agency as a greedy corporate CEO that profits through the trading of energy from one part of the country to another. Bennett borrows the Deleuzian notion of the assemblage to describe the complex operations at work here:

264 | J ON H EGGLUND Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within […]. Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage. (24)

Bennett uses the electrical grid as an example of a human-nonhuman assemblage: it is full of objects and materials manipulated by human decisions and human hands—but it also can have a will of its own, usurping and overturning human control at unexpected and unpredictable times. Humans are not irrelevant to the grid; but nor are we its masters. This levelling of the causal playing field (what Ian Bogost would call a “flat ontology”) has significant consequences for how we view, use, understand, and represent cities.

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With Bennett’s vital materialist model in mind, we are better equipped to articulate the complex role played by the shipping container within the urban milieu. The container, of course, can exist as an object in its own right, a twentyor forty-foot rectangular box typically constructed of corrugated sheet metal. But it also enters into multiple and transitory assemblages that bind it to other entities: it contains objects while in transit, it aggregates with other containers while on board shipping vessels, it forms “stacks” in the container port, it is detached and linked to other means of transport such as trucks or trains. In this modularity, the container becomes a prototypical member of numerous material assemblages that are concentrated on, though certainly not limited to, the city. Because the container is connected to any number of assemblages that encompass a range of spatial scales—from the local neighborhood, to the urban metropolis, and finally to regional, national, and global networks—it is difficult to trace the agency it may or may not have. One way to begin doing so is to interpret the role of the container within the bounded frame of individual narratives. Narrative, in the literary sense, is an instructive place to track the mechanics of agency, as its fundamental architecture (by most accounts) requires human (or human-like) actors experiencing causally related events within a constructed storyworld. For Bennett, in her account of the blackout, the dazzling array of actants might obscure the fact that the narrative dimensions of the event are only legible through a human frame of reference. In their essay “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych” (2012), Serenella Iovino and Serpil

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Opperman, who share the same material-ecocritical investment in nonhuman agency as Bennett, use the model of narrative as a way of identifying agency within nonhuman assemblages. In speaking of such confederations, they ask: “Who is the storyteller of these stories narrated through and across bodies by manifold material-discursive agents, such as toxic waste, sick cells, individual organisms, and social forces? Who is really the narrating subject, if things— collectives, assemblages, actants—are narrative agencies?” (459, emphasis in original). Although their definition of narrative appears to be a capacious one, Iovino and Opperman suggest at least a conceptual tension between two models of narrative agency: one that requires a “storyteller” or “narrating subject” on the one hand, and more mysterious or unvoiced “material-discursive agents” on the other. Conventionally, this distinction has been understood in narrative studies as the former embodying a human or anthropomorphic narrator, while the latter category is reserved for a qualitatively different order of entities: significant objects or forces, to be sure, but ones that still remain secondary to or mediated by anthropomorphic experience. In other words, while Opperman and Iovino nudge Bennett’s idea of the assemblage toward narrative, the very terms in which they express this subject-object blurring still partake of such age-old narrative concepts as the (implicitly human) storyteller. In what follows, I hope to complicate this subject-object foundationalism with respect to narrative agency by looking into the role that the shipping container—and its multiple assemblages—plays in the second season of David Simon’s five-season drama about the city of Baltimore, The Wire. Throughout Simon’s show, we see the regular incorporation of nonhuman material objects that take on a more active narrative role—that is, they cannot be dismissed as mere background or props—but likewise resist being fit into the anthropomorphic mold. This is especially significant in the case of The Wire because the show is otherwise written and produced in a fairly naturalistic style. In its serial form, it presents a wide aperture through which to view the urban world that has been frequently compared to the epic scope of the nineteenthcentury novel. Comparing The Wire to Dickens in fact became a ritual gesture among critics, leading to parodies as well as a self-conscious acknowledgement by the show’s creator—as one episode in the final season is titled “The Dickensian Aspect.”vii Even as it borrows from nineteenth-century modes of narrative storytelling about the city, however, The Wire finds nonhuman agency in any number of spaces and objects. I will focus on the particular piece of matter with which I introduced the essay: shipping containers. Season Two of the series begins in the harbor of Baltimore with a plot centering on thirteen dead women found in a shipping container—colloquially

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known as a “can”—in a container terminal. Initially, the deaths are dismissed by the authorities as an accident—in the offloading of the containers an air pipe was crushed, leading to the suffocation of the women inside. As the detectives on the show further investigate the murder, however, they uncover a ring of gangsters who are using the containers to smuggle Ukrainian women into the United States as sex workers. In some respects, the subplot of the dead women in the shipping container is fairly conventional fodder for a crime narrative. Yet, taken in the larger context of the five seasons of the show and its complex, layered, diverse portrayal of a particular city, the artifact of the shipping container comes to represent something more complicated and resonant with regards to the agency of the nonhuman in the Baltimore of The Wire. Rather than interpret the container port and its milieu exclusively as a setting for the character-driven urban drama that unfolds, the shipping containers are given a visual and narrative primacy over several episodes that calls on the viewer to understand the city as a set of objects, assemblages, and lines of force that human characters may manipulate, connect, or collaborate with, but never completely control or master. In spite of his naturalistic style of urban narration, Simon attunes us to the aesthetic uncanniness of the containers, often presenting them in conspicuously aestheticized ways. Our introduction to the port focuses on the colorful architecture of the “stacks,” and, if we weren’t certain whether or not we should find some beauty in these objects, the port master Frank looks appreciatively upon the spectacle of the stacked metal boxes as seagulls circle around the scene. Simon also displays a particular fondness for shooting the stacks in depth, suggesting the physical scale of the port and projecting a kind of sublimity to their imposing yet constantly shifting presence. The visual portrayal of the containers is not limited to the large-scale environment of the port, however. Several scenes feature containers in something akin to a close-up of a human character. As the investigating team assembles in a warehouse with the damaged container in question, it is shown in an overhead shot, making it appear almost as a corpse lying on an examining table—an object laden with secret knowledge and histories, both of which call for and resist interpretation. I should point out that these moments are still subtle enough not to arrest the considerable narrative flow of the show’s many storylines. Simon is no avant-garde filmmaker, yet he does provide a glimpse into a version of the city that, while connected to human endeavor, has a complex, autonomous existence that remains hidden from view. This existence is no less a part of early twenty-first century Baltimore than the panoply of character types—druglords, junkies, cops, politicians, journalists, educators, and common folk—for which The Wire is justly celebrated.

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Their “star turn” is brief, but the place of shipping containers in the urban narratives of The Wire is significant: they are objects themselves that hold other objects; they participate in the cargoization of humans that equates them with commodities; they are nodal points in a commercial network; they are the material underside of globalization; they refigure an urban geography of center and periphery; they both facilitate and, arguably, commit acts of violence. In a larger context beyond Simon’s narrative, containers are part of a much broader production of space that crosses the boundary from the industrial to the ecological. While containers were developed as an efficient means of holding cargo within a terribly inefficient, petroleum-based shipping network of marine vessels, trains, and trucks, they have become akin to an adaptive species equally well-suited to a future of modular urban living: many architects, both professional and amateur, now consider shipping containers as a cheap, wellconstructed, modular basis for residential and commercial spaces. While Simon seems not to want or care to go this far in his consideration of this object, their presentation in The Wire opens up questions not simply about the past, present, and future of one American city, but also about the ambivalent future of nonhuman things within the urban environment more generally. The Wire demonstrates that containers are not just an ordinary object or prop within the human-centered narrative. Drawing upon Bennett’s theories of nonhuman agency, we can certainly class containers as “vibrant matter,” as they form shifting and contingent confederations with other entities: the ships on which they are transported, the cargo (both human and nonhuman) that they carry, the “stacks” that they form when configured with identical containers, the various modes of transport, such as haulage by rail or truck, that will carry them to their final points of distribution, not to mention the workers, computers, and cranes that variously direct their placement in this network. By analyzing their role within a closed system of narrative, however, we can begin to trace their effect on the human stories that comprise the urban milieu of early twenty-first century Baltimore in The Wire. An adaptation of Bennett’s approach to narrative agency can begin with a term common to both her philosophy and to narrative theory: the actant. In his structuralist semiotic approach to narrative, A.J. Greimas (1973) adapted the term “actant” from linguistic semantics to describe a role, or “slot” in a narrative that is fulfilled by a specific semantic function, such as hero, villain, helper, object, and so on. Greimas wanted to attend to the deep and systemic structures of narrative rather than be distracted or diverted by the particulars of human characters. By contrast, Bennett borrows the term from Bruno Latour (who admittedly derived his usage from Greimas) to describe “a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has

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efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events” (viii, emphasis in original). Whatever their contextual differences, both the Greimasian sense and Latourian sense of the word “actant” de-emphasize a categorically human agency: the latter by highlighting the ontological equivalency of humans and nonhumans within material cause and effect, and the former by diminishing the significance of “character” as a unique bearer of agency within narrative. These different, but related, senses of the “actant” are given common footing by David Herman in his narratological study, Story Logic (2004). Herman treats the Greimasian actant explicitly, arguing that Greimas was right to move narrative agency away from an exclusively human domain, and pointing out that the Greimasian theory of actants is “anti-psychological, displacing attention from the interior states to the manifest deeds of participants in a story,” a statement that Bennett would surely endorse (123). Herman, however, disagrees with the Greimasian structuralist notion that all narratives can be fit into a template with a finite number of actantial categories. Herman instead argues for the term “participant,” which he uses to distinguish entities, whether “animate or inanimate” (137), that “encompass roles played by individuals construed as being centrally and obligatorily involved in events.” By contrast, “nonparticipants” occupy “roles played by individuals construed as being only peripherally and optionally involved” (134). One central implication of this approach is that, “over the course of a narrative one and the same storyworld entity can be assigned several roles,” whether participatory or nonparticipatory (156). Looking at narrative in this way accords no special or unique ontological status to active human agents (“characters”) as opposed to material or nonhuman entities (“things” or “settings”). This is not to say that no distinction is to be made between humans and nonhumans in narrative, only that such a distinction is not foundational in understanding narrative cause and effect. The idea of the human or nonhuman participant in narrative seems to accord with Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter:” the participant may not possess a human psychology or intentionality, but its efficacy in catalyzing change and transformation is no less powerful. Bennett’s notion of distributive agency takes the narrative role of the nonhuman participant even farther, perhaps. In her model, there are always a “swarm of vitalities at play. The task becomes to identify the contours of the swarm and the kind of relations that obtain between its bits” (32). One dimension of this interpretive process is to trace the power of “human-nonhuman assemblages” effected by this confederate agency (Bennett 38). We thus move from Herman’s model of a particulate, if ever-shifting, model of “participants” and “nonparticipants” within narrative to a more sustained look

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at how particular participants can join together—often in human-nonhuman combinations—to produce change within, as Herman aptly puts it, “the emergent ecology of storyworlds” (133). To phrase this in more practical terms for narrative analysis: we will necessarily come up with more complex and granular accounts of agency when we look at actantial participant-assemblages at specific, contingent points within narrative, rather than effects issuing from the essentialized and psychologized anthropomorphic entities known as “characters.” Returning to The Wire, and the complex urban dynamics that it depicts, we can see how the shipping containers are co-participants that both push certain narratives forward while prohibiting other narratives from emerging into the storyworld. The former is best illustrated by the role that containers play in the decline of the urban waterfront, while the latter is revealed in the foreclosed narratives of the immigrant women who are suffocated in the container. Before the dead women are discovered, the first episode of the season outlines a sociological narrative of the decline of white ethnic working-class communities, particularly those who have historically worked as longshoremen or stevedores in waterfront areas. The opening shot of the first episode shows a police boat cruising through the harbor with container terminal cranes visible in the background. Shortly after the episode begins, we are introduced to Frank Sobotka, a local boss of the stevedores union who oversees the Patapsco container terminal in Baltimore harbor. In a brief scene, the “stacks” of containers come into focus: as Frank gazes around the terminal, the camera takes note of the containers by framing them in lengthy shots. He then has a conversation with his nephew Nicky about the shortage of work for stevedores, which the containerization of commerce has eliminated (and which motivates Frank to participate in lucrative smuggling operations). Frank is then called to answer a complaint about his son, Ziggy, who has “misplaced” a “can” among the stacks—suggesting that the identical appearance of the thousands of containers has turned stevedore labor into a technical, bureaucratic operation rather than an endeavor of manual labor. The visual prominence of the containers in the first fifteen minutes of the narrative has shown them to be participants in an emerging narrative: they are a material condition that has precipitated an oversupply of labor with respect to available work. This storyline forms one strand in the narrative weave of The Wire, which extrapolates from individual characters to a more generalized transformation of the American manufacturing city. When we view human characters as co-participants with material objects such as shipping containers, however, we can see an agency distributed not simply among individual human choices and actions, but also in confederation with objects whose sphere of agency spans from the human-scaled

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events of the harbor to global networks of production, distribution, and consumption that are less easily represented in narrative. By contrast, the “crime” that forms one of the main narrative events of Season Two is notable in part because the containers play a participatory role that transforms potential narrative participants—the thirteen women found dead inside—into nonparticipants. When the women are discovered and the cause of their death ascertained—what one investigating officer describes as an “airpipe crushed during the offload […] accidental, probably”—there is no discernible human agency to which the deaths can be attributed (highlighted by the passive construction in the language of the officer). Notably, the dialogue in the show highlights the inability to construct narratives that would account both for the specific cause of death as well as the individual, biographical narratives of the thirteen women. The officers are only able to speak of the women in terms of their absence of identity, noting that “we don’t have a passport or visa in the bunch” and that they can only be officially documented as “Jane Does.” When trying to determine the agency responsible for the paperwork to be filed, one officer notes that, if they were alive, they would be under the jurisdiction of Immigration, “but they’re dead so they’re cargo.” This description underscores the fine line between human and nonhuman that cuts both ways: where there is only a nonhuman agency responsible for their deaths, their status as human participants in narrative is conspicuously denied by their categorization as “cargo.” The assemblage of the container and the thirteen women highlights the contrast in agentic capacity between the “thing” and the “humans:” while the vibrant matter of the “thing” is understood to have agentic powers, the humans in this instance are rendered into mute, abstracted objects. In this assemblage, the contrast between narrative participants and nonparticipants seems especially stark. It is worth pointing out that, while the role of the container is significant in the first several episodes of Season Two, it is an indirect participant in many narrative lines that can be traced throughout the season, as well as the entire fiveseason run of the show. The narrative of the dead women in the container and the working-class cultures associated with the waterfront connect at points with other lines, including the smuggling of drugs that find their way to the dealers of the city’s largely African-American neighborhoods, jurisdictional rivalries between the city’s law enforcement institutions, and political questions about whether to support urban gentrification or an investment in the industry of the port area. In its connection—both literal and thematic—with these complex structures of urban life, the shipping container is a material artifact that can arrive at certain truths about the postindustrial city that a top-down description might overlook. Certainly, a complex, multi-leveled narrative like The Wire is

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especially amenable to the use of nonhuman, object participants within the narrative. Because the narrative storyworld is limited in spatial scope (almost exclusively taking place within Baltimore and its environs), yet is expansive in terms of the characters and storylines that populate this space, the circulation of objects becomes a way both to connect narrative threads and to introduce overarching thematic registers that cannot be expressed through individual human characters.

C ONCLUSION Shipping containers, I suggest, refigure the spaces, flows, and forces of the city in a way that cannot be limited to a human scale. As their name implies, they are ontologically empty, a form enclosing a void, which is then filled with “contents:” raw materials, finished goods, or even (as in the case of The Wire) human cargo. And yet they possess an inherent substance: when stacked in container terminals or depots, they form a modular architecture of their own, a visual counterpart to the city skyline that we associate with the urban downtown. In fact, we can look at container ports as the repressed double of the urban financial center based on the flow of money and information. The immateriality of the global economy can be seen in the shining façade of downtown skyscrapers, while its material obverse is visible, often several miles away in the oversized cranes used to transfer containers to and from the ships at dock and the stacks of colorful rectangular metal boxes that stamp a common form of exchange on a diversity of material commodities. A container port thus offers an alternative, competing geography of the city that destabilizes the idea of a center with concentric zones radiating outward toward the suburbs. The visible, and visualizable, city center is a testament to a human geography of the city—the city as knowable, ordered, and organized around human activity and agency. The port is, by contrast, an illustration of a nonhuman geography of the city, where the “invisible” materiel of urban life is gathered, exchanged, and distributed. Narrative analysis, I hope, will play some part in an emergent nonhuman epistemology of the city. Because cities have served such a central role within literary narratives, especially from the nineteenth century to the present, they offer finite, systematic expressions of urban relations that inevitably show the multiple interfaces between the human and the material and abstract dimensions of the nonhuman. Beyond this, narratives can be models for an emergent model of subjectivity that can both see the complexity of the posthuman city while at the same time holding individual and communal interests as central to any

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future-thinking urban project. Ultimately, what I am pointing toward here is not so much a sudden, epochal transformation in the relation between human and nonhuman worlds or even a decisive, easily marked change in the nature of cities. Rather, I am suggesting a change in orientation, or at the very least a call to focus on the complexity of worlds that are washed out or attenuated when we consider them to be the “mere physical facts” of a built environment. There is a certain amount of built-in unpredictability to the nonhuman entities and artifacts of cities. Any amount of urban planning and infrastructural work might not prevent rising sea levels from transforming the material conditions of cities. The material agencies that precipitate the failure of bridges and buildings might happen at any time, invisible to the human eye. At the same time, a more selfconscious confederacy between the human and nonhuman might provide some sustainable solutions to persistent problems, whether it be through the repurposing of disused shipping containers as modular, low-cost commercial or residential structures, or the use of “geo-tubes”—a polymer tube stuffed with sludge, silt, or other sediment—that can serve uses from shoreline protection to land reclamation (Making the Geologic Now 75). With the recognition of the nonhuman as a significant player in urban landscapes, we imaginatively reconceive urban spaces as immanent, contingent assemblages in the messy materiality of the present rather than some future promise of a shining city on a hill.

W ORKS C ITED Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2010. Print. “Collateral Damage.” The Wire: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Ed Burns and David Simon. Dir. Ed Bianchi. HBO, 2003. DVD. “Ebb Tide.” The Wire: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Ed Burns and David Simon. Dir. Ed Bianchi. HBO, 2003. DVD. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition. 1922. Ed. Michael North. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. “Actants, Actors, and Figures.” 1973. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins. Intro. Paul J. Perron. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. 106-20. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999.

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Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2004. Print. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Opperman. “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 448-75. Print. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2006. Print. Mumford, Lewis. “What is a City?” 1937. The City Reader. Ed. Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout. 3rd Ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 92-96. Print. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” 1903. The Blackwell City Reader. Eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. 11-19. Print. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford and London: Oxford UP, 1973. Print.

C OMMENTS i

ii

iii

While it is true that most of the larger container terminals are located in port cities adjacent to oceans or major waterways, one can find container terminals—or smaller depots—in most inland cities of any size. See Neil Smith, “Scale Bending and the Fate of the National,” in Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society, and Method, eds. E. Shepard and R.B. McMaster (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004): 192-212. Most widely-used definitions of posthumanism and the posthuman focus on the interface between technology and the human body, arguing generally for the liberatory qualities of hybridizations that begin to render essentialized definitions of the “human” meaningless to difficult to maintain. Early contributions to the discourse of posthumanism come from the 1980s, namely with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Donna Haraway’s oftcited “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985). More recent articulations of the term have been made by N. Katherine Hayles in her work, How We Became Posthuman (1999) and Cary Wolfe in his introduction to What is Posthumanism? (2009). Hayles sums up the optimistic, technology-based orientation toward posthumanism in the following quote: “The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-

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iv

v

vi

vii

informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (3). As this passage suggests, Hayles focuses on how material transformations to individual bodies model emergent subjectivities that are no longer reliant on a normative notion of the “human.” Port cities are especially vulnerable to the geological and hydrological shifts wrought by global climate change. Low-lying cities such as Miami already need to plan massive infrastructural works to keep rising sea levels at bay. See, for example, “Goodbye, Miami.” Rolling Stone 1186 (4 July 2013). For a more wide-ranging treatment of the interface between geological and climatological change in the context of the Anthropocene, see Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Everyday Life (Brooklyn: Punctum Press, 2013). UN Habitat, “City Population by Country, 2000-2025. ” Web. 20 August 2015.

This transformation is not easy to identify with any kind of precision, but one qualitative marker is captured by Raymond Williams in his description of mid-nineteenth-century London: “social dissolution in the very process of aggregation” (216). Another useful, if oversimplified distinction, is the one made by Ferdinand Tönnies in his seminal work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). The quantum leap from Williams’ “knowable community” or Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft to a highly articulated, compartmentalized society and sprawling built environment that could not be taken in at a glance indicates the passage to the city as “metropolis.” I have in mind the latter half of the nineteenth century as the age in which the metropolis came into existence. Perhaps the most interesting and sophisticated connection drawn between The Wire and Dickensian fiction is Sean Michael Robinson's post in the Hooded Utilitarian blog, “‘When It’s Not Your Turn:’ The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s ‘The Wire.’” Robinson’s essay is a parodic “rediscovery” of the work of a fictional Victorian author, Horatio Bucklesby Ogden (which, of course, gives the initials “H.B.O.”) and his unjustly forgotten work, “The Wire.” Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Robinson’s post is the inclusion of photographically-reprinted “pages” from Ogden’s “work,” which give glimpses into key moments from the television series rendered in Victorian-style prose, as well as simulated engravings that visually depict certain scenes as well. See Sean Michael Robinson, “When It’s Not Your Turn,” Hooded Utilitarian 23 Mar. 2011. Web. 24 Oct. 2014.

Fueling Change The Gas Station in Urban America G ARY S CALES

For millions of Americans, the gas station is little more than a necessary feature of everyday life. Each day, patrons pull onto the forecourt, fill up their cars and leave with ease—a process so frequent and undemanding that most consider it both ordinary and forgettable. Nonetheless, this routine has a far more significant history than its simplicity might suggest. Even the briefest of observations reveals the gas station as a rich historical source: location informs traffic patterns, youth gatherings make it a social arena, newspaper stands allow for media access, and bright lights advertise convenience stores. These diverse functions have helped the gas station become universally important to a wide variety of demographics; today, with a gas station for every two thousand motorists,i it is one of the most used and necessary spaces in the United States.ii Moreover, as both a product and an outcome of its broad appeal, gas stations can be found across a diverse range of geographic locations; they are a standard feature of urban centers, suburban intersections and rural highways. The historical value of the gas station, however, cannot be assessed from the perspective of patrons alone, as it is also linked to architectural and sociocultural history. Given its value as a historical artifact, it is surprising that the gas station has been largely ignored as a subject of scholarly investigation; attention has been infrequent, often brief and mostly of an architectural focus. Academic studies of the history of the gas station are limited to a single book—The Gas Station in America.iii While the analyses of Jakle and Sculle are convincing and interesting, by making the gas station the central focus of their book, the boundaries of their investigation are naturally narrow. Detailed research regarding corporate growth, roadside marketing and architectural evolution is plentiful; however, this approach contributes little to explaining the effect of gas stations upon nearby landscapes or local citizens. While the authors

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acknowledge that the gas station brought about “changing social complexions” (201) and exerted influence as an “important commercial colonizer” (209), they fail to expand upon these significant statements. In this article, I approach the gas station not as the primary subject but as a tool to help improve our understanding of the development of the American cityscape and how such transformations have affected the internal social mechanisms and daily encounters of suburban neighborhoods across the United States. Discussions of suburbs in the United States have attracted a strong intellectual interest since the late 1980s when a new generation of scholars began to revise previous work that presumed suburbia to be a purely socioeconomic phenomenon—“a conscious choice based on the economic structure and cultural values of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie” (Fishman 8-9). While commendable for highlighting the historical importance of suburbs, these early historians subscribed to the idea of suburbs as “bourgeois utopias” (4), believing “suburbia as fixed and timeless, existing without conflict or change” (Baxandall/ Ewen xv). These first historians of suburbs overlooked the relationships between the physical growth of suburban housing, increasing domestic migration, the onset of the civil rights movement, and the advent of grassroots politics.iv Authors associated with ‘The New Suburban History’ have successfully highlighted these important narratives and their connections to suburban development, particularly in the post-war era. Presenting ideas more insightfully and intricately than their predecessors, they observed “that American suburbs come in every type, shape, and size: rich and poor, industrial and residential, new and old” (Jackson 5). Revisionist in nature, this new research has emphasized the integral part suburbs play in the evolution of the modern city by examining them from a “broader metropolitan perspective” and by “paying attention to suburbs in political and economic relationships” (Sugrue/ Kruse 6). While this recent work has successfully demonstrated the influence of the modern suburb upon the socio-political and economic condition of the United States, the emphases on political and social struggles have often demoted any thorough analyses of the historical everyday experience of suburbanites.v The quotidian realm of ordinary spaces and the meanings people have derived from them, remain largely uncharted and open to investigation. In this article, I address the role of gas stations in remolding the suburban experience. Using the gas station as an apparatus to illustrate these changes, I first look at how the gas station initiated important topographical changes that served to attract fresh commerce and alter the use of nearby property. I also examine the physical form and service style of gas stations in the context of drive-in culture and argue that gas stations made a notable contribution to the localization of automobile use. Afterward, I look at

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how people came to use this new suburban topography and demonstrate how the gas station has served to transform the cultural meanings and expectations of everyday suburban life.

I S M AIN S TREET D OOMED ? In 1931, architect Frank Lloyd Wright suggested the era of “Main Street” and its associated commercial and social practices were at an end. As the automobile became an affordable mode of transport and cities continued their outward expansion, Wright claimed the growth of roadside retail indicated a new trend in commerce: “A movement is now on foot, and has made great headway […]. [R]oadside marketing in 1930 took from the ordinary retail business of the country $500,000,000” (Dale 766). The income and frequency of these businesses reflected a significant shift in the geography of retailing. As the appeal of the roadside as a trading location grew, the status of downtown and “Main Street” as the most lucrative commercial zones came under threat. In this section, I contend that the gas station contributed extensively to this transformation as it drew retail away from the urban core. This occurred for three main reasons. First, during the 1920s, as the number of automobiles rose sharply, the gas station rapidly grew into a customary feature of suburban street corners. As they became established and accepted, they soon began to influence adjacent properties. While the responsibility for these changes was sometimes limited to entrepreneurial gas station owners and operators, it also occurred because of the recurrent patronage of service stations. The high frequency of customers acted as a significant lure for other types of business activity. These changes took place in both established residential neighborhoods as well as on the fringes of developing city suburbs. Second, the gas station was a notable influence on the growth of buildings associated with “drive-in” culture. While the concept of “on-the-go” lunches and instant drinks antedates the automobile age (Liebs 194-196), the purposeful design of the service station was instrumental in harmonizing convenient dining with the liberty of the automobile. As local “drive-in” restaurants and movie theatres sprang up across suburban America, nearby amenities reduced the need to travel and use of the car became increasingly localized. Journeys became shorter and trips downtown less desirable and less necessary. While I do not foreswear established historical assertions that “the motorcar was responsible for the suburban real estate boom” (Flink 141) in the early twentieth century, I argue

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that gas stations were responsible for important innovations in property design, which resulted in substantial changes in automobile use. Third, while many scholars have discussed the American roadside as an “ever changeful world of fad, fashion, and taste” (Jakle/ Sculle 14), few have considered it from the viewpoint of physical movements and the everyday experience.vi I contend that while the automobile opened the interstices “lying between suburban rail axes” to residential development that stood apart “from the densely populated traction-line corridors” (Muller 70), this change did not serve to “infinitely expand the radius of individual mobility” (Flink 154); rather, it created a sphere of local convenience and appreciated amenity. I argue that the creation of this sphere was strongly influenced by the gas station.

E NTREPRENEURS As gas stations evolved into a necessary and accepted feature of the suburban topography, many service station owners came to realize that, while gasoline sales meant a steady income, there was significant scope for an improvement in profits, particularly within the captive markets that suburban areas provided. Seizing these opportunities, many began to expand their operations, and, while some chose to enter into convenience retailing, others proved more entrepreneurial, venturing into businesses traditionally considered unrelated to sales of gasoline or automobile services. The roadside restaurant was a common example. In 1931, the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, which operated a number of stations around residential areas in Chicago, Illinois, opened a dining car style restaurant on a plot of land bordering one of their stations. A trade publication reported that the success of the venture revealed important “changing conditions in buying habits” and that patronage of similar businesses indicated a “greater demand for acceptable eating places” at the roadside (“Gasoline-Food Combination Watched” 61). Another station owner in St. Charles, Missouri, opened a purpose-built restaurant that offered “appetizing home-cooked foods in an attractive dining room.” The manager reported his need to increase the capacity of his dining room because “trade had been so brisk,” and he added that those who “visited on week-ends, holidays, or for dinner on week-day nights […] remained steady customers” (Barringer “Superior” 43). These reports both signified the popularity of these new businesses and strongly indicated that many customers were not just passing tourists, but also came from nearby areas.

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Evidence strongly suggests these establishments were actually more popular with local residents than they were with passing tourists; a survey of customers at one restaurant “showed some stopping for food” who were not “buying oil products, accessories or car services” (“Such Mashed Potatoes” 23). A booklet published in 1931 detailed how these businesses had identified and successfully developed a new market for people who preferred to eat locally “rather than subject themselves to city traffic congestion.” The booklet concluded that gasoline retail companies who were also “providing services outside of the sale of gasoline” were proving “a handicap to the normal development of the established city restaurant” (Ward/ Dickinson 61-62). The growth of commercial enterprises originating at gas station locations was not limited to simple eateries. A station in Bloomington, Illinois, renovated its buildings and premises to provide extra space on the property, which was then leased to four different stores including a barber and auto spares and accessories store (Barringer “Changes” 45). In Roanoke, Virginia, a station owner leased part of his land for the construction of a miniature golf course (“Virginia Station Sells Gasoline” 72). A gasoline retailer in Salt Lake City, Utah, continued the normal operation of its station while leasing land to a “small drive-in community shopping center.” The shopping arcade was “L-shaped” to improve access from the street and to cater to parked cars, and the area included a variety of businesses, including a “drugstore, bakery, grocery, fruit store, shoe repair shop and beauty shop” (“Good Gallonage at Shopping Center” 37). Although these ventures were often orientated towards retail, this was not the only method used by gas station operators to improve their business and raise their profits. Many companies used service stations as their headquarters and built offices to lease to others. In 1935, the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company in St. Louis, Missouri, chose to relocate their headquarters behind one of their service stations. The site was close to a large public park away from the downtown district. The new building was “completely air-conditioned” with “a mass of fixed windows.” It had been constructed for “the comfort and efficiency of its office force,” in a location designed with a “distinctive advantage to the visitors and to the company’s sales force,” as there was “no problem in finding a place to park” due to the seventy spaces available at the premises (“In Appearance a Modern” 33). Situated in a convenient location with ample parking, hermetically sealed windows and an open plan interior, the complex was essentially a precursor to the modern suburban business offices that would come to characterize the post-war suburban landscape from the late 1960s on. These developments were not uncommon. In Rockford, Illinois, the Smith Oil and Refining Company also built an eight-storey office block at the location

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of one their gas stations. According to a trade journal, the “development of the corner with an attractive service station helped in establishing the trend of the business section,” which assured the “natural development” of other nearby office buildings (Barringer “Land” 61). Despite the poor economic conditions of the period, within three months, eighty percent of the building had been rented to other local firms (ibid. 63). The quick construction and swift occupation rates of these new office developments began to indicate the beginnings of a new kind of suburban landscape. These developing regions on the edges of cities that were once predominantly residential were fast becoming interspersed with commercial real estate.

C OMMERCIAL ATTRACTION These topographical changes were not simply the result of entrepreneurial gas station operators; many independent businesses were keen to open near gas stations. Their reasons were twofold: first, with the relative inefficiency of early automobile engines, drivers frequently needed to refuel their vehicles.vii Furthermore they were often limited to the use of a ‘dipstick’ to monitor fuel quantity. As this method was crude and produced irregular results, drivers would visit the filling station often to avoid “the worry of ever being caught with an empty gasoline tank” (‘The Baer-Glauber Ford Gasoline’ 4). The regularity of these visits thus provided a stable and recurrent flow of customers. The high numbers and regular transit of customers at gas stations were an open invitation to other businessmen, who were quick to accept. The following two examples illustrate the patterns of this development. The first focuses on Summit Hill, an affluent suburb of St Paul, Minnesota, and demonstrates how the arrival of a gas station encouraged an existing residential block to evolve into a set of retail stores. The first gas station to open in the Summit Hill neighborhood of St. Paul was a Pure Oil Filling Station at 1036 Grand Avenue in 1923 (“Saint Paul Historic Context Study”). At this time, the street was almost entirely residential and lined with large Victorian style houses on individual plots. Three businesses had opened on this section of the street before 1923. The first, a drugstore, opened in 1912, but it closed shortly afterwards. The second, an auto garage, closed in 1918, less than a year after opening (“Saint Paul Historic Context Study” and St. Paul, MN City Directory 1918, 1368-1369) while a grocer operated intermittently from 1913 (St. Paul, MN City Directories 1912, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918 and 1920).

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After the arrival of the Pure Oil Station, two more businesses opened within a year: a drugstore opposite, and another filling station on the same side of the street (St. Paul, MN City Directory 1924). Three years later, a confectioner, barber and shoe repairer had arrived (St. Paul, MN City Directory 1926). A cinema, ballroom and auto garage had opened by 1929 (St. Paul, MN City Directory 1929) and were joined by a refrigerator and appliance store, tea rooms, a library, and a miniature golf course in 1932 (Figure 1) (St. Paul, MN City Directory 1932). The arrival of the gas station was important for two reasons. First, because the Pure Oil station offered lubrication and greasing services,viii it is likely customers had to wait for the job to be completed.ix The businesses that opened near the gas station catered to these waiting customers. Second, the advent of the additional gas stations added to the number of potential customers for nearby stores. Not only did the gas station bring business, but in these terms it also stabilized local commerce. This pattern of commercial property development did not just apply to existing residential areas; service stations were also a significant lure for businesses when located on suburban fringes. A previously undeveloped block in Pasadena, California, provides an excellent case study of such new development. In 1923, a filling station opened at the corner of East Washington and North Hill Avenue (Residence and Business Directory of Pasadena 1923). Within twelve months, at the same intersection, a bakery, shoe repairer and two grocers had begun to trade (Residence and Business Directory of Pasadena 1924). Three years later, adjacent properties included a barber, a ‘dry goods’x store, an electrical supplies shop and a furniture maker (Residence and Business Directory of Pasadena 1927). In 1933, the grocers and bakery had been razed and replaced by a large Safeway supermarket on the northeast corner of the intersection (Residence and Business Directory of Pasadena 1933). In both St. Paul and Pasadena, the gas station was an important catalyst in the development of local retail outlets. In St. Paul, the appearance of a service station helped to transform an established residential area into a diverse collection of commercial outlets, while in Pasadena the effect was to help mould the development and geography of previously unused land. By attracting commerce and providing new and dependable markets, the gas station undoubtedly influenced the use of nearby land regardless of the existing topography. The ultimate outcome was a fundamental reorganization of space; no longer was downtown or “Main Street” the optimum location for commercial enterprise. As suburban streets and blocks became profitable and desirable for local businesses, so the relationship between gas stations and local stores became

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symbiotic; one profited from the other. As the traditional and rigid demarcations of concentrated commercial districts began to yield to more heterogeneous arrangements of urban space, the gas station was at the center, significantly influencing the development of these new spaces. While service stations affected adjacent land and property, their design and function proved of significant influence. With the increasing use of automobiles, major efforts were made to optimize the design of station forecourts.xi Automobile garages and service providers had existed prior to the gas station, but they had catered only to stationary, unattended vehicles.xii The filling station was the first to accommodate the automobile on the premises while in use. The “wide easy approaches” of gas stations provided “plenty of space on the driveways […] to serve customers conveniently” (“The Modern Service Station” 33-34). The “public is to be served in a manner never before possible” (“Finest Fuel For All Autos” 8), the Los Angeles Times announced in 1933. Another source claimed: “there is certainly a great need for such a proposition” (“Thirty Stations” 8). To meet this increased demand while also returning profits, retailers were fully aware that innovation was crucially important to their success. In many ways, gasoline is a unique product, as it is purchased only because the automobile requires it. As “sight, sound, taste, touch and smell” (“Superservice Station Design” 1) could not be used by the customer when deciding which brand to buy or from which station to purchase the fuel, marketers were keen to add some form of extra value to their product. For nearly all retailers, the solution came in the form of “full service.” Beginning in the 1920s, “full service” soon became a powerful advertising tool. For example, customers at Texaco stations could receive “Circle Service,” where, aside from refilling the vehicle with gasoline, the attendant would check tires, wipe the screen, clean the headlights, and possibly offer battery and radiator services as well as general maintenance advice. This specific service took place while the customer remained in the car. Similar campaigns were run by Gulf Oil and Shell, along with many other independent vendors (Russell 47-67). The concept of a commercially active off-street space, simultaneously combining automobile use with customer service, proved to be such a popular convenience that other types of businesses soon began to replicate the principle. Spurred on by the growing popularity of drinks and snacks sold at gas stations, an increasing number of roadside cafeterias, based on the service principles devised by gas station operators, soon began to emerge. While the early variants of these establishments were a “motley assortment […] of shacks and shanties bedecked with giant hand-painted signs” (Liebs 204), they soon became more professional outfits. Photographic evidence reveals the unequivocal influence of the

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Sources as stated in text.

Figure 1. Property development on Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN. Sources stated in text. Not to Scale.

gas station. By 1931, there were over 100,000 operators of roadside stands throughout the United States, “almost all of whom had expanded from filling stations” (Dale 765).

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At this time, mainly in western cities where the automobile contributed to “a spectacular degree of horizontal growth” (Foster 48), many small roadside shopping malls had begun to accommodate the car, providing “drive-in” facilities suited to the motorist. The “drive-in” restaurant borrowed heavily from the gas station, “which provided the model” (Longstreth 37) for these new style retail outlets, including small roadside ‘drive-in’ malls (ibid., Ch. 2). The culture soon spread to the movie theatre (Liebs 153-168), whose physical size and visual presence reflected the momentous transformations that came to characterize suburban retail sites after 1930. By encouraging not only the proliferation of local commerce, but also the growth of automobile oriented roadside outlets, the service station contributed extensively to the localization of automobile use.xiii Signs further reflected this evolution. Gasoline retailers had placed large signs at the edge of their properties since the beginning of the 1920s. While many early examples were tasteful and carefully painted to ensure they conformed to their surrounding suburban environment, some grew large and bright enough to incur the wrath of local citizens. In some areas companies even faced legal action unless they were removed (“Ten States regulate Posting” 46-48 and Treu 115). Importantly, these signs were not simply directional. While obviously designed to attract the passing motorist, their physical height and size announced the suburb as an automobile-based community: an American landscape best viewed through the windshield. It was not long before other local businesses replicated this signage,xiv illustrating that, while all the amenities and comforts required were situated close by, the automobile was the optimum mode of transport to procure the goods or services on offer. In 1928, The New York Times pronounced that there was “no evading the issue” of filling station signage design and that it would “be pedantry to quarrel” (“Beauty In The Gas Age”) over the inevitable omnipresence of the signs. Within a few years, restaurants and grocery stores displayed “graphics not unlike the basic pole sign of the filling station” (Treu 105-106). These innovations were a crucial factor in the creation of an automobile-based landscape. As these businesses proliferated, they learned to appreciate the automobile as their primary customer. Supermarkets, auto-repair shops, movie theatres, restaurants, and gigantic shopping malls all came to cater obsequiously to the car. As suburban topography accommodated these changes, the relationship between horizontal urban growth and the length of automobile journeys became inversely proportionate; as metropolitan areas got larger, automobiles became more localized. During a gubernatorial campaign speech in 1928, Franklin D. Roosevelt said the automobile made “it possible for those of us who live in the

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cities to get out into the country” (Roosevelt 55). By the early 1990s, a survey reflected a complete change in car use. Conducted in Boston, Los Angeles and Houston, the research concluded that more than forty percent of trips by automobile were less than five miles and only eight percent were over twenty-five miles (Brant/ Leitman 16). Americans lived more locally than ever before, and the gas station played an important role in teaching them how to do so. The suburban landscape had been almost completely transformed as early as the 1970s. The once quiet residential retreats were not only populated with retail stores, restaurants and office buildings, but were also linked to other neighborhoods and districts by bright and noisy “commercial corridors.” For the many that lived in suburbs, with a wide variety of products and services in such close proximity, the need and desire to go downtown was greatly diminished. The propagation of these businesses was testament to their popularity, and, although there were many reasons for such transformations, the influence of the gas station should not be underestimated. In both form and function, it proved a major inspiration to American retailing and suburban lifestyle. The ultimate topographical impact of the service station was twofold. First, the arrangements of urban space that had become conventional during the postCivil War era yielded to a more mixed and integrated form. Second, automobile usage became more localized than ever before. While people still continued to travel to inner city areas, the convenience of the new suburban landscape made such journeys less and less frequent. The gas station was a key element in the creation of this landscape.

A N EW E VERYDAY L IFE Gas stations were not simply a catalyst for topographical change. Once they had become established, the range of products and services that they offered greatly diversified. By retailing such a wide variety of goods and services, the gas station forged a role as a multifunctional space that came to affect the everyday experience of suburban life in powerful ways. The original suburban ideal was separation; suburbs were not simply “parklike grounds at the edge of the city” (Rome 13), but were also imagined spaces where residents “could look back at the city they had escaped” (Hayden 24). These neighborhoods were envisioned as a “refuge from urban ills such as commerce, industry, and persons unlike themselves” (Morton 671). They were also family-oriented spaces, offering “the possibility of shielding children from […] urban-inspired nihilism (Miller 402). Suburban living therefore provided an individual space, a family space and,

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critically, a private space uncorrupted and thus free of any outside interests that opposed the beliefs and desires of its occupants. In the early twentieth century, the gas station was the definitive antithesis of this concept. Dangerous and noisy, early filling stations were ramshackle operations where gasoline was brought “across the pavement in leaky containers” (Williamson et. al. 219), while spent oil, kerosene and other chemicals often stained the ground. As gas stations refined their architecture, retailing methods and marketing operations, they were able to reconcile this juxtaposition and transform the ways in which local residents came to use and experience not just the gas station but suburbia itself. In its earliest form, the gas station catered only to the needs of the local motorist, who, in the 1920s, despite improvements in the design and affordability of automobiles, drove vehicles requiring frequent maintenance. Until around 1920, the sale, service and replacement of vehicle parts had been handled by specialized, independent garages.xv As automobile sales continued to rise (“The U.S. Car and Truck Sales” 2013) so did the demand for such services, and many gas station owners and retailers began to offer these services. These newstyle gas stations became known as “One-Stop” stations and provided far greater convenience to the suburban motorist, who no longer had “to go from place to place for various jobs such as washing or polishing, general repairs, lubrication, battery service [or] radiator repairs” (“Patrons Pleased As Firm” C14). While sales records are unfortunately unrecoverable, the proliferation of the stations is a strong indicator of their success.xvi Trade journals indicate the majority of sales were to local residents. An “ordinary neighborhood gas station” in Cleveland, Ohio “contacted, coded and catalogued” their local customers, cross-referencing vehicle license numbers with state government records. “We know the names of all customers,” the station owner claimed, “the customer’s car […] and his address.” The system was so successful that sales at the station soon doubled (Kelly 39). Another station had two managers “devote all their time to soliciting accounts” within the “natural marketing territory” (Barringer “Salesman” 79), while others toured local homes “constantly ringing door bells” (Barringer “How Marketers” 26 and Watson 40). Motorists welcomed these sales campaigns, appreciating the new “One-Stop” stations, which provided all the necessary services required for automobile ownership at one single location. By expanding the services they offered, gasoline marketers soon learned they could reach (and sometimes open) new markets and made efforts to broaden their appeal to customers other than motorists. Many station owners and retailing chains chose to enter into the sale of products not associated with automobiles, such as food and drink. The result was for service stations essentially to become local stores. This retailing had become a common feature of neighborhood gas

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stations by the end of the 1920s. One station in Kalamazoo, Michigan, built special “saviender” kiosks between the sidewalk and the station forecourt specifically constructed to attract passing pedestrians. According to the station owner, the majority of sales were to local school pupils: “with about 1000 students this summer we found that we could sell most anything” (Barringer “Ice-Cream” 37). It was also reported that new patrons were “often gained from neighbors who walk down for a ‘Coke’ or perhaps half a dozen bottles for the family” and “with no nearby grocery, quite a business is done by stocking them” (“Soft Drink Sale Encourages” 30-38). By the 1990s, convenience food marts had become so profitable gasoline was considered a supporting product.xvii As the array of goods and services available at gas stations diversified, so did the customer demographics. No longer was the gas station a simple necessity for the local motorist; pedestrians, policemen, local diners, and children all came to use the gas station for their own specific reasons and silently declared their approval through repeat and frequent patronage. Importantly, this widespread approval and appreciation of commercial space marked a distinct departure from the traditional ideals of suburban living which had been founded upon the principles of retreat from the overcrowded and socially corrupting atmosphere of city life, which had typified the Gilded Age American city.

C ONCLUSION The story of the gas station is one of changing proximities. From the instant it first arrived in suburbs, it immediately set in motion a process of spatial deconstruction and reformulation that would come to impact the topography and the everyday features of suburban life in equal measure. Foremost, the gas station played an instrumental role in producing new arrangements of geographical space. The magnitude of this change was later enhanced by the many innovative architectural styles of gas stations, which became a major inspiration for the design and construction of other commercial property. In this context, the impact of the gas station was highly visible, strongly influencing both existing and new suburban spaces. The ultimate effect of these changes was to draw commerce away from the inner city business and retail districts, which had become commonplace during the decades following the American Civil War. As a result, suburbs acquired a new status as arenas not just of residential dwelling, but also of regular commercial activity. The outcome was a fundamental restructuring of urban space, and the traditional functions of downtown and ‘Main Street’ became largely obsolete. In fact, within forty years

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of gas stations entering suburbs, ‘Main Street’ was so much more a memory than a reality that it was enshrined at the Disneyland theme park—itself a suburban creation—as “the village of bygone years” (Findlay 95). Second, as the conventional retail districts began to yield to suburban commercial development, automobile journeys became shorter. Responding to the new demand for convenience, local businesses adapted to the automobile customer and, through employing many of the marketing techniques and strategies conceived by gasoline retailers, helped to transform suburban topography. As noted by eminent landscape writer J. B. Jackson, America “acquired new needs” during the twentieth century and “looked to the landscape to satisfy them” (Jackson 150). In creating a landscape that could provide this desired contentment, the gas station played a significant role. Furthermore, and most importantly, by bringing commerce into the suburbs, gas stations helped to transform the suburban ideal. Despite starting life as somewhat antithetical to the ideals of suburbia, gas stations “invaded […] residential communities” (Peterson 38) and quickly became naturalized as an integral feature of suburban life. Once established, service stations became an important catalyst in the evolution of everyday life, helping to alter existing habits while also creating new forms of daily living. As the full influence of gas stations became clear, suburban residents began to experience a distinctly local world. Suburbs ceased to be a simple residential annex from which one could access the commercial offerings of the city and instead became self-sufficient communities complete with the basic functions of a small town. Crucially, as suburban space was remolded into multi-purpose outlets of products and services, local homeowners and residents came to appreciate these new amenities, which were closer than ever before, rather than rejecting these commercial intrusions. Through accepting and valuing this proximity, the suburban ideal was radically reformed; convenience became the priority, and, when nearby commerce was able to fulfill this need, it was welcomed with open arms. By demonstrating the benefits of local commerce and by successfully meeting the demand created, the gas station was at the forefront of this transformation. In summary, these transformations in the landscape and ideals of suburbia created a significant shift in everyday experience. While it did not do so alone, the gas station played a noteworthy role in making convenience an emblem of suburban life. Once a place to escape the corrupting bustle and fanfare of the metropolitan core, suburbs are now places where twenty-four hour nearby commerce provides instant convenience. Through its ubiquity and adaptability, the gas station helps to explain this transformation.

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While it is essential that the history of the gas station be evaluated from the perspective of suburban residents, assessment in the context of preceding historical work is also important. From this viewpoint, the study of gas stations helps establish a link between the two historiographies of suburban America that so far remain separate. In the development of a new suburban ideal that prioritized convenience and consumption over separation and seclusion, the history of the gas station stands alongside early scholarship that declared suburbs “perimeter cities” with functions “independent of the urban core” (Fishman 17). Yet as a producer of economic and cultural space, the neighborhood service station illuminates the strong presence of capitalist forces and cultural politics in modern suburbs—a history more aligned with the recent generation of suburban historians whose work has been instrumental in highlighting the operation of these forces. The strength of this link needs to be reinforced and there are two obvious ways to achieve this. The first is to broaden analysis by addressing other aspects of gas stations, such as employment and crime. The second would be to analyze the gas station under a framework that allows for a wider assessment of its impact, such as a transnational approach. With expanding numbers of out-oftown retail parks and ‘drive-thru’ restaurants in the United Kingdom (Wallop), a transnational history of the gas station could contribute useful knowledge to the “grand story of the making of ‘global society’” (McGerr 1065). Nonetheless, the most important lesson to be learned from a study of gas stations transcends any analysis of suburbs or national borders. It reminds historians that, should we choose to embrace them, our immediate surroundings are the greatest primary source for which we can hope. While history may help explain our current conditions and environments, much of that history remains hidden in the structures we have built, the institutions we have created and the journeys we make each and every day. The request to recover this history cannot be ignored and because “exploring ordinary landscape shakes, then shatters the walls that direct the thinking of so many” (Stilgoe 186), such a task could prove very exciting.

W ORKS C ITED All American Auto Service: About Us. 2012. Web. 7 Aug. 2013. Barringer, E. L. “A Salesman for Each Station.” National Petroleum News 23.15 (1931): 79-80. Print.

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Barringer, E. L. “Changes in Automobile Selling and Repairing Reflected in Neighbourhood Stations.” National Petroleum News 27.3 (1935): 34-36. Print. Barringer, E. L. “How Marketers Direct Personal Sales Campaigns.” National Petroleum News 25.35 (1933): 26-28. Print. Barringer, E. L. “Ice Cream, Soft Drinks, Tobacco Increase Station Profits.” National Petroleum News 23.34 (1931): 35-37. Print. Barringer, E. L. “Illinois Jobber Operates Only Gasoline And Oil Department Of One Stop Unit.” National Petroleum News 27.16 (1935): 45-46. Print. Barringer, E. L. “Land Values Too High for Station; Jobber Builds Office Building.” National Petroleum News 23.33 (1931): 61-63. Print. Barringer, E. L. “Superior Service, Food Builds Business at Combination Station-Dining Room.” National Petroleum News 26.18 (1934): 43-44. Print. Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Elizabeth Ewen. Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print. “Beauty In The Gas Age.” New York Times 24 March 1928: n.p. Print. Bates, Eric S. “Superservice Station Design in Community Planning.” 5 July 1961. Internal Report. BP Archive, University of Warwick. Print. Brant, Bob, and Seth Leitman. Build Your Own Electric Vehicle. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print. Bureau of Labour Statistics. Industries at a Glance: Gasoline Stations: NAICS 447, 19 July 2013. Web. 21 July 2013 Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. Print. Dale, Crag. “Is Main Street Doomed?” Popular Mechanics 55.5 (1931): 765768. Print. Divorcement of Motor Fuel Service Stations. Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S Senate, 97th Congress. 1st Session, 30 July 1981 to October 21 1981, Serial J-97-37. Web. 08 July 2013 Findlay, John M. Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940. Berkeley: UCP, 1993. Print. “Finest Fuel For All Autos.” Los Angeles Times 16 November 1933: Part VII, 8. Print. Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Print. Flink, James J. The Car Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975. Print.

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Foster, Mark S. From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981. Print. “Gasoline-Food Combination Watched As New One-Stop Service.” National Petroleum News 23.35 (1931): 61-64. Print. Glaskin, Max. “US vehicle efficiency hardly changed since Model T.” New Scientist 23 July 2009. Web. 09 August 2013. “Good Gallonage at Shopping Center Service Station.” National Petroleum News, Vol. 23, No. 50 (1931): 37. Print. Gudis, Catherine. Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Hayden, Dolores. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820– 2000. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. Print. Hess, Alan. Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004. Print. “In Appearance a Modern Service Station Actually a Headquarters Building.” National Petroleum News 27.13 (1935): 33-36. Print. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Landscape in Sight: Looking at America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Print. Jackson, Kenneth. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print. Jakle, John A., and Keith A. Sculle. The Gas Station in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Print. Kelly, J. Bennett “Name of Customer, Record of his Car, Address of Customer Increase Tire Sales 100%.” National Petroleum News 26.51 (1934): 39-40. Print. Lassiter, Matthew. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print. Liebs, Chester H. Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Print. Longstreth, Richard. The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Print. Margolies, John. Pump and Circumstance: Glory Days of the Gas Station. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993. Print. McGerr, Michael. “The Price of the ‘New Transnational History.’” The American Historical Review 96.4 (1991): 1056-1067. Print. McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.

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Miller, Laura J. “Family Togetherness and the Suburban Ideal.” Sociological Forum 10.3 (1995): 393-418. Print. Morton, Marian J. “The Suburban Ideal and Suburban Realities: Cleveland Heights, Ohio, 1860-2001.” Journal of Urban History 28.6 (2002): 671-698. Print. Muller, Peter O. “Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis.” 59-85. The Geography of Urban Transportation. 3rd ed. Eds. Susan Hanson and Genevieve Giuliano. New York: The Guildford Press, 2004. Print. Nicolaides, Becky. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. Print. O’Mara, Margaret P. Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Print. “Patrons Pleased As Firm Becomes One-Stop Station.” Hartford Courant, 21 Jan. 1934: C14. Print. Peterson, C. A. “Inexpensive New ‘Shirt Fronts’ For the Service Station Wipe Out Obsolescence.” National Petroleum News 24.31 (1932): 38-40. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory. Vol. XLVIII (1912). St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory. Vol. XLIX (1913). St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory. Vol. L (1914). St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory. Vol. LIII (1917). St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory. Vol. LIV (1918). St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory, 1920, Vol. LVI (1920) St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory. Vol. LX (1924). St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory, 1926, Vol. LXII (1926) St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory, 1929, Vol. LXV (1929) St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. R.L. Polk & Co.’s St. Paul, MN City Directory. Vol. LXVIII (1932). St. Paul: R.L. Polk & Co Publishers. Print. Rome, Adam. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

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Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Campaign Address, Queens, N.Y.” 55. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Volume One: The Genesis of the New Deal, 1928-1932. Compiled by Samuel I. Roseman. New York: Random House, 1938. Print. Russell, Tim. Fill ‘er Up: The Great American Gas Station. Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2007. Print. “Saint Paul Historic Context Study: Neighborhoods at the Edge of the Walking City.” Neighborhoods at the Edge of the Walking City. Web. 07 Aug 2013

Sánchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. Self, Robert O. All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. Print. Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Print. “Soft Drink Sale Encourages Station Cleanliness.” National Petroleum News 32. 36 (1940): 30-38. Print. Stilgoe, John R. Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. New York: Walker and Company, 1998. Print. “Such Mashed Potatoes ‘n Brown Gravy Draw Business for the Pumps.” National Petroleum News 23.52 (1931): 23-24. Print. Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Equality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Print. Sugrue, Thomas. And Kevin M. Kruse, eds. The New Suburban History. London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print. “Ten States regulate Posting of Gas Price Signs.” National Petroleum News, 23.42 (1931): 46-48. Print ‘The Baer-Glauber Ford Gasoline Gauge.’ Advertisement. The Fordowner 4 (1920). December 2008. Web. 14 August 2013.

“The U.S. Car and Truck Sales, 1931-2012.” 17 January 2013. Web. 2 August 2013. “The Modern Service Station.” National Petroleum News 24.18 (1932): 33-46. Print. “The Service Station of the Future.” Petroleum Marketer June 1961: 25-29. Print. “Thirty Stations.” Los Angeles Times 16 Nov. 1933: Part VII, 8. Print.

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Thurston’s Residence and Business Directory of Pasadena, Altadena and Lamanda Park, 1923. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Directory Company, 1923. Print. Thurston’s Residence and Business Directory of Pasadena, Altadena and Lamanda Park, 1924. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Directory Company, 1924. Print. Thurston’s Residence and Business Directory of Pasadena, Altadena and Lamanda Park, 1927. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Directory Company, 1927. Print. Thurston’s Residence and Business Directory of Pasadena, Altadena and Lamanda Park, 1933. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Directory Company, 1933. Print. Treu, Martin. Signs, Streets, and Storefronts: A History of Architecture and Graphics Along America’s Commercial Corridors. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Print. United States Census Bureau. “State & County QuickFacts.” 27 June 2013. Web. 21 July 2013. US Energy Information Administration. “U.S. household expenditures for gasoline account for nearly 4% of pretax income.” 04 Feb 2013. Web. 20 July 2013. “Virginia Station Sells Gasoline 2 Cents Above Competitors.” National Petroleum News 23.6 (1931): 71-72. Print. “Waiting Room Decorations Attract Customers.” National Petroleum News 27.16 (1935): 39-40. Print. Wallop, Harry. “Starbucks to Open 200 Drive-Thrus for Roadside Caffeine Fix.” Telegraph. 1 Dec. 2011. Web. 23 Aug. 2013. Ward & Dickinson, (1931) “Statistical And Other Facts Concerning Highways And Their Relation to The Restaurant Industry.” National Petroleum News 23.35 (1931): 61-64. Print. Watson, T. W. “Personal Contact Helps Sell Fuel Oil.” National Petroleum News 26.51 (1934): 40. Print. “Gasoline-Food Combination Watched As New One-Stop Service.” National Petroleum News 23.35 (1931): 61-64. Print. Watson, T. W. “Personal Contact Helps Sell Fuel Oil.” National Petroleum News 26.51 (1934): 40. Print. “Why C-Stores Lead Gasoline Markets.” National Petroleum News 76.3 (1984): 34-39. Print.

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Wiese, Andrew. Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the 20th Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print. Williamson, Harold F., Andreano, Ralph L., Daum, Arnold R. & Klose, Gilbert C. The American Petroleum Industry 1899-1959: The Age of Energy. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1959. Print. Witzel, Michael Karl. Gas Station Memories. Osceola: Motorbooks International, 1994. Print.

C OMMENTS i

ii

iii

iv

Calculations based on the United States Census of 2010 and Economic Census of 2012. See Bureau of Labor Statistics. Industries at a Glance: Gasoline Stations: NAICS 447. 19 July 2013. Web. 21 July 2013. , [21 July 2013] and United Census Bureau. “State & County QuickFacts.” 27 June 2013. Web. 21 July 2013

It is estimated that the purchase of gasoline, accounts for nearly five percent of the average household expenditure in the United States. Figure calculated for post-tax income. See US Energy Information Administration. “U.S. household expenditures for gasoline account for nearly 4% of pretax income.” 4 February 2013. Web. 20 July 2013. See Jakle/ Sculle (1994). While academic historians have done little work on the gas station, some histories have been published. For example, author Tim Russell advances the gas station as “a complex interplay between changing automobile requirements, consumer demands, traffic patterns, taxation, and competition” (126) but perhaps due to his intended audience, does not further elaborate. Other books tend heavily to nostalgia; Witzel (1994) and Margolies (1993) are two such cases; though photographic evidence is plentiful and enjoyable, these texts do not provide any in-depth historical analyses of significant benefit to the academic urban historian. Recent writing on the suburb has disproved certain long standing theses regarding these events. The “white backlash” thesis, which argues that whites fled inner city areas as a result of the civil rights movement, has been brought into question by books such as McGirr (2001), Self (2003), Self (2012) and Lassiter (2007). Moreover, suburban historians have shown the beginnings of the civil rights movement to be much earlier than previously imagined. Examples include Sugrue (1996) and Wiese (2004). Books such as Nicolaides (2002) and Sánchez (1995) have placed the suburb at the centre

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v

vi

vii

viii

ix

x xi

xii

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xiv

of much wider stories regarding the formation of class identities while O’Mara (2004) and Cohen (2003) have placed suburban growth in the context of the Cold War. The only exception is the chapter “The Texture of Everyday Life” in Nicolaides (2002). Nonetheless, Nicolaides contextualizes her sources with regard to narratives of working class life and subsequent political identifications; daily experience is not the primary subject of investigation. Scholarly attention on the roadside has been predominantly architectural. Examples include Liebs (1985) and Treu (2012) Early automobiles were fitted with inefficient engines and small gasoline tanks which required frequent refueling. For example, the Ford Model T had a fuel capacity of ten gallons (US) and generally achieved around fourteen miles per gallon. See Max Glaskin, “US vehicle efficiency hardly changed since Model T.” New Scientist 23 July 2009. Web. 9 Aug 2013 There are no available photos of the station from the 1920s. However as a registered historic site, the building is preserved in its original form and exists today. The building shows three bays for lubrication and maintenance services. See “About Us.” 2012. Web 7 Aug 2013. Many service stations offering these services provided waiting rooms for customers. See “Waiting Room Decorations” (1935), 39-40. ‘Dry Goods’ stores sold textiles and sometimes ready-to-wear clothing. Trade publications dedicated many articles to forecourt design. Examples include “The Modern Service Station” (1932), 33-34 and “The Service Station of the Future” (1961), 25-29. As early as 1903, City Directories indicate the existence of businesses addressing the service needs of the automobile. However, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps do not indicate the presence of gasoline pumps on any of the listed sites until 1905. There has been much discussion by architectural historians regarding the influence of automobiles on roadside buildings. Nonetheless these accounts do not discuss how the location of these buildings localized automobile use in suburbs. For more information on the architectural evolution of roadside buildings see Liebs (1985) and Hess (2004). American Roadside Signage has been studied by architectural and art historians. See Gudis (2004), Treu (2012) and Hess (2004).

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Automobile related services were initially classified under one heading in City Directories. As more such businesses appeared they were divided under sub-headings. The 1917 St Paul, MN City Directory includes Automobile ‘Repairers,’ ‘Sundries, Supplies and Tires’ and ‘Tire Vulcanizers and Repairers.’ See St. Paul, MN City Directory, 1917: 1759-1760. The “One-Stop” station spread quickly in the early 1930s. This was in part due to more standardized and widely available parts which could be replaced rather than repaired. See E. L. Barringer “Changes,” 34-36. See also Margolies (1993). Although the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 had a major impact on gasoline retailing profits, many station owners reported that profit made on gasoline sales often accounted for a lower percentage of overall station profits when compared with food sales at convenience stores. See “Why C-Stores Lead Gasoline Markets” (34-37) and Divorcement of Motor Fuel Service Stations (1981), 267, 343 and 725. Each account states how gasoline was marketed through, and alongside, convenience stores.

The Urban Frontier in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day U TKU M OGULTAY

On May 1st, 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was opened to the public, presenting a temporary model city built on former wasteland on the shore of Lake Michigan. The White City, as it was called, aimed at nothing less than showcasing the architectural paragon for an increasingly urban society. On May 5, 1893, the Wall Street stock market crashed, eventually bringing to light what was already looming ahead months before, namely the onset of the most severe economic depression that the United States had experienced until that time. The devastating effects of the crisis were to put a stranglehold on the nation’s prosperity in the years to come, but would not keep nearly 30 million visitors from attending and marveling at the spectacular White City. Among its visitors was the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who, on July 12, presented his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. In retrospect, it seems both ironic and fitting that Turner delivered his paper on the premises of the White City. This is because, on the one hand, his address implicitly drew on an antiurban sentiment that has been deeply ingrained in American culture, whereas its venue was actually intended to promote a pioneering vision of urban advancement. On the other hand, however, the White City was perhaps not the worst setting for Turner’s lecture, because the failure of its urban vision may have unwittingly supported his frontier thesis. What Turner mainly accomplished was to provide a scholarly foundation for the idea that frontier history represents the formative experience of American social development. In doing so, he built on and actualized a Jeffersonian agrarian ideal and its corresponding anti-urbanism. The frontier settler thus followed in the footsteps of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer in that both were seen as morally superior towards the urbanite. Yet, given that the 1890 United

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States Census had declared the end of the frontier, Turner also had to face the prospect that the future might belong to urban America. In this sense, his frontier thesis must be seen as an attempt “to make sure that the American past at least was understood to be an anti-urban romance” (Conn 20). This idea obviously proved successful because Turner’s thesis struck a chord with the general public and fostered the “transformation of frontier history into mass-marketed entertainment and popular mythology” (Lears 40). Given its anti-urban tenor, the frontier myth had a curious career in the twentieth century, since the 1970s and 80s actually saw its resurgence in the very thick of the city. The concept of the frontier was then reconfigured into a discursive vehicle that encapsulates the effort at recultivating ‘urban wastelands.’ The new frontier was pushed ahead by ‘urban pioneers,’ who advanced not from east to west, but from periphery to center, towards the ‘wilderness’ of the inner city that had been left in a state of decay ever since the postwar mass exodus to suburbia. These pioneers revitalized once deprived areas left to immigrants and the working class, turning them into seemingly livable neighborhoods. This process gained currency under the shibboleth of ‘gentrification,’ and its promotion frequently drew inspiration from traditional frontier imagery. Needless to say, the notion of an ‘urban frontier’ has justifiably met with criticism, not least because, similar to Turner’s frontier, it glosses over the systemic underpinnings of processes of geographical and economic development by idealizing the actions of individual pioneers. In this essay I examine the literary representation of the frontier myth in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006). Revealingly, the novel begins its narrative itinerary with the deceptive complacency of the White City, from where it sets out on an exploration of a crisis-shaken urban-industrial society that increasingly falls under the spell of the frontier myth. In doing so, Pynchon’s text enacts, as I will illustrate, a literary mapping of late nineteenth and early twentieth century geographical and economic development in the American West. To this end, the novel shows a keen eye for historical detail, especially when it comes to the history of labor relations, the conflict between capital and labor and its entanglements with state policy. Drawing from these historical pretexts, Against the Day develops a narrative outlook that undermines the rigid dichotomy between country and city that the frontier myth relies on and, instead, underscores the complex interdependence of both realms. Further, by augmenting its perspective with a number of invented scenarios and anachronisms, the novel also points beyond the history of the American West and critically comments on the continuity of the frontier myth in the twentieth century, especially in relation to urban discourses.

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T HE F RONTIER M YTH The frontier myth stands in the tradition of a rural ideal and therefore relies on the construction of a dichotomy between country and city. In order to stress the interdependence between both realms, this dichotomy is repeatedly destabilized in Against the Day. That the idealization of either country or city is often informed by ulterior motives transpires early in the novel, namely when the Chicago-based detective Lew Basnight learns about his imminent transfer to a regional office in Denver. Since Lew is hardly excited about the prospect of settling down in rural Colorado, his boss Nate makes a pitch for the region, claiming that “it’s gold and silver mining out there. Nuggets for the picking up” (51).i Nate thus invokes the image of the frontier as the land of plenty, where the riches simply lie dormant in the soil, so as to render the countryside attractive to his employee. But Lew remains unconvinced and instead replies by posing the following rhetorical question: “Ever come out of work in this town when the light’s still in the sky and the lamps are just being lit along the big avenues and down by the Lake, and the girls are all out of the offices and shops and heading home, and the steak houses are cranking up for the evening trade, and the plate-glass windows are shining, with the rigs all lined up by the hotels, and–” (52)

Needless to say, Lew’s picturesque description of a supposedly typical early evening in Chicago has only little in common with his everyday life, let alone his work routine, which requires him to shadow unionists from behind “factory fences breathing coal smoke” (51). Lew is undoubtedly sentimentalizing city life at the expense of what he perceives as a humdrum existence in the countryside. In this sense, his image of the city is quite cognate with the way in which Nate idealizes the American West. Regarding the reciprocity of both realms, Slotkin has pointed out that [t]he common images of the Frontier as a place of windfall profit, of plenty, of magic, of positive transformation, imply that the Metropolis is the obverse of these things: a place of relative scarcity, in which improvements of conditions can be achieved only by difficult labor within the bounds of customs, where expectation is dimmed by history and selftransformation limited by law and jealousy. (Fatal Environment 40-41)

If the frontier’s promises are contingent upon the city’s deprivations (regardless of whether real or perceived), then to idealize the metropolis means partly to

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invert the frontier myth, which is exactly what Lew does in Against the Day. In an attempt at sidestepping his boss’s decision, he discursively relocates a key aspect of the rural ideal, namely the quality of life, right into the heart of the city. This episode already gives a rough idea of how the construction of country and city are tied to each other in the frontier myth. In what follows, Against the Day underscores the extent to which the historical realities of the American West are becoming increasingly transfigured by the myth. Eventually, the novel relates how an academic called Professor Vanderjuice issues a warning to the effect that “[i]t may not be quite the West you’re expecting” (52). Considering himself an authority on the subject of the frontier, Vanderjuice explains: “I spent my earlier hob-raising years out where you’re headed, Denver and Cripple Creek and Colorado Springs, while there was still a frontier, you always knew where it was and how to get there, and it wasn’t always just between natives and strangers or Anglos and Mexicans or cavalry and Indians. But you could feel it, unmistakably, like a divide, where you knew you could stand and piss would flow two ways at once.” (53-54)

For the academic, the frontier thus denotes a region that is virtually impossible to represent on a map, for it acts as a liminal space located on the threshold between nature and culture. It goes without saying, however, that the way in which the professor’s conception is rendered in the novel obviously mocks how the frontier encapsulates a distinctly male experience. In a sense, the urine can be said to figure as a male fertilizer that facilitates the cultivation of a nature that is constructed as feminine in the first place. But, interestingly enough, the urine flows towards the west as well as the east and urban civilization, which is why Vanderjuice’s image equally symbolizes an anti-urban sentiment. Contrary to expectations, the academic’s contempt stems not so much from actual urban experiences as from the efficacy of the frontier myth. This crystallizes when considering how Vanderjuice further contrasts the American West with urban society. Having taken cognizance of Turner’s thesis while visiting the White City, the academic wistfully has to admit “that the Western frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on the map but gone, absorbed—a dead duck” (52). Turner’s thesis apparently prompts him to establish a direct correlation between the closing of the frontier and the onset of a societal process of cultural decline, which implies an increasing loss of human ties with nature and most notably makes its presence felt in the industrial city. On that score, Vanderjuice invokes the Chicago stockyards both as a negative example of historical development and as positive proof for his diagnosis. During an airship flight above the stockyards, the academic indig-

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nantly points at a group of tourists who enjoy “an instructive hour of throatslashing, decapitation, skinning, gutting, and dismemberment” (53). Thus, Vanderjuice pits the alleged heroism of frontier life (and the killing of cattle by individual pioneers for purposes of self-sufficiency) against the automatized mass slaughtering that takes place within cities and mostly for urban populations. Indirectly, then, the academic proposes a model of American history in which the stage of frontier expansion is followed by the stage of urban-industrial society. “The frontier ends and disconnection begins” (53), he concludes. Although Vanderjuice interprets the course of this history as decadent, he is unable to explain the succession of its stages, which merely leaves him pondering: “Cause and effect? How the dickens do I know?” (51). Elsewhere in the text, however, his interpretation actually refracts history through the lens of the frontier myth. As Slotkin has argued, “[i]n 1893 the Frontier was no longer (as Turner saw it) a geographical place and a set of facts requiring a historical explanation,” and instead “it was becoming a set of symbols that constituted an explanation of history” (Gunfighter Nation 61; emphasis in original). That Vanderjuice deploys the frontier as a mythical interpretation of history manifests itself in a passage that draws on a key figure of the frontier. In view of the proceedings in the stockyards, he proclaims in an unashamedly nostalgic manner: “here’s where the Trail comes to its end at last, along with the American Cowboy who used to live on it and by it. No matter how virtuous he’s kept his name, how many evildoers he’s managed to get by undamaged, how he’s done by his horses, what girls he chastely kissed, serenaded by guitar, or gone out and raised hallelujah with, it’s all back there in the traildust now and none of it matters, for down there you’ll find the wet convergence and finale of his drought-struck tale and thankless calling.” (53)

For Vanderjuice, the closing of the frontier and the incipient triumph of urbanindustrial society entail the symbolical death of the American Cowboy. However, his image of the virtuous cattle herder is derived not so much from the historical realities of the West (in terms of a geographical space) as from the fictions created about the Old West as a mythical space. This is not least reflected by the fact that he refers to the stockyards as “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show stood on its head” (53). Hence Vanderjuice’s notion of urban-industrial society functions as a symbolic obverse to his conception of the American West, which has been informed by a theatrical enactment of frontier history that does not provide “re-creations but reductions of complex events into ‘typical scenes’ based on the formulas of popular literary mythology” (Slotkin Gunfighter Nation 69).

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What Against the Day likewise highlights is, however, that the significance of frontier life does not necessarily have to be a simple reflection of the myth. Instead, the meaning that the frontier assumes for individuals is embedded within biographical contexts, shaped by their geographical trajectories and not least contingent upon issues such as class affiliation. Take, for example, a dream in which the mine worker Webb Traverse envisions the frontier: Webb would find himself standing at some divide, facing west into a great flow of promise, something like wind, something like light, free of the damaged hopes and pestilent smoke east of here—sacrificial smoke, maybe, but not ascending to Heaven, only high enough to be breathed in, to sicken and to cut short countless lives, to change the color of the daylight and deny to walkers of the night the stars they remembered from younger times. (86)

When considered out of context, it seems that Webb’s experience of frontier life fully corresponds to the imagery of the frontier myth and that even its implicit anti-urbanism has found its way into the dreams of pioneers. In this sense, the frontier symbolizes openness, mobility and possibilities from which the good life might ensue, whereas the city represents an entropic environment that inevitably results in decay and death. Yet, on closer inspection, Webb’s anti-urbanism is hardly directed at the city as a way of life. Rather, his contempt for the metropolis originates in its role as the seat of economic power upholding a system of exploitative labor, for which the frontier acts as “a region adapted to an internal imperialism” (Slotkin Fatal Environment 46). This can be illustrated by tracing a few key characteristics of Webb’s trajectory in Against the Day. That Webb one day “found himself in the back of a wagon heading west” (87) is hardly the result of a pioneering spirit, but is due to a family dispute that had sundered his kinship amidst the ravages of the Civil War. Eventually, he arrives in southern Colorado, where various mining operations had already been in progress since the 1850s. More precisely, Webb takes up employment as a mine worker in Leadville—a town that was founded after a silver discovery in the late 1870s, resulting in a boom that lasted for over a decade and thanks to which many frontiersmen could make a living. Thus, with his economic survival secured, Webb settles down, marries and, within the bosom of a nuclear family, apparently leads a placid life within a local community. The sine qua non for settlement is, however, “the existence of a ‘resource’ Frontier” (Slotkin Fatal Environment 45) that is marked by an abundance of mineral deposits, but that is also constantly relocated depending on new discoveries. This frontier, in turn, depends on the city, since a labor-intensive industrial undertaking such as hard

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rock mining initially requires considerable capital investment. It is therefore indispensable also to take a “capital Frontier” into account, for which “the abundance/scarcity division between Frontier and Metropolis is reversed” (Fatal Environment 45-46). This capital frontier is, moreover, contingent upon the availability of “a ‘cheap labor’ Frontier” (Fatal Environment 46) that it considers as a resource in itself and that it deploys as such in order to produce surplus capital. The frontier-capital nexus that ties economic survival to a fluctuating demand for cheap labor is, of course, also what Webb finds increasingly difficult to ignore. The worsening economic climate, including wage cuts and extended working hours, induce him to partake of collective action by organized labor. At some point, however, Webb devotes himself to vigilantism, as he begins to lead a double life as a clandestine dynamiter, thus gaining notoriety throughout the nation as “the great Wild West bomb-chucker known as the Kieselguhr Kid” (370). In other words, Webb does not renounce the myth in the face of the everyday realities of frontier life. Instead, he remodels a key figure of frontier heroism, namely the outlaw, so as to turn this figure against the myth itself and to call attention to (and to avenge) what the latter conceals—that is, the systematic exploitation of workers by a capitalist class. That Webb can only do so on the terms of the frontier myth clearly cuts both ways. After all, he reaffirms and perpetuates the myth, especially its rugged individualism, by staging acts of spectacular violence that function “as a safety valve for metropolitan social conflicts” (Slotkin Gunfighter Nation 127). What Webb’s trajectory thus illustrates is how the frontier myth rationalizes economic and geographical expansion in that it transfigures socially produced wealth into the fruits of a wilderness, as it were, and idealizes individual action by touting traits such as “assertiveness and achievement [...] as values in themselves” (Slotkin Fatal Environment 33).

U RBANIZING THE F RONTIER Against the Day also relates the frontier myth to processes of economic and geographical development, particularly to processes of urbanization in the American West. In this context, the novel stresses that urban growth has to be understood as part of a larger framework of capitalist expansion, rather than merely in terms of a social process. A key region that Against the Day focuses on is Colorado, which, from the 1860s on, was marked by relatively pronounced population growth, industrial concentration and gold and silver mining, which played a crucial role within the national economy. In fact, the US government

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purchased these two metals on a large scale, since both gold and silver money were valid as legal tender at that time, according to the monetary standard known as bimetallism. But the demand for silver was subject to drastic fluctuations due to changes in fiscal policy, which, in turn, had notable repercussions for mining towns. In other words, rural Colorado and the urban centers of economic and political power on the Atlantic seaboard were closely intertwined. As a regional focus, Colorado is therefore suitable for analyzing the interdependence of city and country obfuscated by the frontier myth. The nexus of economic development and urbanization in Against the Day emerges in a scenario that signals the impact of boosterism on urban growth in Colorado. The novel relates how Lew Basnight, while scouting the hinterlands of Denver, accidentally winds up in the fictional town of Lodazal, where he meets Burke Ponghill, “the editor of Lodazal Weekly Tidings, the newspaper of record for a town which as yet was little more than a wishful real-estate venture” (172). Moreover, we are told that “[i]t was young Ponghill’s job to fill empty pages with phantom stories, in hopes that readers far away would be intrigued enough to come and visit, and maybe even settle” (172). The so-called ‘town’ thus consists of nothing more than undeveloped parcels of land that could be sold for a profit in case future settlers should strike an undiscovered vein of wealth. The purely speculative nature of this scheme further transpires in the ensuing conversation between Burke and Lew: “[S]o far all we’ve really got’s a mining town that ain’t built yet.” “Silver? Gold?” “Well, ore anyway... containing this metallic element that ain’t exactly been–” “Discovered?” “Maybe discovered, but not quite refined out?” “Useful for…?” “Applications yet to be devised?” (172-73)

Even if this scenario acts as a parody of urban boosterism, the ostensible mockery also contains a grain of truth, because, as Self has noted, late nineteenth century Western towns “have been promoted, hawked, and downright lied about on a scale rarely matched elsewhere in the nation” (415). Settlements in the West were therefore an integral part of a flourishing real-estate market that was, in turn, bound up with other economic sectors such as the extractive industries. Boosters figured prominently within this market insofar as their promotional strategies served to attract both labor and investment capital.

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That Western towns were frequently established as instruments of economic expansion is likewise reflected in Against the Day by emphasizing the prefabricated aspect of townscapes. The text particularly alludes to so-called “instant towns” (Abbott 106), such as Telluride—a mining town founded in 1878 after the discovery of gold, which is depicted as “the simple narrowed grid of a town that seemed to’ve been shipped in all at the same time and squeezed onto the valley floor” (281-82). The novel also leaves no doubt that, far from being isolated monads, such settlements act as outward anchors within a continental network of towns and cities primarily held together by the railroad. Having formerly worked in Chicago, a “city at the center of twenty or thirty railway lines, radiating with their interconnections out to the rest of the continent,” Lew Basnight becomes convinced in Colorado that “the steel webwork was a living organism, growing by the hour, answering some invisible command” (177). Lew subsequently has to acknowledge that “American geography had gone all peculiar” (177), because, against all expectations, he finds it difficult to discern a substantial difference between city and country. Less than making for a contrast to the metropolis, the small town in the West instead functions as a colonial outpost of the industrial metropolis (and occasionally resembles its scaled-down mirror-image). Further, as the urban fabric spreads its dominion, the landscape of the Old West is utterly changed out of recognition, while its vestiges, such as wayfaring paths, are incorporated into the urban supply chain. On that score, Pynchon’s narrator informs us that on the outskirts of Telluride, “the trail up the valley beside the tracks,” used to transport “ore and supply wagons” between mines and the rail station, “was all bustling, like streets of a town” (281). This issue gains another significant dimension as Against the Day relates how urban social conflicts spill over to the American West in the wake of the Panic of 1893. The novel particularly emphasizes that, as an arena for the upsurge of labor unrest, Colorado cannot be considered merely as a regional phenomenon, but rather has to be seen as a focal point of social conflicts that were already under way in urban centers for decades. This is also why Lew Basnight, after staying on in Colorado, notes that “every day out here saw another little Haymarket” (176). Yet the text also points to the role of state policy in acting as the final straw that facilitated the eruption of lingering conflicts in Colorado. This can be clarified by reviewing a number of issues related to US monetary policy that paved the way for the Panic of 1893: To begin with, the 1873 Coinage Act demonetarized silver and thus re-established the gold standard. Due to new silver discoveries and in need of a silver market, however, Western mine owners soon urged a return to bimetallism. Their de-

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mand was supported by the indebted agrarian classes in the South (in the hope that an inflation would ease their burden of debt), while the financial elites in the East pleaded to adhere to the gold standard. As a result of the 1878 BlandAllison Act, the US Treasury eventually became the main outlet for the silver production in Colorado (and elsewhere), whereupon an overproduction during the 1880s caused a steep decline in the metal’s value. Since the pressure exerted by Western industrial and Southern agrarian interests did not abate, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act took effect in 1890, requiring the Treasury to buy an even greater amount of silver each month. In turn, the sellers of silver received bonds that could be redeemed for either gold or silver dollars, but as the majority chose gold, the government’s reserves were soon depleted. Crisis-shaken and threatened by bankruptcy, the US government consequently repealed the Silver Act in 1893, so that the value of silver hit rock bottom, numerous Western mines stopped their production for good, hosts of silver miners became unemployed, and plenty of mining settlements turned into ghost towns. The impact of the repeal of the Silver Act is unmistakably reflected in Against the Day, as the novel accentuates how a regional economic landscape that had relied on the frontier myth and its promise of windfall profit (so as to lure a workforce into settling down) is virtually turned upside down and how a regional network of towns is drastically reconfigured: Leadville, thinking itself God’s own beneficiary when the old lode was rediscovered in ‘92, got pretty much done in by Repeal, and Creede the same, sucker-punched right after the big week-long wingding on the occasion of Bob Ford’s funeral. The railroad towns, Durango, Grand Junction, Montrose, and them, were pretty stodgy by comparison. (89)

It is telling that Leadville, the town where 1880s silver boom started, is associated with the idea of divine providence, which implies that, given the alarming news of the closing of the frontier, the rediscovery of silver might have been seen as an act of divine grace, only to be exposed as an illusion by state intervention. Further, the novel implies two possibilities as to how towns could survive the man-made debacle. Acting as a transport hub certainly cushions the effects of the economic downturn, yet the most significant lifeline for towns seems to be the existence of nearby gold deposits. This crystallizes looking at how the previous passage is continued: Telluride was in the nature of an outing to a depraved amusement resort, whose electric lighting at night in its extreme and unmerciful whiteness produced a dream-silvered rogues’ district of nonstop poker games, erotic practices in back-lot shanties, Chinese

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opium dens most of the Chinese in town had the sense to stay away from, mad foreigners screaming in tongues apt to come skiing down the slopes in the dark with demolition in mind. (89)

The hyperbolic rendering of this scenario clearly anticipates the eventual restructuring of Telluride—as is known, an upper- and middle-class resort town ever since industrial production stopped for good in the late twentieth century. At this point, however, the mining town seems to be flourishing despite the depression, which is hardly surprising given that the US government had to restock its reserves, meaning that gold was in demand as never before. Further, this passage indicates the mass migration of labor triggered by state policy, as a town that once merely served to accommodate a miners’ workforce swiftly turns into a place of refuge where the unemployed congregate. However, the concentration and the ensuing oversupply of labor in single towns and regions enabled mine owners to cut the wages and to extend the working hours. This, in turn, provoked strikes organized by miners’ unions, the first of which, early in 1894, was “the strike in Cripple Creek for an eight-hour day” (82). In response to such strikes, owners frequently hired strikebreakers as well as private detectives, mostly employed by city-based firms such as the Pinkerton or Thiel agencies, in order to protect the strikebreakers. In cases where violence eventually erupted, state militia was often sent in order to restore peace, which in many cases, however, resulted in massacres carried out against strikers and union members. The history of labor relations in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Colorado is treated in Against the Day with a keen eye for detail, starting with the unrest immediately after the Panic of 1893, through to the so-called Colorado Labor Wars between 1903 and 1904 as well as the Ludlow Massacre in 1914. My main intent was to give an idea of how the novel suggests how this series of regional conflicts is closely tied to a national framework of economic development. What the text emphasizes is how, once triggered off by state policy, Colorado became the focal point for the conflict between capital and labor that had been lingering in urban centers throughout the US for a con-siderable time. This outlook is repeatedly underpinned in Against the Day, often by narratively enacting an urban outsider’s point of view on this episode of Western history. It is once again the perspective of Lew Basnight that hints at the significance of the regional conflicts in Colorado for the overall political and economic course of the United States. Eventually, Lew finds himself unable to deny that the labor struggles in Colorado were not “just unconnected skir-mishing” and that these events instead represent “a war between two full-scale armies, each with its own chain of command and long-term strategic aims—civil war again” (177). On a

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related note, the novel stresses that the driving force behind the urbanization in the West were not individual pioneers who discovered a source of wealth. While individuals (such as boosters) cer-tainly played a role for the development of the West, it is indispensable to acknowledge that behind their actions often stood a collective interest, which is exactly what the frontier myth obscures. The way in which Against the Day depicts the urbanization of the frontier thus seems very much in line with the argument that writing “[u]rban history as frontier history” merits close attention to “the full incorporation of the West into the system of modern capitalism” (Abbott 33).

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In addition to the urbanization of the frontier myth, Against the Day addresses processes of regional and urban restructuring, especially regarding the significance of the American West as a tourist and recreational area. As already mentioned, industrial production in the West was in many respects dependent on railroads. After the establishment of an extensive network of railways in the late nineteenth century, however, Western towns were also frequently incorporated by tourist routes that railroad companies eagerly promoted by drawing on the frontier myth and the imagery of the Old West. In other words, the urbanization of the West involved the construction of a tourist-oriented image of the frontier. This issue manifests itself in Against the Day, for instance, when we are told how Lew Basnight runs into two Englishmen called Nigel and Neville, who happen to be touring the West. Lew surmises that their presence in Colorado is due to the “Oscar Wilde influence” (185). The narrator subsequently explains: “Since the famous poet had returned to England from his excursion to America, brimming with enthusiasm for the West, and Leadville in particular, all kinds of flamboyant adventurers had been showing up in these mountains” (185-86). What this reference suggests is that Wilde’s veneration of the American West proved beneficial in increasing the region’s attractiveness for middle- and upperclass tourists, both domestic and foreign. Concerning the role of the American West as a tourist destination, it has been argued that “[d]efinining the western mountains and coast as recreation zones required substantial editing of history. Tourism [...] increasingly bypassed or ignored the industrial landscape of mining and manufacturing” (Abbott 125). Western tourism depended on an image of the American West that would retain an element of lawlessness while at the same time being easily digestible. Thus, it stands to reason that Wilde’s visit seamless-

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ly fits in with such an image, whereas the history of labor conflict, which I addressed earlier, obviously does not. The purposeful attempt to create a tourist-oriented image of the West is also reflected in a scenario that revolves around the Telluride-based entrepreneur Ellmore Disco, whose formula for success seems to be that he manages to advertise his goods to the residents of the local mining community. But it also transpires that the entrepreneur is in fact dependent on urban populations who visit the region from far and wide. Ellmore eventually made a habit of stylizing himself as a trigger-happy rogue threatening to shoot anybody who makes impudent remarks about his extravagant headgear: “To strangers he was Ellmore the Evil, to friends an engaging enough customer despite these hat-related spells” (284). However, once serious trouble, labor-related or otherwise, is in the air in Telluride, his real interest is revealed to be nothing but de-escalation and appeasement. He explains his attitude on the following grounds: “The one thing no form of business can really do without […] is good old peace and quiet. Any disruptive behaviour up here over and above the normal Saturday-night frolics will tend to discourage the banks down in Denver, not to mention the day-tripping into town of that pigeon population we’ve all of us come so much to depend on, next thing you know we’re into a slack cycle and well, the less of that the better’s all.” (315)

That he refers to visitors as ‘pigeons’ reveals that the entrepreneur pursues a con game, as it were, by impersonating a dangerously frenzied gunslinger. He enacts a role that is part and parcel of a meticulously staged image of Telluride as a Wild West town. In other words, the novel depicts a consciously constructed townscape characterized, on the outside, by frontier ruggedness and entrepreneurial individualism while concealing its dependence on cities near and far. Thus, while still serving as a residential place for the working class, Telluride already foreshadows its transformation into a recreational town. What Against the Day satirizes in this regard is how supposedly pioneering entrepreneurs claim to spearhead this process. As the subject of Telluride’s scenic appeal comes up in a conversation, Ellmore divulges his vision of the town’s future redevelopment, which notably involves a potential increase in the land’s value under a different use: You’re lucky to see it while it’s boom times, for when these veins give out at last, there’ll be nothing here to sell but the scenery, which means herds of visitors from places that don’t have any—Texans, for example. That side of the street you’re lookin at’s what we call the Sunny Side, you see those little miners’ shacks over there? Too narrow for any but

312 | U TKU M OGULTAY the undernourished to stand, let alone turn around, in—well someday each of those will be going for a million apiece U.S., maybe two, and up. (285; emphasis original)

That such a vision of Telluride’s late twentieth century conversion into a wealthy recreational town echoes a process such as gentrification is, of course, hardly an accident. In this regard, the novel obviously mocks how the entrepreneur considers himself a pioneer in this process, which is underlined by his interlocutor’s sardonic comment on these deliberations: “Man of vision” (285). What Against the Day insinuates is that such a prospect of regional restructuring primarily has to be understood as a scenario that is, in a way, to be expected, not least because the process that eventually results in Telluride’s conversion into a recreational town is already under way in the early twentieth century. For the time being, the nearby industrial concentration might be incongruent with the intended image of a frontier town. After production has stopped for good, however, the local mining facilities, once remodeled and marketed in terms of their industrial heritage, would likely cease to disturb and instead tie in with the image of a health-promoting resort town that is built on a rural ideal and shows its scenic beauty to its advantage. What is underscored in Against the Day is that the primary driving force behind such restructuring processes is not, as the frontier myth would have it, the entrepreneurial acumen of pioneering businessmen, but rather the collective actions of capital owners such as real-estate agencies, banks, financial investors, and the state. This argument is enforced, most notably, in a scenario that involves a fictional Western town called Nochecita. This town is located to the south or southwest of Colorado’s mining areas, and apparently it served as a transport hub during the heyday of silver mining, as we are told that “around the railhead and its freight sheds and electrical and machine shops, the town had grown” (200). With the gradual decline of the mining industry, however, it seems that Nochecita has turned into an all but deserted quasi-postindustrial Western town, as it were, whose center—once a residential area for the working class—now merely hosts a few catering and vice establishments that offer their round-the-clock services to travelers who happen to pass through town. The text also conveys that on the outskirts of Nochecita the propertied class once used to reside, but eventually left town in the wake of the region’s decline. The novel then relates how, in the early twentieth century, Frank Traverse travels to Nochecita, where he makes the acquaintance of Estrella Briggs, who lives on the outskirts of the town, or, more precisely,

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upstairs in what had been once the domestic palace of a mine owner from the days of the first great ore strikes around here, now a dimly illicit refuge for secret lives, dark and in places unrepainted wood rearing against a sky which since this morning had been threatening storm. Walkways in from the street were covered with corrugated snow-shed roofing. (200)

The novel therefore implies that, after having been deserted by its owners, the building is about to decay as its maintenance is increasingly neglected. The property value consequently declines, so that the ‘palace’ becomes both affordable as a residential building for a low-income population and attractive as a gathering place for the town’s lowlifes: The restaurant and bar on the ground-floor corner had been there since the boom times, offering two-bit all-you-can-eat specials [...]. At all hours the place’d be racketing with gambling-hall workers on their breaks, big-hearted winners and bad losers, detectives, drummers, adventuresses, pigeons, and sharpers. (200-1)

Further, the ground level of the building is described through the metaphor of “[a] sunken chamber almost like a natatorium at some hot-springs resort” (201). The phrasing is telling insofar as it anticipates the structure’s imminent revalorization, which eventually manifests itself as the novel relates how Frank revisits Nochecita almost a decade later. What he comes to notice is that, although the old building is still in place, its condition has further deteriorated, while its neighborhood has surprisingly developed into a densely built-up area. This transformation is depicted in Against the Day to the effect that the upsurge of new construction fosters the dilapidation of the old structure: New buildings had gone up near Stray’s old place, so close sometimes that there remained only narrow slipways for the wind to pass, picking up speed, whereupon the pressure decreased, so much that as the unrelenting plateau wind passed through town, the flimsily braced older structure was actually sucked to one side, then the other, all night long, rocking like a ship, ancient nails creaking, plaster apt to chip away if you looked at it for more than a second, walls of the rooms shedding soiled white flakes, a threat of collapse in some near future. (460)

Setting the hyperbole aside, the narrowing of the distances between the old and the new structures can be read in terms of a spatial metaphor that points to the imminent closing of a rent gap. The latter has been defined as “the disparity between the potential ground rent level and the actual ground rent capitalized

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under the present land use” (Smith 65). In our case, this means that the actual ground rent of the old mine owner’s residence initially declined, so that the gap between actual and potential ground rent widened. However, once the neighborhood becomes attractive again for capital investment in the built environment, the rent gap is ready to be closed, which is also when a process such as gentrification sets in. This is precisely what happens in Nochecita after the town has started to attract capital again: The foundations had gone on crumbling back to pebbles and dust, and rain leaked in everywhere. Little or no heat in the place, floorboards not quite level. And yet the rent here, he heard people complain, kept getting higher each month, newer tenants continued to move in, earning more and eating better, as the place filled up with factory reps, realestate salesmen, drummers of weaponry and medical supplies, linemen, water and road engineers, none of whom would ever quite meet Frank’s eyes, respond when he spoke, or recognize him in any but the most muted and shifty ways. (460-61)

The depiction of how local residents are threatened with displacement due to the influx of a higher-income group makes the reference to gentrification rather explicit. It is obvious, however, that the ‘gentrifiers’ do not primarily choose to settle because they imagine the neighborhood as a place to live the good life. This is clearly indicated by the fact that the new tenants either deal in real estate and arms or work in the construction and industrial sectors, which suggests that Nochecita is about to be redeveloped as a transport hub. As such, the town might actually take on a strategically significant role again, “owing to the troubles south of the border” (460), namely the uprisings on Mexican territory that culminated in the revolution of 1910. To sum up, the revalorization of Nochecita is delineated as follows: as the Mexican borderland is increasingly characterized by political instability, the regional market is stimulated and starts to attract investment capital from far and wide. As a result, Nochecita becomes an economically advantageous location again, so that a new cycle of investment into its built environment begins. This, in turn, creates a rent gap that affects the property in the neighborhood in which new construction takes place and which is eventually closed by a process of gentrification. The novel thus highlights that neighborhood revalorization and the ensuing process of gentrification have to be considered, to some degree, as intrinsic to development in the built environment under the conditions of capitalism. This idea is, of course, at odds with a demand-oriented perspective that explains such processes mostly through changing consumer preferences. The position that Pynchon’s text therefore takes up is, first and foremost,

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directed against how the frontier myth distorts discourses linked to processes of urban restructuring. In other words, the novel suggests that a process such as gentrification does not primarily occur because middle-class pioneers someday decide to move into a slum in order to re-cultivate a supposedly urban wilderness, but rather for structural economic reasons. Further, the anachronistic manner in which this idea is illustrated suggests a critical perspective on the ongoing popularity of the frontier myth in late twentieth and twenty-first century urban discourses.

I NTO THE U RBAN W ILD In the following section, I explore how Against the Day negotiates the frontier myth in a distinctly metropolitan context. In this regard, the novel draws on a popular literary formula, namely the narrative of the rural (and typically female) adolescent venturing out into the metropolis in order to climb the social ladder. ii In a sense, this narrative both inverts and reaffirms the frontier myth: its trajectory begins with a movement away from rural parochialism and towards the metropolis, which is imagined as a marvelous place of promise and opportunity. However, the moment of arrival is usually followed by profound disillusionment, as the metropolis reveals itself as the stomping ground for a dog-eat-dog society, not to mention a cesspool of immorality and vice. In order not only to survive but to make it in the metropolis, the protagonist is then virtually required to adapt to the urban wilderness. Conceptualized as a “metropolitan sublime,” this narrative paradigm has been said to mark a watershed in the context of US-American urban fiction, because, in its rendering of urban life, “[t]he street is the city space par excellence: its order that of chance, its freedom the energy of the crowd” (Ickstadt 303). As such, it can also be seen as a precursor for later modernist renderings of an increasingly immaterial city in that the empirical city vanishes behind an opaque realm of excessive signification. The metropolitan sublime therefore heralded the “myth of the city as new West” (304) by molding urban space into a seemingly inexhaustible frontier whose promises are ceaselessly recycled by a massmediated consumer culture. The frontier of the metropolitan sublime in Against the Day is placed side by side with another frontier, which points to the city as a segregated place and which is linked to the popular turn-of-the-century pastime of ‘slumming.’ This involved affluent citizens temporarily venturing into seedy and crowded immigrant and working-class districts so as to seek cheap thrills and illicit

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pleasures. Although a pioneering spirit was part and parcel of the practice, slumming was in fact a thoroughly organized and promoted collective enterprise. While also critically judged by social and religious institutions, the public attention devoted to the phenomenon ultimately helped to consolidate the idea that “the slum constituted an identifiable and uniform region of urban poverty, congestion, and decay that was segregated, both geographically and morally, from the residential districts inhabited by middle- and upper-class whites” (Heap 22). In other words, the slum was discursively constructed and thus naturalized as an urban wilderness within a wilderness, as it were. In doing so, the systemic underpinnings of its existence, including the role of both urban policy and processes of economic development in the built environment, were effectively concealed. In a sense, then, we are dealing with two correlated urban frontiers. The metropolitan sublime relocates the frontier right in the heart of the city, where the newcomer aspires to upward social mobility. The slumming frontier, in turn, presupposes a relative affluence, so that the excursion into the urban ‘underworld’ holds out the prospect of self-assurance regarding the legitimacy of the slummer’s social position. Further, in both cases, the metropolis appears as a space that is permeated by a complex economy of signs. The city thereby becomes an increasingly liminal space, since one and the same neighborhood can be constructed in the most divergent ways. For one group, it can act as a lived space of everyday life, whereas another group consumes the same space primarily as a spectacle. This liminal zone figures as a pivotal semantic territory that Against the Day critically surveys, as I will point out, in order to destabilize the foundations of both frontiers. A striking reference to the metropolitan sublime in Against the Day can be found in the storyline that revolves around Dahlia Rideout, who, as an adolescent, travels from Colorado to New York, where she at first struggles to gain a foothold, but eventually succeeds as a social climber by finding employment in show business. Despite the borrowings from literary tradition, however, the novel modifies the conventional trajectory from country to city in significant ways. This already crystallizes on closer consideration of how the moment of arrival—a narrative linchpin of the metropolitan sublime—is rendered in Pynchon’s text, namely as a travesty of both the popular image of the bustling metropolis and the idea that arriving necessarily implies a sense of being overpowered by the sight of urban crowds. The following passage depicts how Dahlia, right after leaving Grand Central Station, observes an ordinary street scene:

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In New York at last she stood out of the traffic, watching shadows of birds move across sunlit walls. Just around the corner, on the great Avenue, two-horse carriages curvaceous and sumptuary as the beds of courtesans in a romance moved along, the horses stepping carefully in mirror-symmetry. The sidewalks were crowded with men in black suits and stark white high collars, in the tangible glare of noontide that came pushing uptown, striking tall highlights from shiny top hats, projecting shadows that looked almost solid […]. The women by contrast were rigged out in lighter colors, ruffles, contrasting lapels, hats of velvet or straw full of artificial flowers and feathers and ribbons, broad angled brims throwing faces into girlish penumbras as becoming as paint and powder. (337)

Needless to say, this passage ironically rehashes the romanticizing sentiment through which the moment of arrival is often expressed in the metropolitan sublime. Instead of the social promiscuity associated with the city street, the heroine encounters a striking ordering principle due to which street life seems to run like clockwork, almost to the point of appearing static. The crucial issue, however, is that Dahlia arrives in midtown Manhattan and not elsewhere in New York. What she beholds is anything but a cross section of the city population; rather, she beholds a specific segment that mostly comprises relatively affluent middle-class citizens. More than just pointing to the geographical specificity of arriving, the novel likewise indicates that particular regimes of order actually underlie the image of the chaotic metropolis. Notably, in our case, there is a divide that runs along gender lines, since the sidewalks are swarming with either male wage earners employed in the service sector or female flâneuses indulging in conspicuous consumption. The gendered logic of the use of public space is further underscored by the narrator's bottom line, expressed through Dahlia's observation: “A visitor from quite far away might almost have imagined two separate species having little to do, one with the other” (337). The city as a segregated place figures prominently in the variation on the metropolitan sublime that Against the Day provides. This can be illustrated by the way in which the novel continues to act out a series of set-pieces modeled on this narrative paradigm. What usually follows the episode of arrival is an arduous search for employment that is aggravated by fierce competition on the job market. Thus, in order to strike it rich, the protagonist has to succumb to an urban wilderness that is epitomized by the mean streets and the teeming crowds of the metropolis. Playing through such a narrative pattern, Pynchon’s text indicates aspects that the myth of the urban wilderness trivializes. As chance would have it, on the day of her arrival, Dahlia makes friends with Katie, a fellow newcomer to New York, who works part-time in a midtown restaurant where customers serve themselves, which is also why its low-paid female work-force is

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primarily responsible for maintaining “the hygienic brilliancy of the establishment” (338). Her desire to pursue a stage career apparently discourages Katie from leaving “this miserable town,” where, as she snaps, “[d]isrespect was invented” (338). Soon Dahlia likewise tries to find her way into the playhouses of the city but blunders first, as she applies for positions considered inappropriate for women, such as “a job as an organ tuner’s apprentice that didn’t pan out, owing, as far as she could determine, to her lack of a penis” (338). Through another chance encounter, however, Dahlia finds an acting job that requires her to play a naive young girl who winds up on the crowded streets of Chinatown, where she is seemingly abducted by hoodlums. Slummers who visit Chinatown on a guided tour are intrigued by these plays, so that Dahlia soon “had uptown visitors gaping from their tour charabancs in amazement, ladies from out of town clutching their hats” (340). Eventually, the performances attract financiers from the entertainment industry, which precipitates a higher in-come for Dahlia and which allows her to move to a relatively affluent midtown neighborhood. The rendering of Dahlia’s advancement clearly draws on the metropolitan sublime in that it relates how the newcomer suffers a series of setbacks, but only to be ultimately redeemed by the urban crowd. The city figures as an environment that is inscrutable and perilous, but that, in the end, seems to reward individual courage and perseverance through the promise of fortunate chance encounters. Still, Against the Day likewise stresses how such mythologization effectively cushions the existence of social injustices such as gender-based discrimination or unequal access to the labor market. On closer consideration, it also shows that the apparent fortuitousness that Dahlia owes her advancement to is linked to a logic of supply and demand. The essential condition for her contract with Chinatown’s “white-slave simulation industry” (339) is the pervasiveness of upper- and middle-class anxieties about reputed slums that were believed “to ensnare white native-born women in lives of involuntary sexual servitude” (Heap 46-47). Further, the text implies that Dahlia’s physical appearance corresponds to how kidnap victims were imagined according to the rhetoric of white slavery. In other words, her upward mobility is not so much related to any redemptive force of the crowd as to the fact that she fills a niche in a market. As such, Dahlia becomes part of an ingenious mise-en-scène whose organizers shrewdly plug into an urban discourse so as to capitalize on it. Still, the novel indicates that it would be misguided to grasp this strategy merely as a process that transforms an authentic neighborhood into a world of make-believe. Instead, the fictional “white-slave simulation industry” depicted in Against the Day has to be seen as a further development of preexisting strategies of constructing a neighborhood as ‘authentic’ for the purposes of tourist consumption.

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“Slumming, as a tourist diversion,” it has been argued, “contained within itself elements of adventure and risk even as it was becoming an industry. The picturesque entwined itself with the dangerous to construct an alluring offer for aspiring pleasure seekers” (Christ 77). The staged abductions therefore represent the externalized and supposedly untamed equivalent of the picturesque interior of the Chinese restaurant that tourists frequent in order to consume “an uptown fad” (338) called ‘Chop suey’—as is well known, a dish invented by Chinese immigrants so as to appeal to native palates. The spectacle of street crime returns a sense of adventure to the constructed image of the slum. Put another way, these fake-crimes—aptly called “Chop suey stories” (339) by their artistic director— restore a wilderness into an otherwise all too easily digestible image of a neighborhood, for they “add an element of ‘spice’ to the show” (340). For the slummer, the immersion in the wilderness implies a manageable and even pleasant threat, for the supposed perils of the slum are after all spatially confined. Suffused with an uplifting sense of having crossed a frontier that separates civilization from savagery, the slummer can readily head home to the comforts of the bourgeois abode. Still, it is important to note that “with each successive vogue the practice of slumming came more and more to define the urban districts upon which it converged” (Heap 57). A prime example in this context, which Against the Day also refers to, is the development of Greenwich Village—a neighborhood that had been virtually deserted by a white middleclass after the mass influx of immigrant workers in the late nineteenth century. Around the turn of the century, the latter were followed by numerous artists, bohemians and radicals, who moved into the neighborhood for its low rents. Consequently, the ‘Village’ became a notorious hotspot of the counterculture that “provided enterprising young women and men with a rare opportunity to fashion lives outside the constraints of both traditional family networks and the industrial economy” (Heap 59). Given its novel residential composition, slummers eventually started to consider the neighborhood as increasingly safe. Thus, by retaining the gritty vibe of a working-class district, while infusing it with an air of bohemian dissidence, the Village was made palatable for high earners as a slumming destination. The onset of this process is illustrated in Against the Day in a brief yet telling episode. We are told how, after relocating to midtown, Dahlia and Katie repair to downtown in order to attend a party at an impresario’s townhouse in Greenwich Village: They took the sixth Avenue El downtown and got off at Bleecker Street. There was some apricot-pink light left in the sky, and a southeast wind bringing up the aroma of roasting

320 | U TKU M OGULTAY coffee from South Street, and they could hear river traffic. It was Saturday night in Kipperville. Bearded youths ran by, chasing girls in Turkey red print dresses. Jugglers on unicycles performed tricks along the sidewalk. Negroes accosted strollers, exhibiting small vials of white powder and hopefully inquiring faces. Street vendors sold corn on the cob and broiled squabs on toast. Children hollered behind the open windows of tenements. Uptown slummers bound for places like Maria’s on MacDougal chatted brightly and asked one another, “Do you know where we’re going?” (348)

In a sense, this passage can be read as an ironic reprise of the initial moment of arrival. After relocating to a prosperous district, the heroine, now an upstart socialite, ventures into a seedy downtown neighborhood; however, this time she does so not out of necessity but as a pastime. Further, the passage suggests that the working-class neighborhood is on the cusp of profound transformation. The depiction of the picturesque streetscape, let alone the emblematic reference to the smell of coffee, prefigure that the Village, as it gradually sheds its semblance of a vice district, is undergoing gentrification. But the text likewise signifies that such a condition is not precipitated by supposed pioneers, who seek to recultivate an urban wilderness. What allowed slummers to effortlessly tour the Village was in fact the rather recent provision of a system of mechanized public transport, which the text reflects through highlighting the Sixth Avenue elevated railway constructed in the late 1870s. The Village’s popularity as a slumming destination was, in other words, dependent on the development of a transport infrastructure, which, in turn, required capital investment in the first place. This is not to deny the significance of the image of Greenwich Village as a stomping ground for libertines, but rather means that its attractiveness as a slumming destination has to be understood within a larger framework of economic development. What is more, its continuing integration into a transport network also made the Village increasingly attractive as an actual residential neighborhood for higher-income groups (mainly office workers and clerks employed in the financial district).iii In a way, then, its early appeal as a neighborhood of ill repute had a virtually paradoxical effect: As hosts of affluent slummers, lured by the promise of bohemian debauchery, poured into the Village, the district became attractive for capital investment. Consequently, the neighborhood underwent further redevelopment, while retaining its bohemian flair, so that it started to attract high earners as residents. Heap has put the nexus between the slumming craze and the restructuring of Greenwich Village as follows: “Far from reinforcing the districts’ association with poverty, degradation, or illicit sex, the slumming vogue for bohemian thrillage actually led to what might be considered one of the earliest examples of urban

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gentrification” (62; emphasis original). This is precisely the scenario that Against the Day alludes to, while indicating that such urban transformation was above all set in motion by capital investment and the development of a transport system. This is implied by designating Greenwich Village as ‘Kipperville’—an obvious reference to the 1939 children’s book Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel. The latter’s plot revolves around the eponymous steam shovel operator, who suburbanizes, as it were, in order to elude the growing competition by dieselpowered shovels. Although the operator’s decision can be seen as a display of personal ingenuity, it also represents a ‘passive’ adaptation to market conditions obeying the logic of supply and demand. Put another way, this reference once again points to the systemic nature of economic development in the built environment, for which the construction machine figures as an emblem. In this essay I have traced how Against the Day negotiates the various facets of the frontier myth in relation to processes of geographical and economic development. Pynchon’s text particularly stresses that the frontier myth unduly idealizes the history of westward expansion, while downplaying the role of urban development in the United States. The novel likewise signals that the frontier myth was crucial to shaping a conception of the city as an urban wilderness. In this sense, it came to provide a semantic repertoire that serves to promote and legitimize the ‘revitalization’ of this wilderness by supposed pioneers. This kind of rhetoric thus should be treated with caution, for it abets displacement by rendering invisible preexisting community life. Used in this way, the frontier myth becomes an instrument—as the narrator in Pynchon’s latest novel Bleeding Edge scathingly mocks—for insatiable real estate deve-lopers who sing to themselves: “This Land Is My Land, This Land Also Is My Land” (166).

W ORKS C ITED Abbott, Carl. How Cities Won the West. Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2008. Print. Christ, John X. “A Short Guide to the Art of Dining, Slumming, Touring, Wildlife, and Women for Hire in New York's Chinatown and Chinese Restaurants.” Oxford Art Journal 26. 2 (2003), 73-92. Print. Conn, Steven. Americans Against the City. Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Print. Heap, Chad, Slumming. Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print.

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Ickstadt, Heinz. “The City in English-Canadian and US-American Literature.” Faces of Fiction. Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to Postmodernity. Eds. Susanne Rohr and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2001. 299-310. Print. Lears, Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation. The Making of Modern America, 18771920. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Print. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print. ---. Bleeding Edge. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print. Self, Robert O. “City Lights: Urban History in the West.” A Companion to the American West. Ed. William Deverell. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 412-441. Print. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment. The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. ---. Gunfighter Nation. The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. Print. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.

C OMMENTS i

ii

iii

All references to Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) are given parenthetically with page numbers. Although this formula also found expression in a variety of dime novels, its most prominent literary rendering is probably Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). In this context, Heap has particularly stressed the importance of the southward extension of Seventh Avenue in 1914 and the ensuing construction of the Seventh Avenue subway line that was opened in 1918, both of which “transformed the once-secluded Village into one of the most central and easily accessible neighborhoods in the city” (61-62).

Contested Spaces

Ways into and out of the Crisis Urban Transformations in the L. A. Times’ Reporting on the 1992 Los Angeles ‘Riots’ K ATHRIN M USCHALIK

On March 3, 1991, an African American motorist, Rodney Glen King, was stopped by the LAPD for a traffic violation. The otherwise routine stop escalated, leading to King’s arrest; and, while being detained by four white officers at the scene, he was kicked and beaten more than 50 times. The police officers were unaware that they were being recorded by a witness, George Holliday, who gave the videotape to local TV-station KTLA. As the tape provided evidence of the officers’ violation of King’s civil rights and aroused public outrage, the four officers were charged with excessive force and assault. On April 29, 1992, however, they were acquitted, and Los Angeles erupted in an outbreak of violence and destruction that would become known as the “L.A. riots.” In the course of this unrest, more than 50 people were killed, more than 2,300 injured, and several thousand arrested, which—together with a total property damage of about $1 billion—makes it one of the most disastrous instances of urban unrest in U.S.-American history (Wallenfeldt). From day one of the unrest, daily newspapers and television networks devoted extensive resources not only to coverage of what was happening during the so-called “riots,” but also to discussion of what had led to the violent outbreak in the first place. The purpose of this essay is to examine the discourse on the “L.A. riots,” focusing particularly on the question of what was regarded as the cause and the ways out of the existing crisis. For this purpose, the Los Angeles Times—one of the largest newspapers in circulation in the United States in the 1990s—will serve as the main source. It will be determined if, in the first month after the eruption of the unrest (April 30-May 30), urban transformations were made a subject of L.A. Times reporting, how much importance it attached

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to this particular topic, and which—from the paper’s point of view—individuals or institutions were, had been, or should be involved in such changes. Before turning to the subject of urban transformation, however, this article will provide a brief overview of the Los Angeles Times’ news coverage on the unrest in general. Here, it is noticeable that this newspaper concentrated on the initial spark of the violent outbreak, the acquittal of the four police officers— Stacey Koon, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Laurence Powell—who had been involved in the Rodney King beating. According to the Times, the majority of the city’s population perceived the verdict as the ultimate proof that white-onblack racism was deeply rooted in American society and that its executive forces as well as its judicial branch—both of which are supposed to be color-blind— were marked by racism. Particularly in the first two days of the L.A. Times’ reporting, this impression was created by numerous articles presenting people’s reactions to the way that “the color of your skin determines the degree of justice you get” (Ferrell/Wallace A24), or to the public’s feeling that “the verdict’s just as racist as what happened that night [the night of the King beating]” (Serrano/Wilkinson A22). Despite the focus on institutionalized racism that manifested itself in the King beating as well as the acquittal of the police officers, the Times soon identified another reason for the existing crisis: the past transformation of Los Angeles. This urban transformation, however, was only mentioned in passing and in a rather fragmented manner. Attentive readers were pointed to isolated historical phenomena, which served as a partial explanation for the violent outbreak. While some of these isolated phenomena were concerned with developments in Los Angeles as a whole, others focused on the location where the riots had started, namely South Central L.A. Articles dealing with the citywide historical urban transformation concentrated, above all, on the rise and decline of Los Angeles’ defense industry between 1945 and the late 1980s. The newspaper reported that, according to experts from different academic fields, the city—with the already looming collapse of the Soviet Union—had neglected “to shed its old industrial skin, to emerge an information and finance-based gateway to expanding Asia” (Flannigan). Clinging to the defense industry and a simultaneously declining sales market for industrial goods led to a dramatic rise in unemployment. According to the L.A. Times, the decline particularly affected African Americans, who had played an important role in the city’s heavy industry since its very beginnings: “Employment in better paying metal fabrication industries fell 22%. Unemployment among young black males grew to 50% in some areas” (ibid.). In the low-pay sector, the results were even more dramatic because the

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already low-wage rate was undercut by cheap foreign labor from Central America. According to the L.A. Times, the export of labor caused an economic division of the city “into an explosive patchwork of sub-minimum and high incomes,” (ibid.) which could be regarded as the main cause of the unrest. The Rodney King beating, then, was the last straw. Unemployment among African Americans was not only addressed with regard to the transformation of the whole city, but, more specifically, with respect to the demographic change, the historical urban transformation of South Central Los Angeles. Here, unemployment was stressed as having caused a division within the black community. Those who could financially afford to leave South Central did so, and they left behind those who could not. The impoverished members of the African American community found “themselves increasingly isolated from both the white community and the increasingly affluent black middle class” (Risen/Tumulty). As stated by the Los Angeles Times, this “massive group of the permanent underclass” (Brownstein “Clinton: Parties Fail”) faced the influx of a growing number of Korean entrepreneurs in South Central and their economic success in the neighborhood. In the course of the unrest (together with the emerging question of whether “rioters” deliberately targeted Korean-owned businesses), the Times repeatedly mentioned that the surge of Korean-owned businesses led to African Americans feeling excluded from economic opportunity. Herve Gordon, a social worker in and of South Central, for instance, states that They [black welfare recipients] spent all their money right here with these Koreans. And they got treated like crap. These businesses used to be all black and some Jewish […]. But suddenly—and mysteriously […]—they were taken over by Korean proprietors. You never knew it was for sale. You never knew there was an opportunity to invest in your neighborhood. They [Koreans] have some kind of invisible inside line on it. (Stall A14)

In printing quotes of this kind, the Times revealed not only the economic disadvantage decried by many African Americans, but also the strained relationship between Korean shop owners and their black customers—a strain caused by a combination of mutual prejudices and cultural miscommunication.i However, the newspaper shied away from identifying the animosity between blacks and Koreans as a cause of the unrest. Instead, it cautiously asked whether or not black looters and arsonists deliberately targeted Korean businesses, suggesting that tensions between these two groups had been high since the killing of Latasha Harlins about a year earlier.ii

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By elaborating on the historical urban transformation of South Central, the Los Angeles Times presented black residents who participated in the unrest largely as victims of their living conditions—conditions brought upon them by economic changes and unresponsive politicians. At the same time, the newspaper’s terminology did not correspond with this depiction of the looters and arsonists as victims. By referring to the unrest as “riots”—“a situation in which a large group of people behave in a violent and uncontrolled way” (“Riot”)—the Times assumed that residents participating in the unrest were disrupting their otherwise “peaceful” living conditions. Thus, the Times named possible reasons for the unrest and neglected them at the same time. This depiction of events may have to do with the course of the first few hours of the violent outbreak, during which its progression, scale and the manifold reasons behind it might have been obscured. Once the newspaper had labeled the events “riots,” it simply adhered to this terminology, even though the terminology did not fit the cause of unrest as determined by the Times. Furthermore, it is striking that—if it was mentioned at all—the historical urban transformation was depicted from an African American perspective only, though many other ethnic/racial groups, especially Latin Americans, participated in the unrest as well. The demographic change that had occurred in their neighborhoods was completely omitted by the Times, and its readers were not informed about the motivation Latinos may have had to take part in the unrest. This might have happened for a number of reasons, none of which were actually addressed in the L.A. Times. One reason can certainly be found in the “King case,” given that it involved white-on-black violence, which was excused by the law. Another reason might be related to the city’s history of racially charged unrest, starting with the so-called Chinese Massacre of 1871 and continuing through the 1943 Suit Zoot riots to the 1965 Watts riots. These unrests in the history of L.A. involved two ethnic groups, one of which was always Caucasian. In 1992, by contrast, the city faced its first multiethnic unrest, a “concept” both unknown and hard to grasp, especially in the early hours of the events. The historical transformation of South Central Los Angeles, however, was not the only topic addressed in the coverage of the L.A. Times. In addition, and in a similarly subtle manner, the contemporary transformation was made a subject of discussion. The contemporary transformation, which can be subdivided into a physical and a mental one, referred to the changes taking place during the Los Angeles unrest of 1992, i.e., at the very moment the L.A. Times was reporting about it. One part of the contemporary, ongoing transformation concerned the actual, physical and targeted destruction in and of certain neighborhoods, like Koreatown or South Central itself. Here, it is striking that within L.A. Times

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coverage, the demolition of black-owned stores by black “rioters” was met with incomprehension. The Times repeatedly quoted citizens of all races and ethnicities who seemed to accept the conflict between two racial groups and the mutual destruction of their respective neighborhoods, but not the destruction of a neighborhood by its own residents; they were astonished by the fact that “they [the “rioters”] are destroying their own neighborhood” (“Globalization”). The second aspect of the contemporary transformation of Los Angeles is what I call a mental transformation, which refers to the attitudes of different ethnic and racial groups towards each other. Beside articles dealing with the question of which ethnic and racial group(s) had instigated the unrest, there were several others informing the reader that the relationship between different ethnicities was not only marked by suspicion but increasingly by fear. Readers were, for example, informed that “fear knows color” (Woo A1) and that “even people who normally pride themselves in the acceptance of other cultures have found themselves noticing other peoples’ skin colors and feeling afraid” (Kowsky/Hirabayashi A18). Thus, in the course of the unrest, race/ethnicity became the most important identity marker, not only for the participants in the ‘riots’ but also the readers. The distinction between “we” and “them,” between friend and foe, was particularly (if not solely) based on the opponent’s visible ethnic/racial background. By stressing the respective agents’ racial/ethnic background over and over again (and particularly by doing so in the first three days of its reporting), this racially based distinction of Angelenos can also be found in the Times’ reporting. This became apparent in articles stating, for example: “White photographer Al Seib and reporter Ashley Dunn, who is Chinese-American” (Morrison A4); “Times reporter Greg Braxton, who is black” (ibid.); or “Highland Park resident Marianne Hooper, 30, who is white watched the verdicts at home” (Ferrell/Wallace A24). But it became especially clear in the published lists of fatalities: While reports from the second day of the unrest (Thursday, April 30) mentioned the respective victims’ name, age, cause and place of death, as well as their ethnic/racial background, the latter information does not appear on the list published directly after the unrest (Tuesday, May 5)iii (“The List of Fatalities”). No longer mentioning the victims’ race might be an indication of the Times’ shift in reporting. While the newspaper focused on respective racial/ethnic backgrounds in the first days of coverage, this soon changed towards a focus on “rioters” and victims. Besides the historical and the current transformation of the city, the Los Angeles Times alluded to what I call a future urban transformation. This yet-tocome transformation can be subdivided into a negative one—to be avoided—and an anticipated, or hopeful, one. Predictably, the negative one was condemned, as

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it would lead to an economic and social downward movement of the city. Here, it was initially assumed that, in the worst case, the unrest could “exacerbate the image of L.A. as a ‘Blade Runner’ urban landscape of crime and decay” (Lee A16), which would cause a decline in tourism; hotels, restaurants and other service industries would be the most likely to face losses in sales. In combination with the destruction caused by the unrest, it would “result in an incalculable loss of jobs and income that will certainly raise the area’s unemployment rate” (ibid.). First and foremost, this loss of jobs would upset the low-wage sector, which would in turn especially affect the already impoverished inner city. However, it is striking that another transformation, an anticipated transformation, was regarded as the only opportunity to overcome the crisis. Here, the newspaper offered many solution-oriented articles demanding two things: first, measures to improve race relations and second, economic changes that would lead to an improvement of the living conditions of South Central’s residents. Numerous experts from different academic fields as well as politicians were cited who essentially all came to the same conclusion: the necessity of “new federal government initiatives, including an increase in spending on infrastructure […], new efforts to encourage job training, and the creation of a national health system” (Brownstein “Clinton offers Views” A9). While in some cases economic changes and the improvement of race relations were treated separately, there were other articles in the L.A. Times that regarded these two aspects of the city’s future as inextricably linked. According to the latter reports, the racial animosity that found its expression in the unrest was merely a “symptom of L.A.’s more fundamental problem, which is economic stratification” (Flannigan). This seems also to have been both the local as well as national politicians’ general impression. Even while the unrest was taking place, these politicians instigated or at least suggested measures supposed to foster an anticipated urban transformation. It is remarkable that an improvement of the status quo was considered possible at all, given the content of the Times articles and the vocabulary used to describe the unrest. One term repeatedly used was “crisis,” which—although negatively charged—implies the chance of rebuilding Los Angeles as well as improving its residents’ living conditions. The unrest, like each and every crisis, constituted a surprising and threatening event for most Angelenos but it simultaneously denotes the potential for change intrinsic to the term. “A city in crisis,” a phrase that was used repeatedly to characterize Los Angeles, thus describes a city in transition, while the crisis constitutes a corridor between two stages: the one that Los Angeles used to be in and another, a future, and hopefully better, stage.

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Something similar is implied by what Dana Cloud terms “rhetoric of therapy.” From day one, articles described the unrest (and also circumstances that have led to it) in medical terms. They were characterized as a “trauma” (“Stop the Violence”), a “self-inflicted” (Peterson/Tobar A1) or “open wound” (Braun/Dunn A1) giving L.A.’s residents—regardless of ethnic background—“a painful […] time” (Corwin A8). Here, the idea of unrest is something unexpected, which includes the prospect of change and improvement, as there is a fair chance of “healing” (“Stop the Violence” B6), another term in regular use. This, however, was by no means a stylistic device used by the Times only. Especially during the 1990s, disease and healing metaphors were widely used in politics to refer to socio-political conflicts (Cloud). Thus, the L.A. Times took up and utilized an existing discourse, made it a part of its own reporting and applied it to L.A., not as a remedy but as a signifier for the transitional phase between the two stages: the old and the new Los Angeles. But who or what was supposed to bring about this “healing” of the city and pave the way towards its anticipated transformation? By repeatedly stressing the necessity of new governmental initiatives addressing the problems of inner-cities (and thereby indirectly pointing out that officials had neglected these areas for decades), the Times depicted officials rather than the “rioters” as the ones to blame for the current crisis and also as those who would have to find ways out of it. The newspaper therefore considered not only local, but also national politics responsible. Thus, it extensively reported on how the presidential candidates of the 1992 election, then-Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton and then-President George H.W. Bush, addressed the unrest in their respective campaigns.iv The Times reported that city residents met both politicians with skepticism because they assumed the candidates were not interested in solving the social and economic problems of the inner city, but in gaining votes. Nevertheless, the Times presented Clinton as the one worthier of support. Their favoring of Clinton particularly apparent when comparing reports about the candidates’ visits to the “riot zone.” Here, among other things, Clinton was portrayed as the more human politician, who is literally in touch with “his” people: [A] man made a come-on-over gesture with his arm and caught the eye of Clinton, who was about 50 feet away and just concluding a sidewalk press conference with a gaggle of reporters and photographers. Clinton grinned, hesitated and hiked over. He shook hands and exchanged brief greetings with the volunteer and several other onlookers. (Stall A14)

Bush, in contrast, was depicted as an impersonal politician, abandoning the city’s residents in an hour of need:

332 | K ATHRIN M USCHALIK As Bush’s limousine emerged from a tent in the Radio Korea parking lot, after the early afternoon meeting, hundreds of demonstrators shouted, “Compensation! Compensation!” Behind tinted glass, the President leaned forward and offered a cramped wave and a smile. “We are victims!” one woman shouted. The limousine accelerated and, in seconds, was gone. Chest heaving, the woman’s voice began to crack. “Help us,” she cried. (Jehl/Stall A8)

By using quotes such as these, embellishing articles dealing with the respective yet similar politicians’ pre-election promises (they resemble those presented above), the Times—at least with regard to the unrest and the anticipated urban transformation of L.A.—depicts Clinton as the more favorable candidate. If and to what extent this portrayal might have influenced the outcome of the 1992 presidential election certainly leaves room for future studies. Beside articles dealing with the presidential candidates’ responses to the unrest and the improvements they proposed (which were mentioned but hardly commented on by the Times), the newspaper equally concentrated on reports about local initiatives supposed to rebuild L.A.: one of the most concrete measures was certainly the appointment of Peter V. Ueberroth, organizer of the 1984 Olympics, to head an extra-governmental task force supposed to rebuild the ‘riot-torn’ city. Already during the unrest, on Saturday May 2, Ueberroth announced that he had accepted Mayor Tom Bradley’s offer to take the unpaid chair of Rebuild L.A. and “to make the ravaged parts of the city much better than they were before the disturbance” (Clifford/Schwada A1)—a decision the Los Angeles Times itself seems to have greatly appreciated. Statements by the Times according to which Ueberroth was “one of the finest salesmen around” (Scheer) and that his “confidence and ambition are infectious” (ibid.) are vivid expression of this favorable reporting. Furthermore, the newspaper repeatedly praised him as the organizer of the Olympic Games, saying, for instance, “Peter V. Ueberroth, who guided the city through one of its greatest modern triumphs—the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics—has agreed to take charge of the city’s efforts to recover, materially and spiritually, from the holocaust of the past week” (Clifford/Schwada A1). Thus, the Times not only stressed Ueberroth’s economic achievements, but also seems to have invited the newspaper’s readership to look for a brighter future under his “guidance.” The publics’ reactions, as reported in the Times, to Ueberroth’s key role in rebuilding Los Angeles turned out to be deeply divided. While city officials were “generally enthusiastic about Ueberroth’s role,” (ibid. A13) others—also those who endorsed his appointment in general—asked to what extent he would be up to the task. Civic activist and Tom Bradley’s former aide, Nelson Rising, for

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instance, was “thrilled that someone like Peter has stepped forward. But this is a real fundamental challenge. Our society isn’t working. The slender thread that holds us together broke, and we all watched it” (ibid). Arguably, one of the most prominent reasons for questioning Ueberroth’s appointment was, besides the economic practicability of his plans, his ethnicity. Soon the public raised the question of whether or not a single white man could cater to the needs of L.A.’s various ethnic groups. Members of different minorities asked whether the new leader of the Rebuild L.A. task force had “sufficient understanding of the devastated neighborhoods where the repairs will need to be made” (Shiver Jr./Rainey A1). In this case, “sufficient understanding” comprised knowledge about the respective areas’ history, the ethnic and economic constellation conditioned by it, as well as their inhabitants’ cultural characteristics. Ethnic minorities stressed that, for example, residents of Korean neighborhoods had to proceed differently than residents in Latin or African American communities. They also stressed that rebuilding Los Angeles and mobilizing an urban transformation could only be successfully accomplished within and through the communities themselves. Though the Times quoted ethnic minorities who had problems with his appointment, the paper simply listed these opinions without further comment. Together with presenting Ueberroth as a hands-on businessman, this can be read as an attempt on the newspaper’s part to distance itself from the idea that he could have been the wrong choice. Even in situations where Ueberroth and his aims could have been criticized, the Times refrained from doing so. Ueberroth, for example, pointed out that his goal was “for corporations to make long-term commitments to the devastated inner-city neighborhoods and to create ‘sustainable jobs on a profitable basis’ rather than short-term donations” (Peterson/Lee A1). To ensure these, the collaboration of the private sector would be necessary. Its task would be creating lasting jobs in impoverished areas that have suffered from a job exodus in the recent years. If successful such neighborhoods—where jobs have often been at the corner liquor store or check-cashing outlet—might one day be transformed into centers for a range of industry, utilizing trained workers. (ibid. A1, 13)

It is striking that Ueberroth ascribed to South Central only one kind of possible economic reconstruction, namely the re-introduction of manufacturing industries, similar to the heavy industries that had been characteristic of the area during and after World War II. He obviously did not take into account the factors that had led to a migration of companies during the 1970s and 1980s, which had caused an urban transformation that became detrimental for this particular

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area—the low-cost production of various goods in cities behind the Mexican border, e.g. in Tijuana, or in Asian countries such as Indonesia. Though it is common for politicians to call for a solid industrial base in times of economic crisis, the Times’ support of Ueberroth’s suggestions was inconsistent. Previously, the newspaper had identified economic changes—and the lack of response to them—as the main cause of decline in areas like South Central, but it did not question Ueberroth’s approach; it stressed his achievements instead. In numerous articles, the L.A. Times portrayed Ueberroth as a hands-on businessman trying to meet the expectations of all Angelenos. For example, the newspaper repeatedly stressed that Ueberroth not only met with community leaders to include their demands in his revitalizing efforts, but also tried to take account of the ideas of “ordinary citizens.” Readers were informed that Ueberroth and his Rebuild L.A. taskforce had, for instance, provided questionnaires “at tables outside about 30 Los Angeles Churches […] for people to voice their opinion on how they think rebuilding should be done” (Peterson “After the Riots”). Furthermore, the Times repeatedly told its readers about Ueberroth raising funds to rebuild the city. It reported that, shortly after the unrest, he had been able to convince numerous foreign L.A.-based firms to contribute to his revitalizing efforts. The Times stressed Ueberroth’s success by reporting, for instance, that several companies and associations—such as the Japan Business Assn. of Southern California, a coalition of 700 firms and 60,000 employees—were “concerned and want[ed] to help communities rebuild” (White). Mentioning these numbers and telling its readers that there were numerous other firms awaiting “a Rebuild LA master plan for revitalizing the city” (ibid.), shows that the Times actively supported Ueberroth. Using terms like ‘master plan’ to refer to his efforts and at the same time not commenting on his critics’ argumentation illustrates exactly this. As suddenly as the reporting on Ueberroth had appeared, it vanished. On May 18, the Times reported that because of Ueberroth’s hands-on attitude, his race was perceived as less and less of an obstacle. The newspaper pointed out that, although residents felt “a white man residing outside the city [could not] be sensitive to the needs of riot-torn neighborhoods” (“Ueberroth denounces Critics”), there was still a growing number of “cautiously supportive voices from the minority communit[ies]” (Peterson “Ueberroth does balancing Act”). With criticism of Ueberroth receding, the coverage of Rebuild L.A. also declined. Taking into consideration all the evidence provided above, it can be said that between April 30 and May 30, 1992, the Los Angeles Times repeatedly referred to urban transformations, even in instances in which they were not labeled as

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such. As this essay has shown, these transformations were not limited to the contemporary period but involved reflections on the past and present, as well as speculations about the future. The first, the historical urban transformation of L.A., particularly of South Central Los Angeles, explained the current transformation. Although being marked by destruction and fear, the current transformation was regarded as a chance for change. According to the Times, this change, this future urban transformation, was supposed to be influenced by national as well as local politics. Besides Bill Clinton and George Bush, the newspaper focused on Peter V. Ueberroth and his extra-governmental taskforce Rebuild L.A., which was portrayed as offering the most promising way out of the crisis. The newspaper actively supported Ueberroth by depicting him as a handson businessman who was concerned with the welfare of all Angelenos, regardless of their race/ethnicity or social class. It is striking, however, that while— according to the Times—race and ethnicity were of great importance in all here urban transformations, gender or rather gender roles do not seem to have played an appreciable role, at least not in the L.A. Times’ reporting examined here. This certainly had its reason in the fact that in a predominately male setting like the 1990s’ realm of politics and economy, it did not play a crucial role and thus was neglected by the Times, too. That the 1992 L.A. unrest, or rather the attention it aroused in the media, had an influence on life in urban Los Angeles is undeniable. Though it is hardly possible to evaluate to what extent single measures (local/national funding, the founding of public charities, etc.) contributed to the development of Los Angeles after 1992, some observations can be made. First, South Central L.A. underwent an urban transformation, which differed from the anticipated urban transformation sought by Ueberroth. In 2003, the area was renamed South L.A. to avoid the negative connotation it had evoked in the past. Describing the area’s shift from a predominantly black to a Latino community, local residents also speak of an ethnic transformation. Furthermore, they state that South L.A. “calmed down dramatically, in terms of violence” (“How is South Central”), and they attribute the relative calm to an increased police presence. “[L]ots of new buildings” (ibid.), which offer not only housing but also different shopping opportunities, has noticeably changed the area’s streetscape. In comparison to pre-riot South L.A., its neighborhoods are no longer “held hostage by the multitude of liquor stores and mini-marts” (ibid.), but are marked by new restaurants, grocery stores and banks. Nevertheless, these positive changes cannot hide the fact that a number of grievances that contributed to the 1992 unrest are still present. Racial tensions and police brutality have not vanished, and are still regarded as a major problem

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in L.A. Still, the Los Angeles unrest raised awareness of these problems. Today, police brutality and a lack of job prospects for young male minority members are no longer denied. Furthermore, conversations about race and race relations are no longer a black-and-white problem, but include other racial/ethnic groups, such as Latinos and Asians. Attentiveness to racial/ethnic diversity has “elevated the discussion of the racial composition of juries and the location of trials” (Steward). Thus, although the 1992 unrest did not lead to the resolution of all social and economic problems of South Los Angeles, it induced a change in the way the city thinks about its ethnically diverse communities. This change in thinking was certainly encouraged by the L.A. Times’ news coverage of the unrest. With a daily circulation over 1.1 million on weekdays and 1.3 million on Sundays, the Times was the second largest daily American newspaper (only outnumbered by the Financial Times) at the beginning of the 1990s, reaching not only Angelenos but Americans all over the U.S. Its problemas well as solution-oriented reporting—which included discussions of racerelations, economy and politics—referred to existing problems and contributed to a conscious examination of the respective topics on individual as well as societal levels. It was this examination of pressing social issues that made the changes possible in the first place.

W ORKS C ITED Braun, Stephen and Ashley Dunn. “View of Model Multiethnic City Vanishes in Smoke: Relations: Disturbances bare a simmering racial anger that community efforts never fully quelled.” Los Angeles Times 1 May 1992: A1, 28. Print. Brownstein, Ronald. “Clinton: Parties Fail to Attack Race Division.” Los Angeles Times 3 May 1992: A8. Print. Brownstein, Ronald. “Clinton Offers Views on Recovery: Tour: On a visit to riot-torn areas, the Democratic front-runner says residents need to be ‘empowered’ to confront urban problems.’” Los Angeles Times 5 May 1992: A9, 14. Print. Clifford, Frank and John Schwada. “Ueberroth Will Direct City Rebuilding Effort.” Los Angeles Times 3 May 1992: A1, 13. Print. Cloud, Dana. Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetoric of Therapy. London: Sage, 1998. Print. Corwin, Miles. “Everyday Life Shattered in Many Ways: Closures: Businesses and services are forced to shut down throughout the city. Schools, mass

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transit and libraries halt operations. Pro sports events are cancelled.” Los Angeles Times 1 May 1992: A8, 16. Print. Ferrell, David and Amy Wallace. “Verdicts Greeted With Outrage and Disbelief: Reaction: Many cite videotape of beating and ask how jury could acquit officers. A few voice satisfaction.” Los Angeles Times 30 April 1992: A1, 24. Print. Flanigan, James. “Can L.A. Answer Cry for Economic Equality?” Los Angeles Time 3 May 1992. Web. 13 July 2014 Ford, Andrea and Lee, John H.: “Slain Girl Was Not Stealing Juice, Police Say: Shooting: The incident in which the 15-year-old was killed by a market owner was captured on a security system videotape”. Los Angeles Times 19 March 1991. Web. 16 Sept 2015 “Globalization of Los Angeles: The First Multiethnic Riot: American dilemma of race relations has suddenly been internationalized.” In: Los Angeles Times 10 May 1992. 13 July 2014 “How is South Central Today Compared to 15 Years ago (Los Angeles: crime, homes).” City-Data.com. 13 March 2009. 23 Sept. 2014 Jehl, Douglas and Bill Stall. “Bush Offers Message of Healing to the City: Unrest: President tours devastated areas and tells of ‘horror and dismay.’ Some riot victims react with anger.” Los Angeles Times 8 May 1992: A1, 7, 8. Print. Kowsky, Kim and Bernice Hirabayashi Ashi. “Tension Add Awkwardness to Everyday Encounters: Race Relations: Mistrust is pervasive. Even small talk and forced politeness point to a heightened unease.” Los Angeles Times 4 May 1992: A1, 18. Print. Lee, Patrick. “Riot May Send Economy Into a Deeper Hole.” Los Angeles Times 2 May 1992: A1, 16. Print. “The List of Fatalities.” Los Angeles Times 5 May 1992: A19. Print. Morrison, Patt. “The Press Under Fire: Riot Targets Journalists.” Los Angeles Times 1 May 1992: A4. Print. Peterson, Jonathan and Hector Tobar. “South L.A. Burns and Grieves: Life has been hard in the neglected area for years. But now, as self-inflicted wounds mount, residents fear for the future.” Los Angeles Times 1 May 1992: A1, 24. Print.

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Peterson, Jonathan and Patrick Lee. “Ueberroth Says Calls to Aid Rebuilding Are Flooding In.” Los Angeles Times 6 May 1992: A1, 13. Print. Peterson, Jonathan. “After the Riots: Rebuilding the Community: Rebuild L.A. Asks Residents for Their Input”. Los Angeles Times 11 May 1992. 13 July 2014 Peterson, Jonathan. “Ueberroth Does Balancing Act as Rebuild L.A. Chief: Riots: Leaders lobby chairman for roles for minorities in restoring the city. Task force has not named a board of directors”. Los Angeles Times 18 May 1992. 13 July 2014 “Riot.” Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, 2014. Web. 3 Nov. 2014

Risen, James and Karen Tumulty. “King Case Aftermath.” Los Angeles Times 02 May 1992. Web. 13 July 2014 Scheer, Robert. “LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW: Peter Ueberroth: A Man of Privilege Aims to Get Down and Dirty to Rebuild L.A.” Los Angeles Times 17 May 1992. 2 March 2015 Serrano, Richard A. “All 4 in King Beating Acquitted. Violence Follows Verdicts; Guard Called Out: Trial: Governor deploys troops at mayor’s request after arson, looting erupt. Ventura County jury apparently was not convinced videotape told the whole story.” Los Angeles Times 30 April 1992: A1, 22. Print. Shiver Jr., Jube and James Rainey. “Reaction Divided Over Key Role for Ueberroth” Los Angeles Times 4 May 1992: A1, 20. Print. Stall, Bill. “Clinton treated Coolly on Firebombed Avenue.” Los Angeles Times, 5 May 1992: A9, 14. Print. Steward, Alicia W. “5 Ways the Rodney King beating and the LA riots changed America.” Vlog. InAmerica. CNN. 18 June 2012. Web. 2014.

“Stop the Violence, Start the Renewal: The King verdict spawns unwarranted violence, but also acts of courage and leadership that show the way to a better future.” Los Angeles Times 1 May 1992: B6. Print. “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992: Historical Timeline”. UCDAVIS. Campus Community Book Project 2004. 2004. 2014

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“Ueberroth Denounces Critics of His Role: Project: ‘Rebuild L.A.’ chief rejects idea he can’t be sensitive to the needy.” Los Angeles Times 14 May 1992. Web. 13 July 2014 Wallenfeldt, Jeff. “Los Angeles Riots of 1992” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013. Web. 8 July 2013. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/879397/LosAngeles-Riots-of-1992 White, George: “Foreign Firms Joining Rebuild L.A. Effort: Commerce: The Japanese are leading the effort. But some are irritated about demands for their help because of recent ‘Buy American’ campaigns”. Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1992. 13 July 2014 Woo, Elaine. “Fissure of Race Tear Fabric of L.A.: A third-generation ChineseAmerican comes to a haunting realization about multiracial L.A. For the first time, she feels prejudice—and fear.” Los Angeles Times 5 May 1992: A1, 12.

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The conflict between African Americans and Koreans was not a new phenomenon in 1992 Los Angeles. The relationship between blacks and Koreans—because of mutual reservations and prejudices—has been strained since 1965, when the newly passed Immigration and Nationality Act allowed a growing number of Koreans to enter the U.S. (see Cho). On March 16th, only two weeks after the King beating, 14-year-old African American Latasha Harlins was shot by Korean entrepreneur Soon Ja Du in South Central L.A. in the quarrel over a bottle of orange juice. Despite a video showing Du shooting Harlins in the back of her head, Du was sentenced with only five years probation, community service and a $500 fine (see “Twilight”). Since Joyce Karlin, the judge responsible in this case, was white, the city’s black community raised the question of whether her decision had been racially motivated. Before the verdict was made public, African American civil rights groups had started boycotting Korean-owned businesses. They demanded more respect from Koreans, on the one hand, and more economic influence in South Central, on the other hand (Ford/Lee). Because of the intensity of this “Black-Korean conflict,” the L.A. Times asked if Korean-owned stores were deliberately targeted during the 1992 unrest. This development can be tracked, since the Times used its “old” fatality lists and simply added the unrest’s new victims.

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Despite the fact that Clinton and Bush were not the only Presidential candidates, the Times focused particularly on their responses to the L.A. unrest.

Reconceptualizing the ‘Inner City’ Blackness, Community and Urban Geography in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle E VA B OESENBERG

Paul Beatty’s novel The White Boy Shuffle, published in 1996, maps the urban transformations of Los Angeles of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but extends them into a dystopian future. In a satirical mode, it denaturalizes the link between stereotypical images of the ‘inner city’i and blackness, even as it highlights the role of built environments as tools of a ‘race’- and class-based biopolitics. The residents respond to such spatial violence through their own place-making strategies which, while not always unproblematic, express a measure of agency and transethnic solidarity. The tensions inherent in this unequal power struggle come to a head in the LA Rebellion and a subsequent form of non-violent transformation of urban geographies that gestures towards the potential erasure of ‘blackness’ in the US altogether. This article proceeds in four steps. I will first discuss the novel’s representation of a built environment, a fictionalized version of South Central Los Angeles, as a mechanism to contain racialized working-class populations. The second part will then address the residents’ co-construction of this ‘inner city’ through their own spatial politics, before I turn to the impact of the LA Rebellion. The fourth section finally analyses the effects of the new social movement led by the narrator-protagonist that possibly heralds not only the end of the ‘inner city,’ but that of the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area and thus US American cities more generally.

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D ECONSTRUCTING THE ‘I NNER C ITY ’ The text immediately undermines notions of ‘inner cities’ as the natural habitat of a black ‘urban underclass’ by setting narrator-protagonist Gunnar Kaufman’s childhood in middle-class, white-dominated Santa Monica. It comments ironically on so-called “black flight,” middle-class African Americans’ departure from impoverished LA neighborhoods for more well-to-do parts of the city since the 1960s: The Kaufmans move to the predominantly working-class district of Hillside not out of economic necessity, but because Mrs. Kaufmann believes greater exposure to “traditional black experience” will benefit her children (Beatty 46).ii As Rolland Murray observes, “The fantasy of homecoming that Mrs. Kaufman endorses […] aims to reverse the alienation that is a consequence of desegregation by reintegrating into the site of an organic blackness” (223). Gunnar and his sisters are not pleased: “Ma, you done fucked up and moved to the ‘hood!’” (Beatty 41). The image of the “hood” is soon revealed as a racialized projection when a rap video, shot in Gunnar’s new environment, reiterates all of the clichés associated with this term. The name of the director—Edgar Barley Burrows— links the video to Tarzan, shorthand for a history of primitivism in US popular culture. Designed to impress viewers in “Peoria” and “Dubuque,” i.e. a white audience, the clip features a hyperbolic performance of violence that requires serious effort on the side of the actors (76). The instructions to the film crew reveal the artificiality of the setup: “‘Special effects, can you make the flames shoot farther out from the barrel of the Uzi? […] More blood! You call this carnage! More blood.’ My street was a soundstage and its machinations of poverty and neglect were Congo cinema verité” (76). The last sentence explicitly frames the filming as a colonial, or neocolonial, encounter. “[S]o powerful is the colonial simulation that Burrows brings to Hillside that it usurps living reality,” Murray comments (224). A later passage highlights the exploitative dimensions of such kinds of cultural production: “The Hollywood ethnographers were no longer examining the traditional native dances […]. Like photogenic Riefenstahl Nubians watching the white god’s helicopter pull away, the Hillside denizens watched the film crew […] hustle off, leaving us to fight over the blessed remnants of Western civilization they left behind” (Beatty 79). Neocolonial power relations are here mapped onto the interaction of different social groups within the greater L.A. area that are marked by a raced and classed power imbalance. At the same time, Gunnar’s sophisticated reading of this scene, with the term “cinema verité” signalling his

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possession of middle class cultural capital, suggests that Hillside’s residents are more than aware of the stereotypes projected upon their neighborhood. The text thus self-reflexively draws attention to the discursive construction of urban space, its own included. For the narrator’s portrayal of Hillside is hardly less exaggerated, its sarcastic humor frequently pivoting on the violence endemic to local social interactions. But it frames these as caused in large measure by the oppression and economic discrimination perpetrated by those outside of its confines, as the evocation of neo-colonialism in the exchanges with the film team attests. Even if the constellation of “chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs” Eric Avila has described as typical for Los Angeles in the post-World War II era (1-19) has been replaced by a more complicated urban geography, unequal power relations are still legible in the city’s spatial makeup. When Hillside is first introduced in the text, its name, coined by the residents, already comments ironically on one of the central tropes in US cultural history: the “city upon a hill” seems to be sliding downward. Its physical shape succinctly expresses the social confinement of Hillside’s inhabitants: In the late 1960s, after the bloody but little known I’m-Tired-of-the-White-Man-Fuckin’with-Us-and-Whatnot riots, the city decided to pave over the neighboring mountainside, surrounding the community with a great concrete wall that spans its entire curved perimeter save for an arched gateway at the southwest entrance. At the summit of this cement precipice wealthy families live in an upper-middle-class hamlet known as Cheviot Heights. At the bottom of this great wall live hordes of impoverished American Mongols. Hardrock n-s,iii Latinos, and Asians. (45)

With its surrounding wall, the neighborhood’s architecture represents an instance of structural violence, its sole entrance a means of monitoring and controlling the mobility of the potentially unruly local population. The text here evokes Soja’s description of Los Angeles as an “urban panopticum” governed by the downtown area, specifically City Hall (Postmodern Geographies 233-34). While Hillside’s concrete circumference tropes the tendency of affluent “gated communities” to fortify their boundaries, the area also prefigures the “containment districts” declared by municipal authorities after 1992 (Davis 384). The wall literalizes the residential segregation that has long been a distinctive feature of US American racism—in L.A. as well as elsewhere. It is hardly accidental that Josh Sides’s 2003 study of African American Los Angeles is entitled L.A. City Limits. The physical constraints the wall imposes are complemented by the surveillance of the residents. In this space, Gunnar is immediately read as a

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potential criminal by the Los Angeles Police Department, LAPD, who send two armed officers to inquire about his gang affiliation (46-48). The construction of the narrator-protagonist’s family complicates simple mappings of a white/black binary onto the constellation of racist police force versus innocent victim, though, for Gunnar’s father is himself a member of the LAPD—he sketches portraits of criminal suspects (9). The family is thus both in- and outside of Hillside, the father contributing to the oppression of the residents to which his former wife and the children belong. The title of the first chapter—“mama baby, papa maybe”—, which derives from an African American vernacular expression, makes it clear with which side Gunnar identifies. The point is made in a different manner during the introductory dialogue between the narrator-protagonist and Scoby. When Scoby, upon hearing his name, comments: “You dark as fuck for someone with Teutonic blood,” Gunnar retorts: “Naw, strictly Negro hemoglobins” (67), distancing himself from any Germanic ancestry his father’s surname might evoke. At the same time, his first name recalls Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, whose An American Dilemma paved the way for the Moynihan Report, which advanced the damaging social theory according to which the root cause of African Americans’ problems consisted in their frequent departure from patriarchal family structures. With its portrayal of the female-headed Kaufman family, The White Boy Shuffle both evokes and refutes such racist assumptions.iv Inside Hillside’s walls, social hierarchies are mirrored by geographical location. The composition of the population “at the bottom” reflects demographic constellations in late-twentieth century L.A. inner city districts such as South Central, including its so-called “Latin Americanization” (Sides 203). The text resorts to an Orientalizing metaphor (“Mongols”) to signal their perception as “un-Western” and possibly “uncivilized.” Perhaps most importantly, the passage points to the intersection of ‘race’ and class: What connects the multicultural multitudes is lack of economic opportunity, or rather, marginalization on account of both socio-economic status and ethnicity. Even if physical violence and gang warfare are everyday occurrences in Hillside, the text identifies dominant social groups located outside of its perimeter as those primarily responsible for the inhabitants’ lack of rights and re-sources. The residents are well aware “that they inhabit a social landscape whose contours were not designed to accommodate them or their families,” as Karen Brodkin put it in a related context (95). Just as “dead cats and dogs, rotted fish, and droplets of piss” rain down on Hillside from above (45), the decrepit state of the neighborhood primarily derives from the denial of recognition and economic opportunity that limits the inhabitants’ lives as much as their physical immurement.

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A crucial element in the novel’s debunking of the ‘inner city’ stereotype is its construction of the narrator-protagonist, who almost appears as the antithesis of the kind of ‘black masculinity’ reproduced in mainstream media. The novel’s title already alerts the reader to the fact that the protagonist’s performance does not measure up to notions of black hypermasculinity. When forced to dance, Gunnar “settle[s] into a barely acceptable, simple side-to-side step, dubbed by the locals the white boy shuffle” (123). His moves on the dancefloor fail to certify his ‘blackness’ and position him as ‘almost white.’ As the narratorprotagonist self-deprecatingly summarizes his predicament, “I suffered from what the American Psychiatric Association Manual of Mental Disorders lists as social arrhythmia and courtship paralysis, meaning I couldn’t dance and was deathly afraid of women” (121). This self-mocking, ironic style, laced with allusions to the narrator’s erudition, characterizes the novel as a whole. As L. H. Stallings notes, “Beatty fashions Gunnar’s Bildungsroman […] as a way to dismantle configurations of hypersexual black masculinity” (109). The novel satirizes notions of black phallic superiority in its representation of the protagonist’s sexual initiation—he is deflowered by two young African American women in a laundry room (Beatty 84-85). In his arranged marriage to a Japanese “mail-order bride” chosen by his mother and his gangleader friend Juan Julio aka Psycho Loco, his first sexual encounters with his wife Yoshiko threaten to position Gunnar as queer. Having been warned by Psycho Loco that being penetrated irreversibly turns one into a homosexual, “I awoke to find Yoshiko’s index finger worming its way toward my prostate. Punked for life” (173). Even if the narrator-protagonist eventually becomes “more black” in Hillside (by taking up basketball, for instance), the cliché of the ‘inner city’ resident is continually undermined by his voice. The homodiegetic narration testifies to his intellectual skills and his extensive knowledge that encompasses concepts as arcane and as prestigious as those of the American Psychiatric Association. Together with the novel’s slapstick humor, the narrative voice’s oscillation between involvement and detached, ironic analysis functions to de-essentialize categories such as ‘race,’ gender, and sexuality. This does not interfere with its indictment of racism, however. At the same time, the residents of Hillside are not merely presented as victims. If the community is to some extent generated by the physical, social and economic “walls” that circumscribe it, the locals simultaneously co-construct it through a set of distinctive cultural practices. Despite the neighborhood’s multiethnic composition, the text identifies these as “black.” It is the performance of this specific version of ‘blackness’ on which Hillside’s social cohesion is based.

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By combining and contrasting ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ representations of Hillside’s urban geogaphies, The White Boy Shuffle implements Edward Soja’s insight that “[u]nderstanding the postmetropolis requires a creative recombination of micro and macro perspectives, views from above and from below” (Postmetropolis 22). It thus imagines, to quote from Doreen Massey’s analysis of “time-space,” “the spatial as the sphere of the juxtaposition, or coexistence, of distinct narratives, as the product of power-filled social relations; it [represents] a view of space which tries to emphasize both its social construction and its necessarily power-filled nature” (21).

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Hillside at first presents itself to Gunnar as a text he finds most difficult to decipher. At this point, Natalie Kalich argues, the narrator-protagonist functions as “a new kind of ethnographer” who produces an “anthropological reading of the ghetto” (86). He is a new ethnographer, though, because, much as his initial descriptions of the neighborhood seem to “explain” it to (implicitly white) outsiders, he ultimately joins the group he portrays (79). In Gunnar’s practice of “autoethnography,” which continues an African American tradition exemplified by Zora Neale Hurston, for instance (Lionnet 1990), his own position vis-à-vis the culture he investigates differs significantly from the relationship between the ethnographer and the social group observed in conventional studies of this kind. The novel’s insertion of its protagonist into a terrain that is “culturally black” despite its ethnically mixed population allows it to toy with received notions of ‘blackness’ while emphasizing the performative quality of ‘race.’ Gunnar’s new environment is above all made up of language: “Language was everywhere. Smoldering embers of charcoal etymology […] permeated the air” (Beatty 48). The phrase “charcoal etymology” identifies this language (and its history) as “deeply black;” the metaphor of the “smoldering embers” draws attention to the fiery energy, perhaps the anger that animates such verbal expression. The protagonist’s first encounter with a boy of his age, who takes him to task for his linguistic and sartorial style, leaves him confused: “It wasn’t as if I had said, ‘Pardon me, old bean, could you perchance direct a new indigene to the nearest corner emporium’” (41). Confronted with the boy’s reaction to his own utterance (which the text does not represent), Gunnar feels as if his choice of words has been classified as both arrogant and outdated—connotations evoked by the complexity of the sentence, the archaic vocabulary and the overall British feel deriving from its formality and excessive politeness.

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Unfamiliar with Hillside’s cultural codes and conspicuous because of his clothing, his diction, and his body language, his inability to “walk the walk and talk the talk,” Gunnar frequently meets with hostility and physical violence from his peers. It is only when he strikes up a friendship with his African American classmate Nicholas Scoby during Shakespeare rehearsals that he finally gains access to his neighborhood’s social networks. Gunnar eventually attains the respect of the local youth when he begins to play basketball. But the manner in which the text describes his transformation into a “baller” denaturalizes the figure of the “natural black athlete” by revealing it as a carefully crafted construction. Athletic skills like the ability to dunk are not enough. The role also requires “The Shoes,” “The Haircut,” and “The Ball,” to each of which the text devotes an entire subchapter. The shoes alone cost the protagonist $175. The centrality of consumption in this makeover militates against any essentialist understanding of ‘race.’ It does not, however, deprive the Hillside style of political significance. In his classic study Subculture (1979), Dick Hebdige already noted how marginalized cultural groups mount symbolic challenges to hegemonic social systems precisely through particular strategies of consumption. Yet the text’s reliance on stereotypical markers of ‘blackness’ in its portrayal of local ‘place-making’ and community-building runs the risk of contributing to their reproduction. The major strategy employed to forestall this is the novel’s mobilization of hyperbole and satire. Thus Gunnar’s visit to the “sneaker emporium,” with Scoby’s evaluation of the different models, is among the most hilarious sections of the novel. He vetoed the sporty Barbarian on my left foot because they were sown by eight-year-old Sri Lankans […]. The Air Idi Amin Fire Walker on my right foot, a colourful suede hightop designed to look like a traditional African mask, was nixed because although the shoes performed well on asphalt, they tended to slip on gym floors, and besides, the kids chanted “Coup d’état, coup d’état!” at anyone who wore them. (89)

A sophisticated consumer, Gunnar’s friend bases his decision on performance characteristics, fair labor standards, and street credibility. The names of the sneakers rejected by Scoby testify to the primitivism and cultural ignorance implicit in the sporting goods industry’s construction of ‘blackness’—which “the kids” recognize and satirize. The scene also reminds readers of ‘racial profiling’ in the retail industry by detailing the excessive security measures adopted by the store to safeguard against the theft of athletic gear (89).

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The second stage in Gunnar’s transformation into a “Hillsider” takes place in a barbershop, according to Gary Phillips one of the canonical images of community for African Americans (Scruggs 75). But the man who provides the protagonist with a locally acceptable hairstyle is “a tall curly-haired Chicano” (90) who serves a clientele including “a circle of old men, Indios and Africans, [who] played electronic poker games and swapped migration stories” (91). It is perhaps not only their current economic disenfranchisement and the physical proximity of their homes that unites the male customers at Manny Montoya’s “Barbershop and Chiropractic Offices.” The one “migration story” represented recounts a flight from Southern racism that shows conspicuous parallels to nineteenthcentury narratives of former slaves (91). For “Indios and Africans,” the term “migration stories” might further resonate with collective memories of traumatic forcible relocations such as the Trails of Tears and the Middle Passage. “The Ball” is finally supplied, in yet another ironic twist, by Gunnar’s policeman-father. The elder Kaufman even gets a white officer to deliver it— complete with one of the canonical works on basketball, Rick Telander’s Heaven Is a Playground (1976), and the admonition not to become “one of the black misfits sociologically detailed herein” (92). While Gunnar’s father thus materially (and one could argue, even intellectually) supports his son’s athletic practice—and one marked as ‘black’—, he simultaneously reinforces a white hegemonic gaze on this pursuit, in which ‘good’ professional and organized basketball is contrasted to supposedly undisciplined ‘inner city’ “playground ball.” If the basketball court and the gym become places where Gunnar’s ‘blackness’ is certified—and the school, due to his new habitus, his athletic prowess, and his friendship with Scoby, a cultural space where he belongs—his standing in Hillside as a whole is secured by his friendship with his Mexican American neighbor Juan Julio Sanchez, the leader of the local gang “The Gun Totin’ Hooligans” (83ff.). With Scoby, Juan, his basketball coach and mentor Motome Chijiiwa Shimimoto, and his wife Yoshiko Katsu, Gunnar’s social network is as multicultural as the district itself. The text thus probes “the changing racial landscape of Los Angeles along with the permeability of racial boundaries,” as Charles Scruggs argues (84). Eventually, Gunnar’s linguistic skills earn him the title “poète maudit for the Gun Totin’ Hooligans and by extension the neighborhood” (105). Poetry becomes an important medium for claiming and marking one’s space as Gunnar defends his position against contenders in “poetic showdown[s]” with “tankas at seven paces or sestinas at noon” (105) and flashes his weapons, “a paperback copy of Audre Lorde or Sterling Brown and a checkerboard set of abdominal muscles” (96) at members of rival gangs.

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But the protagonist goes further, stenciling his poems on the wall that surrounds Hillside (86-87). In this manner, he turns the architecture of confinement into a canvas for his art, reasserting the effectiveness of poetry as a political medium so visible in the African American Civil Rights Movement, as well as in Rap and Hip Hop. As a form of graffiti, Gunnar’s writing rescripts the city, entering into a dialogue with the architectural violence it cannot displace. It thus functions as “public history,” to borrow Dolores Hayden’s expression. Ironically, photographs of his work, published in book form without his knowledge or consent, quickly make Gunnar famous across the nation (17879)—a development that draws attention to a history of appropriation of black cultural capital by other ethnic groups. For all of its deconstructive moves, the text does not abandon the category of ‘race.’ It is central to Gunnar’s creative production, which is located at the intersection of high and popular culture, as Kalich puts it (77), and which draws on African American vernacular language and oral traditions, as well as his comprehensive knowledge of Western canonical poetry (85-87). The novel replicates this combination not only in the diegetic sections of the text, but also in its structure, mobilizing African American proverbs and set expressions for the titles of its five major sections. Despite, or perhaps because of its hybrid progeny, this style—which one might describe, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as literary signifying—resists and contests hegemonic discourses. This becomes visible especially after the L.A. Rebellion marks a decisive transformation not only in the tectonics of the city, but also in the narrator-protagonist’s reconceptualization of ‘blackness,’ which dramatically affects urban topographies in the end.

U RBAN E XPLOSIONS After the Rodney King verdict, the narrator briefly interrupts his satirical tour de force to articulate his pain and frustration in a straightforward manner: “I never felt so worthless in my life” (130). The experiences of police harassment Gunnar and Scoby share after hearing the news of Rodney King’s beating are similarly narrated in a sober, matter-of-fact style (125). It is racism that finally solidifies ‘blackness’ in the text. When the officers are found “not guilty,” the protagonist experiences an unprecedented anger that parallels the sudden and radical metamorphosis of urban space during the L.A. Rebellion. While many accounts of what Julian Murphet has termed the “Justice Riots” (107) in mainstream media described it as an irrational outbreak of violence

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resulting in the senseless destruction of property, The White Boy Shuffle offers a much different story. From the Hillsiders’ perspective, the events represent a “Carnaval, poor people’s style” (132), even a secession from the union (132). The narrator’s reference to “bloody but little known I’m-Tired-of-the-WhiteMan-Fuckin’-with-Us-and-Whatnot riots” in his first description of Hillside (45) spells out the cause not only of the L.A. Rebellion but that of many twentiethcentury “race riots,” according to scholars such as Mike Davis. Frequently ignited by specific instances of police brutality, they argue, such collective uprisings articulate long-standing grievances and frustration deriving from the pervasiveness and persistence of structural racism and class oppression (Davis 371). As part of what Murphet has termed “literature of urban rebellion,” Beatty’s novel registers “the tectonic frictions of a long history of urban unrest” (110). The “state of exception” with its temporary disruption of social hierarchies manifests itself in Gunnar’s neighborhood as a period of open doors, where perfect strangers begin to talk to each other and a general atmosphere of elation and solidarity prevails. Hillside in fact becomes safer: “I asked Psycho Loco if the rumors about a gangland truce if the jury found the cops innocent was true. He said that there already had been a big armistice […] it’ll be good to have a little peace in the streets’” (125). This reflects the historical situation in Watts, where four chapters of the Crips and Bloods agreed on a Peace Treaty the day before the L.A. Rebellion erupted. The sense of community is not limited to African Americans. Coach Shimimoto addresses his basketball team as “soon-to-be revolutionaries” (129). Barber Montoya and his wife Sally refresh rioters with “free tamales and steaming bowls of ponchi soup” (133). Her perspective on current events embeds them in a history of urban warfare: “Sally proudly told stories about how Hillsiders had historically acquitted themselves well in Los Angeles’ riots. Beating back an armada of drunken sailors in the zoot-suit riots in the summer of ’43, blowing up four police cars and poisoning six police dogs with cyanidelaced chitterlings and chorizo in the Watts riots of ’65” (133). The LA Rebellion thus appears not as a singular, unprecedented event, but merely as the latest (and probably not the last) episode in what seems like an on-going civil war. Beatty’s retelling of the rebellion, which tallies with the historical evidence in a number of respects—for instance, in noting the crucial role of television in instigating looting (133)—consistently reflects an economically marginalized perspective. Where a witness of the historical event compared it to “a television game show where everybody wins” (Davis 374), Psycho Loco and his friends play The Prize Is Right with jewellery they have “come upon” during the melee (Beatty 141). The looting is described as a “general redistribution of wealth”

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(Davis 373; Beatty 133). At the same time, the novel explicitly alludes to an African American history of economic disenfranchisement. When Gunnar and Scoby arrive at a technology store too late for “Christmas in April”—“All the presents had been opened. […] Even the ceiling fans and the service phones were gone”—the protagonist quotes Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred?” (134). In one of the most interesting—and problematic—rewritings of the rebellion’s ethnic dimensions, even the African American/Korean American shopkeeper Ms. Kim joins the fray. Where she had earlier rebuffed Psycho Loco’s attempt at “robbing Koreans” by yelling at him and threatening to call his mother (99), she now sets fire to her own store, taking revenge for the killing of Latasha Harlins (133). While her black neighbors had earlier perceived her as Korean inside her store and as African American outside of it (99), the psychological rezoning of the city places her squarely on the ‘black’ side. What this representation conveniently elides, though, are serious tensions between different ethnic groups not only in Watts and Compton, but in economically marginalized urban areas across the US. The fact that small-scale Korean American businesses were hardest hit during the L.A. Rebellion is glossed over too quickly in this portrayal of a ‘mixed race’ individual and the depiction of the neighborhood as a unified “community.” The text too blithely disregards the circumstance that the rioters’ wrath disproportionately affected another marginalized ethnic group instead of white hegemonic structures. Participation in the rebellion ends for Gunnar when he is caught and severely beaten by his father. Mirroring an earlier scene in which he and Scoby had halfseriously pummelled the white driver of a Wonder Bread truck “with pillows of white bread until it snowed breadcrumbs” (134), the protagonist relives his experiences with his abusive parent as a series of “flashes of white” as he suffers the rifle blows (138). When he falls into a coma, the phrasing “there was only white” (138) suggests a confluence of patriarchy and white supremacy ironically embodied in an African American.

N O F UTURE ? The L.A. Rebellion has serious consequences for Gunnar in more ways than one. After he is released from hospital, his parents enrol him in an “elite public high school” in the hope “that the reinfusion of white upper-class values would decrease the likelihood of my committing another felony, but the two miserable years I spent at El Campesino had the opposite effect” (153). Whereas the text

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had playfully satirized Gunnar’s becoming ‘black’ in Hillside, the portrayal of his racialization in this new context is quite another matter. White supremacy and class privilege are so pervasive that the protagonist feels reduced to the position of a minstrel, a perception he expresses by appearing in whiteface and cotton gloves as Gunnar ‘Hambone, Hambone, Have You Heard’ Kaufman during his final basketball game (164). This strategy of exploding the derogatory image imposed on him through hyperbolic enactment is also noticeable in his final political intervention. As Stallings observes, “the challenge to racialized social formation does not have to be heroically masculinized” (102). Meanwhile, the spoils of Psycho Loco’s heist during the rebellion, liberally bestowed on all participants, produce the equivalent of “a thriving goldmining town’s bubble economy” in Hillside (Beatty 141). When Gunnar refuses his share, Juan Julio, in consultation with Mrs. Kaufman, spends it on bringing Yoshiko to the US, presenting him with a bride on his eighteenth birthday. What first appears as the result of patriarchy and US imperialism is quickly reinterpreted both through Psycho Loco’s statement that Yoshiko chose Gunnar “over hundreds of potential husbands” (165) and through her departure from the stereotype of the submissive “Oriental” woman. She is neither poor nor conventionally beautiful, and least of all docile. Despite its unorthodox beginnings, her life with Gunnar is represented as exceedingly harmonious. Since marriage is conventionally regarded as a rite of passage into adulthood, the circumstance that Gunnar’s wedding is financed by funds obtained during the L.A. Rebellion suggests that this event precipitated the protagonist’s maturation. The marriage also performs other important ideological functions in the text, as I will argue below. The remainder of Gunnar’s formal education—a stint at Boston University— drives home the message that the US educational system has nothing more to offer. He and Scoby are intellectually superior to their instructors as well as their fellow students, becoming celebrities and appearing on talk shows across the nation. But fame does not depoliticize Gunnar’s art—quite the contrary. Reflecting candidly on his own position, as well as that of African Americans generally, during his first public speech, Gunnar arrives at the conclusion that collective suicide is the only viable political option. The novel’s preface spells this out: In the quest for equality, black folks have tried everything. We’ve begged, revolted, entertained, intermarried, and are still treated like shit. Nothing works, so why suffer the slow deaths of toxic addiction and the American work ethic when the immediate gratification of suicide awaits? […] It will be the Emancipation Disintegration. Lunch

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counters, bus seats, and corporate washrooms be damned; our mass suicide will be the ultimate sit-in. (2)

Articulating an Afro-pessimist position that suggests, as João H. Costa Vargas puts it, black diaspora communities were “never meant to survive” (Vargas), the utterance reprises a history of black political activism for full citizenship and equal rights, declaring its unequivocal failure—or rather, highlighting the intransigence of white racism, to which the Rodney King verdict had testified. The inversion of traditional political strategies is signified in the text’s troping of key historical terms such as “Emancipation Proclamation” (rhythmically bested by “Emancipation Disintegration”) and its explicit abandonment of cultural spaces central to earlier civil rights efforts. After Scoby puts his program into practice and kills himself, Gunnar and Yoshiko return to Hillside, by now transformed into a fully dystopian cityscape. The new “Leader of the Black Community” cannot stay at his mother’s house, where the LAPD awaits him. Homeless in Hillside, the couple take up residence at La Ciliega Motor Lodge. At night, Gunnar is followed by the searchlight of a police helicopter wherever he goes. If postmodern literary representations of urban space run the gamut from paranoia to self-empowerment, as Antje Dallmann argues for New York, Beatty’s text short-circuits the two. Capitalizing on the redrawing of public/private boundaries this panoptic surveillance effects, Gunnar and his friends stage black desperation at their weekly open-air “MiseryFests,” broadcast live on television. In a speech commemorating Scoby’s death, Gunnar finally requests that the US government literalize its disregard for black lives by releasing the secret third atomic bomb initially intended for Japan: “Well, Big Daddy, Uncle Sam, oh Great White Father, you brought me here, so I’m asking you to take me out. Finish the job. Pass the ultimate death penalty […]. Drop the bomb on Hillside!” (223). The speech portrays the US American state as the embodiment of white patriarchy whose treatment of African Americans—from slavery to the current racially biased penal system Michelle Alexander has termed “the new Jim Crow” (2012)—consistently negates black humanity. The appeal of this analysis to large numbers of African Americans finds expression in yet another urban transformation as followers of Gunnar relocate to Hillside, paradoxically effecting something like “urban renewal.” Congress responds to the demands of the movement (as well as a flood of racist letters seconding their request) by “issuing an ultimatum: rejoin the rest of America or celebrate Kwanzaa in hell” (224). This language oxymoronically echoes the history of the civil war, in which the cause of “secession from the Union” had

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been, among other things, a desire to prolong racial subjugation in the form of slavery, instead of abolishing it. The text had earlier employed the same metaphor to characterize the L.A. Rebellion (132). In response to this message from their supposed representatives, the new residents “paint white concentric circles on the roofs of the neighborhood, so that from the air Hillside looks like one big target” (224). Gunnar’s embrace of “no future” bears more than a fleeting resemblance to Punk, whose relation to “American Africanism” Tavia Nyong’o has brilliantly detailed in “Punk’d Theory,” as well as Lee Edelman's influential book of the same title (2004). Especially in its opposition to a futurity that is consistently mobilized to defer meaningful political action in the present, the protagonist’s stance shows many similarities to Edelman’s. Admittedly, it is not unproblematic to map a theoretical approach concerned with “queerness” (without particular regard to ‘race’) onto a discourse contesting racism, especially when speaking from a straight white position, as I do. Yet, The White Boy Shuffles consistent gesturing towards “queerness” might subtend such a comparison, which can also serve to illuminate the differences in their agendas. Both texts effectively mobilize what Murray, with regard to Beatty’s novel, has identified as a “union of disintegration and potentiality” (226) for a profound political critique. But they assume a different stance towards what Edelman terms “reproductive futurism,” embodied in the figure of the Child (2). As Gunnar pronounces suicide the logical option for African Americans fed up with a lack of freedom and equality, he simultaneously “piles [soap]suds on Naomi’s head […] and tell[s] her the Kaufman history” (226). As a Biblical figure, Naomi survives the loss of her husband and sons, to some extent comforted by her daughter-in-law Ruth, with whom she struggles to survive in a patriarchal world. The name of Gunnar’s daughter can thus be interpreted as a foreshadowing of her fate of having to grow up without him—or as renunciating a patriarchal history characterized by acquiescence in white supremacy, hyperbolically summarized at the beginning of the text as “a long cowardly queue of coons, Uncle Toms, and boogedy-boogedy retainers” (5). The most prominent member of this unheroic genealogy, the figure that haunts the text and with which it concludes, is the protagonist’s own father. Notable especially for his brutalization of his son and his collusion in upholding the status quo, Rölf Kaufman has just committed suicide—in a particularly inept manner (226). But the parallels between the father, who turns out to have been a poet as well, and the son do not suggest a philosophical or even political continuity in the Kaufman line. Rather, they militate against a straightforward reading of the protagonist’s suicide plans. Even as he

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acknowledges his parent by including him in his genealogical narrative, the protagonist wants nothing more than to emerge from the shadow of his father, as his story attests (24). Between his suicidal progenitor and his daughter who, I would argue, might be read as “the Child” representing reproductive futurism in Edelman’s sense (Edelman 2), it seems rather unlikely that the protagonist will choose his father. Gunnar’s marriage might already signal an investment in heterosexuality and thus to some extent “normality,” i.e. hegemonic social relations, that limits the text’s queering of black masculinity and thus departs from Edelman’s approach in significant ways. The precarious balance between a rhetoric of “apocalypse now” and a narrative outcome that features the protagonist not only still alive, but actively engaged in the continuation of his familial history, also distinguishes the last words spoken by Gunnar in the novel: “when you really think about it, me and America aren’t even enemies. I’m […] the donkey in the levee who’s stumbled in the mud and come up lame […]. I’m tired of thrashing around in the muck and not getting anywhere, so put a n- out his misery” (Beatty 226). For all the bitterness this statement encapsulates, it can still be read as a plea that seeks to alert those in power to the urgent need for full racial equality and fairer access to economic resources. Relatedly, the place from which it is uttered—a motel—still suggests the possibility of movement, even as its description as the “bull’s eye” (224) marks it as destined for destruction (Murray 229). Beatty’s novel suggests that the depth of African American despair and a fundamental lack of trust in all branches of the US government might jeopardize what Soja and others have described as the contemporary model of globalized urbanity (Postmodern Geographies 2, 222-48). For of course an atomic attack on one of its central districts would spell the end of LA as a whole. Such a dystopian ending might be said to befit the “disaster capital” that has been destroyed “in at least 138 novels and films since 1909,” with “the carnage […] accelerating” since the 1990s, as Davis notes in Ecology of Fear (276). But what is at stake here is not only the survival of Los Angeles. It is the future of the entire nation, which is unimaginable without African Americans.

W ORKS C ITED Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New P, 2012. Print. Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley: UC P, 2004. Print.

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Beatty, Paul. The White Boy Shuffle. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Print. Brodkin, Karen. Making Democracy Matter: Identity and Activism in Los Angeles. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2007. Print. Dallmann, Antje. ConspiraCity New York: Großstadtbetrachtung zwischen Paranoia und Selbstermächtigung. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. Print. Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. Print. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2004. Print. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University P, 1988. Print Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995. Print. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979. Print. Kalich, Natalie. “’An Anthropological Rending of the Ghetto:’ Intersections of High and Popular Culture in Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 42.1 (2009): 77-88. Print. Lionnet, Françoise. “Autoethnography: The An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks On a Road.” Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin, 1990. 382-414. Print. Massey, Doreen. “Imagining Globalisation: Power-geometries of Time-space.” Power-geometries and the Politics of Space-time. Heidelberg: Department of Geography, U of Heidelberg, 1999. 9-36. Print. McNamara, Kevin R. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Literature of Los Angeles. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. Murphet, Julian. “The Literature of Urban Rebellion.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 101-10. Print. Murray, Rolland. “Black Crisis Shuffle: Fiction, Race, and Simulation.” African American Review 42.2 (2008): 215-33. Print. Nyong’o, Tavia. “Punk’d Theory.” Social Text 23.3-4 (2005): 19-34. Print. Scruggs, Charles. “Los Angeles and the African-American Literary Imagination.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 75-86. Print. Sides, Josh. L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. Berkeley: UC P, 2003. Print. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989. Print.

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---. “Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis.” Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams. London/New York: Routledge, 1997. 19-30. Print. Stallings, L.H. “Punked for Life: Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Radical Black Masculinities.” African American Review, 43.1 (2009): 99106. Print. Telander, Rick. Heaven is a Playground. 1976; Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska P, 1995. Print. Vargas, João H. Costa. Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopia in Black Diaspora Communties. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. Print.

C OMMENTS i

ii

iii

iv

I use the term here to refer to a construction of urban space, largely produced by US American mainstream media and hegemonic political discourses, that links economically marginalized areas to a racialized working-class population, crime, etc. In this sense, the expression is coterminous with “the ghetto” or “the hood,” other problematic terms that primarily serve conservative ideological agendas. Unless noted otherwise, future page numbers in parentheses will refer to this text. Beatty’s text uses the n-word, which I as a white person do not want to repeat. For a different interpretation of this connection, see Stallings 2009: 105.

Mapping Gentrification Processes through Film San Francisco’s Mission District in the Documentary Boom: The Sound of Eviction A STRID K AEMMERLING

The 2002 documentary Boom: The Sound of Eviction,i produced by the Whisper Media Collective, traces the influence of the dot.com boom on gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District during the early 2000s. Boom follows the Mission District community’s struggle against eviction and displacement from the inner city, a process resulting from the rapid gentrification process. As emphasized by the SF Weekly, Boom, “[t]hough originally released in 2001 […] should still ring frighteningly true today” (“Arthouse Movie Listings”). Today, evictions continue to overshadow the district’s narrative. As such, it is not surprising that the film continues to be screened in local art house movie theaters in the Bay Area. Founded in 1996, Whisper Media was a film collective consisting of Francine Cavanaugh, A. Mark Liiv, and Adams Wood. The collective specifically aimed at “using video production and media resources to document social and political issues” (boomthemovie.com). Through a focus on the socially oppressed, the documentary provides an intimate look at issues and problems caused by rapid urban restructuring, giving voice to individuals as they face the threat of eviction. Boom addresses the complex consequences of eviction for the community of a specific neighborhood. The documentary weaves multiple perspectives into one disturbing and provocative critical narrative: a story told through the perspectives of multi-racial families, singleparent families, the elderly, artists, activists, local residents, and politicians. By documenting the struggles against evictions of San Francisco locals during the 2000s, the filmmakers capture a critical moment in San Francisco’s

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urban development. Through a combination of contemporary and historic visual footage of the Mission District’s anti-gentrification movement, of filmic representations of San Francisco during the 1960s, as well as the use of sound— composed and selected by music sound theorist Alex Theory—the documentary conveys the impact of evictions on communities in the Mission District from the past through the present. In addition, the use of audio recordings of the local soundscape place an emphasis on the dramatic impact evictions have upon the lives of native and long-time San Francisco residents. In the end, while the viewer is relieved to enjoy a moment of silence, what remains is a multiplicity of unanswered questions: why are the evictions taking place? What is gentrification and why does gentrification cause eviction? What roles do race and class play? In The New Urban Frontier, Neil Smith poignantly defines gentrification as [A] process […] by which poor and working-class neighborhoods in the inner city are refurbished via an influx of private capital and middle-class homebuyers and renters— neighborhoods that had previously experienced disinvestment and a middle-class exodus. The poorest working-class neighborhoods are getting a remake; capital and the gentry are coming home, and for some in their wake it is not entirely a pretty sight. (32)

In addition, he stresses that gentrification is “‘a key theoretical battleground’ between those stressing culture and individual choice, consumption and consumer demand on the one side and others emphasizing the importance of capital, class and the impetus of shifts in the structure of social production” (41). In Gentrification, Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly identify the rising housing expenses, evictions and thus the personal catastrophes of displacement and homelessness as the most negative consequences of gentrification (73). Furthermore, they underscore that these “are the symptoms of the fundamental inequalities of capitalist property markets, which favor the creation of urban environments to serve the needs of capital accumulation, often at the expense of the needs of home, community, family, and everyday social life” (73). It is not surprising that Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly use San Francisco’s Mission District as a case study for their research on gentrification. Summarizing the neighborhood’s historic past, they place an emphasis on the late 1990s and early 2000s: “The 1990s was characterized by frighteningly rapid commercial and residential gentrification, with a flood of evictions and displacement of small businesses, artists, and predominantly Latino low-income tenants” (261). Supported by the Ellis Act, a “California state law which allows property owners to remove their property from the rental market and evict all the tenants (so long as paltry sums of money are given to each evictee—$4,500 for

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low-income persons, and $3,000 to elderly or disabled persons),” it becomes understandable why the Mission District and other San Francisco neighborhoods registered an increase of evictions since the late 1990s (260). Boom sheds light on the negative impacts of the process of gentrification and provides insight into the lives of locals who are evicted or displaced during this specific time. Through a fusion of interviews with local residents, artists and activists, which are placed in opposition to the voices of local politicians, housing agents and technology industry CEO’s, the documentary shows how local people came together to “fight both the developers and the legislation that was proving propitious for gentrification” (261). Rowland Atkinson states that the film can be seen as one product emerging out of the activist resistance against the rapid gentrification process: “Arguably tenant and neighborhood activism in the US has been more coherent, even leading to the production of films opposed to gentrification Boom! The Sound of Eviction (Cavanaugh et al., 2002), although this is probably linked to the greater scale and virulence of the process” (2345). In connection to activist film-practices, Boom stands out as a social-issues documentary. According to Meg McLagan, [i]n an era of mass-media consolidation, long-form documentaries constitute an alternative space of investigation, debate, and active questioning of traditional channels of knowledge production and validation. Deploying a methodology of discovery and immersion in a social world or problem, they seek to describe the dynamics of an unfolding present. What gets created formally comes out of an experience of something and a belief that it is worth knowing about. Thus, built into the form is a contract with the audience that it seeks to engage or address viewers as public actors. (307)

The documentary certainly enables the filmmakers to create an “alternative space” and maps their investigation of the debate surrounding the topic of forced evictions questioning the city’s urban planning politics in connection to race and class. Dennis Harvey, in a brief film review, poignantly addresses how “[the] amount of information and its chronology may sometimes confuse viewers who are not familiar with Bay Area politics.” Dave Kehr, in his film review for the New York Times, makes the same fitting critique, indicating that it is oftentimes hard to reconstruct the links between the portrayed political events and their immediate effects upon the Mission District’s urban planning developments, as the filmmakers fail to explain the connections between the selected visual fragments (Kehr, “Boom the Sound of Eviction”).

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Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly in their chapter from The Future of Gentrification?, briefly summarize the upheavals of this time period. As they state, 2000 was the year in which the dot.com boom hit the city hardest. As Chester Hartman explains in City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco, “The invasion of the ‘dot-comies’ hit San Francisco in the late 1990s with earthquake-like force. Somewhere between five hundred to seven hundred Internet-related companies […] created an estimated fifty-five thousand jobs, located mainly South of Market and in the Mission” (305). This is the time period in which the documentary was shot. Two large development projects were taking shape during this period, finally giving rise to the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition (MAC), an association consisting of more than a dozen local organizations that hold community meetings, testify before public bodies and create a force to stop the rapid urban restructuring caused by the changing industrial landscape. The two major planning projects leading to the creation of MAC were (1) the Bryant Square project and (2) the National Guard Armory project. As Hartman summarizes, the National Guard Armory project was the city’s plan to transform a former Armory, located between fourteenth and fifteenth streets and Mission, into office space. Meanwhile, the Bryant Square project was the plan to transform an entire square block complex into 150,000 square feet of office space (331). Both projects become central in the film’s narrative as they are exemplary of the ways in which the city’s urban planners were forcefully and rapidly pushing out current Mission residents, artists and non-profit organizations in order to create dot.com office space. The documentary follows the activists’ movements against these two development projects, showing scenes from court rulings, as well as protest speeches at the opening of the Armory to dot.com mavericks. In addition, visual footage from a large community meeting as well as from local street protests, including a dance groups’ fight against eviction from their rehearsal space, have been visually archived in the documentary. Together, this material captures the struggle of local—specifically Mission District—residents for their rights to urban housing and thus on a larger scale, a right to the city (Mitchell, Harvey). As depicted by Lees, these activist movements finally led to the emergence of Proposition L—a citizens’ initiative calling for an end to the live-work loophole of loft development banning office projects extending the size of 6,000 square feet and the regulation that all office developers have to include belowmarket-rate space for nonprofits (261). Also a part of the documentary, Proposition L caused a stir amongst developers. While Proposition L did not win, Prop. L candidates were elected into office and “the activism that sprouted from the contact of endemic evictions in the Mission led to a change in politics

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at a citywide level—an extraordinary achievement” (263). While Loretta Lees and her co-authors highlight that the dot.com industry boom of the 2000s crashed only one year later, we know today that this was just a short-term stagnation. Still, it was not predictable then that the boom would quickly pick up speed again during the 2010s—with even more dramatic consequences for remaining local residents. In “Misunderstood Saviour or Vengeful Wrecker? The Many Meanings and Problems of Gentrification,” Rowland Atkinson characterizes the term gentrification as “a politically loaded term, making dispassionate debate and analysis difficult” (2344). He explains that “for those on the political left, the process has often been seen as an insidious vanguard, with fragments of the middle classes dislocating both social problems and ‘problem’ people” (2344). Without a doubt, the documentary gives voice to those ‘problem’ people and addresses issues arising through rapid gentrification processes. The filmmakers manage to illustrate “systematic inequalities of urban society” and open a space for discussion about the ongoing gentrification debate (2394). By following the protest movement(s), interviewing participants and local community members, as well as portraying everyday life in the Mission District during the 2000s, Boom provides space to examine some of the most deleterious consequences of gentrification for the worst-off (DeVerteuli 1564). According to Geoffrey DeVerteuli “there has been little concentrated research on displacement across a broader social service landscape for not only homeless individuals but also the poor, recent immigrants, hungry, elderly, welfare-dependent and unemployed” (1565). The documentary provides information to fill this research gap by specifically addressing these perspectives. By focusing on selected cases, as, for example, an elderly women or a Latino family in their fight against eviction, the filmmakers manage to expose the forceful displacement of ‘vulnerable people.’ Following these people, the documentary also sheds light upon the social services and organizations on which they rely in order to fight for their rights. Boom becomes a tale of San Francisco’s local geography of displacement. By using both audio documentation of the local soundscape as well as visual representations of the neighborhood and its residents, the film historicizes the fading and already lost voices and cultural traces of those who were forced out. As such, the documentary can also be viewed as archiving material about the district’s cultural geography. This function is being strengthened due to the insertion of excerpted archival travelogue pitches as well as historical documents from, for example, the General Strike of 1934 and the protests against the demolition of the International Hotel (a former low-cost residential hotel). The

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General Strike, or labor strike, led to minimum wage payments, as well as a thirty-hour work week; the anti-demolition protest during 1969-1977 secured the existence of the hotel until 1981. The archival materials documenting these events speak to the success of strikes and protests in the history of San Francisco, emphasizing the importance of community and political engagement in relation to current displacements of long-term, mostly working-class, residents of San Francisco. Les Roberts remarks that “the landmarks and locations depicted in the films draw on an imaginary of place that is in some way expressive of the actual city” (190). Instead of exploiting “the potential of the city’s urban landscape and rich architectural heritage to raise brand awareness,” and promote the city’s heritage, the filmmakers purposefully use the travel industry’s filmic depictions of San Francisco’s iconic locations to strengthen the dramatic impact of gentrification processes upon local mission residents. The filmmakers try to heighten the viewer’s senses of place by rejecting the abstract understanding of the city and instead focusing on an immediate experience of local residents in their fight against evictions. The documentary visually traces the Mission District’s cultural legacy by exploring the specificities of place. The mix of historic footage, consisting of archival photographic and film material, as well as the filmmakers’ own collection of the Mission District’s specific urban space explorations, allows them to construct a mind-challenging visual map not only of the Mission District, but, even more, of the impact evictions have upon San Francisco’s production of space. The documentary enacts a “dérive-driven psychogeography” of San Francisco’s Mission District of the late 1990s/early 2000s. I am here referring to the Situationist International, a Paris-based artist collective active between 1957 and 1972. The SI gained recognition due to their practice of so-called dérives, a walking “technique of transient passage through varied ambiences” (Ford 35). According to the Situationists, this practice—the study of an urban environment via the act of walking—allows one to create a psychogeographic exploration of the urban environment as it generates the “environment’s direct emotional effects upon the walker” (Coverly 93). It is the careful selection of aerial views of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and the city’s skyline, in combination with walking sequences of the filmmakers exploring the Mission District, which have a strong impact on the emotions and behavior of the viewer of the documentary. As Teresa Castro explains, aerial views “certainly evoke war experience and the vision of aerial bombers,” but can also be read as referring “to the vision of modernity” (153). Boom continuously plays with the dual message of the aerial

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view as threat and promising vision of progress, which becomes particularly effective due to the historic time lapses and the switch from eye level, pedestrian explorations of urban space to a sudden aerial depiction of San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge. Teresa Castro, in “Mapping the City through Film: From ‘Topophilia’ to Urban Mapscapes” (2012), argues that the combination of the aerial and pedestrian sequences of the urban landscape create a visual map that moves beyond the agenda of the Situationist International, as it is no longer a static but a mobile view of a given urban environment. The goal of this extended visual filmic mapping practice, as Teresa Castro claims, is to produce “urban views and urban identities, structuring and transforming our geographical imagination and affecting the ways in which we have come to understand cities and act upon them” (154). It is unquestionable that the filmmakers are calling for a critical engagement with gentrification and eviction in the Mission District. Furthermore, the filmmakers use the city’s geography to prompt an emotional response by relating the historic and current identity of San Francisco, or, more specifically, the Mission District (Les Roberts 197). Paul Newland in “Towards (East) London” explains that Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life criticized the aerial view upon the city as being detached from lived experience and instead called for an urban discourse based on the city’s everyday practitioners, strengthening the role of the city’s inhabitants in the local production of space (166). It is obvious that the filmmakers are in agreement with de Certeau, as they portray the immediate, lived experience of Mission locals. Apart from the visual dimension, as the title Boom: The Sound of Eviction suggests, sound bears witness to the rapid urban restructuring developments portrayed in the film. A thrilling combination of images and natural sounds, as well as electronic sound compositions by Alex Theory, emphasize the impact of evictions upon the geographical landscape of the district and San Francisco at large. The changing rhythms of the sound compositions manage to, for example, capture and stress the tension and anxiety of residents who are about to be evicted, the decidedness of political figures implementing urban development processes, the anger of protesters, and the excitement of real estate agents advertising their properties to incoming technology workers. In an interview, Alex Theory conveys information about his interest and investment in music and sound. The interview emphasizes Alex Theory’s interest in psychoacoustics, namely the “fusion of sound and psychology” (Graham). It is not surprising that in Boom, the collection of sounds documenting the fight and electronic sound compositions actively influence the physical and psychological state of the viewers (Graham). For the viewer, the sounds—in connection with the images

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and information provided—recreate a state of restlessness, a restlessness one can envision as comparable to the state of being of those being forcefully dis-placed from their homes and communities due to the rapid gentrification processes. With an emphasis on natural sound, Boom’s opening sequence starts with the implosion of the Geneva Towers, two former 20-story low-income housing units in the inner city of San Francisco. The “boom” of a building being dynamited and collapsing becomes the introductory sound for viewers entering the documentary. Built in 1967, the towers were scheduled to be torn down in May 1998. After a loud “boom,” the massive cement towers collapse into themselves. This sound is the echo of crumbling gravel that completed the destruction of 585 lowincome units, which provided living space for up to 1,000 people (Johnson). What remained were only the excited voices of the spectators following the demolition of the two towers. After the introductory sequence a conglomerate of voices of interviewees, as well as street noises, street performance sounds of San Francisco locals and electric sound components underlying the spoken sections create a rather unsettling sound experience. Overall, the soundtrack of Boom, if one can refer to it as such, “never simply juxtaposes with the images as a fictional and emotional device but is part and parcel of the evolution of the context the filmmakers interact with […]. [T]he result is a rather unusual viewing experience” (199). Nevertheless, the sound layers correspond to the emotions of the interviewees and thus manage to stress the psychological impact evictions had and still have upon the local residents of San Francisco and specifically the Mission District. Yet, they deviate from the traditional function of a film score by influencing the psychological state of the viewer, as these sound compositions create a highly uncomfortable viewing experience. The sounds seem to aim at influencing the viewers to realize the need for active participation in the local fight against evictions and gentrification at large. At the same time, the sound layers portray the Mission District’s unique status as a culturally diverse neighborhood, embracing sounds and beats of North and South Americans. This sonic portrayal underscores the district’s unique multicultural characteristics. Local sounds like kids playing, running and laughing, drummers performing on Mission Street, as well as the cracking sound of excavators tearing down previously evicted buildings, alongside Hip Hop and Latino dance music tunes, stimulate the creation of a provocative audio narrative. The fusion of the soundscape allows the documentary to create an accurate representation of the urban everyday space of San Francisco’s Mission District. Today, in 2015, countless of these sounds have become part of the district’s past. Many of the residents, activists and artists portrayed in the docu-

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mentary have been evicted and displaced as the speed and force with which evictions took place in the early 2000s did not come to a halt. In “Geographies of Displacement: Latina/os, Oral History, and The Politics of Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District,” Nancy Raquel Mirabal refers to the late 1990s and early 2000s as a period in which the Mission District underwent significant changes, revealing that “as a result of local politics, housing and rental policies, real estate speculation, and development thousands of Latina/o families were being displaced” (7). Differing from the documentary’s perspective, the focus of her work was not the ongoing process of gentrification but its “results.” She interviewed evicted Mission residents asking them to report on their displacement experiences while in the process of starting anew somewhere else. Mirabal tries to understand why those evicted have been forced to leave as well as the immediate impact the disappearance of Latina/os has upon San Francisco at large. She ends her article by questioning the way in which histories are memorialized. Criticizing the erasure of the district’s recent past, she says: There is no mention of the immigrant businesses, community centers, public schools, and modest homes leveled to make room for the condominiums, skyscrapers, and upscale restaurants. There is no place for remembering the recently displaced and excluded. […] Because in the end, whose memories are the ones that we are allowed to remember, whose memories are the ones officially on display? Who decides how we remember and why? (30)

She is referring to Hayden White, who in “The Modernist Event” questions the narration of histories, as well as the creation and the intention behind the creation of certain historiographies. Nancy Raquel Mirabal is calling for a portrayal and active meaning generation surrounding the consequences of gentrification—a history not only of those benefitting but also of those who are negatively affected, displaced and thus silenced. As Hayden White states, referring to the Holocaust [t]he meaning of these events, for the groups most immediately affected by or fixated upon them, remain ambiguous and their consignment to ‘the past’ difficult to effectuate should not be taken to imply in any way that such events never happened. On the contrary, not only are their occurrences amply attested, their continuing effects on current societies and generations which have no direct experience of them are readily documentable. But among those effects must be listed the difficulty felt by present generations of arriving at some agreement as to their meaning—by which I mean, what the facts established about

368 | A STRID K AEMMERLING such events can possibly tell us about the nature of our own current social and cultural endowment and what attitude we ought to take with respect to them as we make plans for our own future. In other words, what is at issue here is not the facts of the matter regarding such events but the different possible meanings that such facts can be construed bearing. (21)

While the immediate meaning and the long term consequences the evictions will have upon San Francisco have to yet be determined, Boom, through the usage of the documentary style, allows us to process facts about gentrification. As Deborah Dixon confirms, documentaries “[have] been lauded as an ethical and worthy form of commentary on the social and natural world that is capable in a more pointed political sense, of exposing and critiquing the causes of inequality and exploitation” (65). This documentary clearly functions as social commentary and is able to expose and critique the immediate political dimension of evictions upon San Francisco’s residents. While the documentary, similar to Nancy Raquel Mirabal’s article, does not provide immediate solutions as how to stop the evictions, it calls for action while at the same time securing a layer of the district’s history. As Meg McLagan reveals in “Imagining Impact: Documentary Film and the Production of Political Effects”: Documentary film is at once a form of policy analysis and a node in a larger “issue network” consisting of the filmmaker, activist, organizations, social movements, decision makers, and policy elites. Flipping the focus from the film to the campaign in which it is embedded, in other words, reveals a film’s performative power as it circulates, connecting different actors and arenas and in so doing, producing political effects. (312)

The documentary certainly has the performative power to produce political effects and manages to bring to attention a rather uncommon perspective on evictions. As such, the documentary, as Les Roberts illustrates, stands out as a “place-based initiative aimed at tapping into a broader and more locally defined geography of film,” and it manages to “place an otherwise neglected filmic, social and urban-architectural heritage back ‘on the map’ of official city narratives”—in this specific case, upon San Francisco’s city narrative (201). The filmmakers object the claim that documentary cinema is just a ‘representational form,’ a recording of events, and instead show that the filmmaking process allows toexpress time and space, encompassing documentary and fiction, while incorporating both diegetic and non-diegetic sounds (Pollacchi 199). The documentary, through an intense interplay of carefully selected and composed sound and visual material, enables the viewers to partake in the evic-

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tion process. In a sense, the film builds upon the viewer’s ability to empathize with the eviction victims, thus enabling them to understand the destructive impact of evictions. The documentary therefore strongly portrays the cataclysmic dimension of evictions upon local residents of all generations. It becomes obvious that the boom is a threat rather than an opportunity for San Francisco’s low-income residents. The documentary thus manages to portray the fundamental inequalities the capitalistic city’s housing and neighborhood redevelopment plans have upon San Francisco’s lower class population. In the end, the socio-political message of this social issue documentary is inescapable: There remains a call “to resist any attempts by redevelopers to write the city from above, to empty the city of history [and] memory […] and to replace these things with planned, organized, governed and controlled space” (Newland 167).

W ORKS C ITED Atkinson, Rowland. “Introduction: Misunderstood Saviour or Vengeful Wrecker? The Many Meanings and Problems of Gentrification.” Urban Studies 40.12 (2003): 2343–2350. Print. Castro, Teresa. “Mapping the City through Film: From ‘Topophilia’ to Urban Mapscapes.” The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections. Eds. Richard Koeck and Les Roberts. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 144–155. Print. Cavanaugh, Francine, Mark Liiv, and Adams Wood. Boom: The Sound of Eviction. Whispered Media, 2002. Film. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden, Herts: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Open WorldCat. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. U of California P, 2011. Print. De Verteuil, Geoffrey. “Evidence of Gentrification-induced Displacement Among Social Services in London and Los Angeles.” Urban Studies 48.8 (2011): 1563–1580. Print. Dixon, Deborah. “‘Independent’ Documentary in the U.S.: The Politics of Personal Passions.” The Geography of Cinema: a Cinematic World. Ed. Chris Lukinbeal and Stefan Zimmermann. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008. 65–83. Print Ford, Simon. The Situationist International: A User’s Guide. London: Black Dog, 2005. Print.

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Graham, Danielle. “Finding the Pulse: Interview with Spiritual DJ Alex Theory.” SC Super Consciousness (2009): n. pag. Web. Hartman, Chester. City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Print. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. 1 edition. New York: Verso, 2013. Print. Harvey, Dennis. “Boom: The Sound of Eviction.” Variety 13 Jan. 2002: 47. Print. Johnson, Jason B. “Geneva Towers To Tumble / Troubled S.F. Public Housing Project to Be Demolished Today.” SF Gate (1998): n. pag. Kehr, David. “Boom the Sound of Eviction.” The New York Times (2014): n. pag. Web. 17 Mar. 2014. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater, and Elvin K. Wyly. Gentrification. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2008. Print. Liiv, A. Mark, Francine Cavanaugh, and Adams Wood. “Boom The Movie.” Web. 4 Apr. 2014. Maas, Regan M. “Hispanics/Latinos in the United States: A Geography of Change.” Placing Latin America: Contemporary Themes in Geography. Eds. Ed Jackiewicz and Fernando J. Bosco. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012. 233–248. Print. McLagan, Meg. “Imagining Impact: Documentary Film and the Production of Political Effects.” Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism. Ed. Yates McKee and Meg McLagan. New York : Cambridge, Massachusetts: Zone Books; distributed by the MIT Press, 2012. 305–319. Print. Mirabal, Nancy Raquel. “Geographies of Displacement: Latina/os, Oral History, and The Politics of Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District.” The Public Historian 31.2 (2009): 7–31. Print. Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press, 2003. Print. Newland, Paul. “Towards (East) London 2012: Emily Richardson’s Transit (2006) and Memo Mori (2009), and the Work of Iain Sinclair.” The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections. Eds. Richard Koeck and Les Roberts. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 156–168. Print. Pollacchi, Elena. “The Sound of The City: Chinese Films of the Late 1990s and Urban Noise.” Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis. Eds. Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson. London : New York: N. p., 2008. 193–204. Print. Wallflower Press.

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Roberts, Les. “Projecting Place: Location Mapping, Consumption, and Cinematographic Tourism.” The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections. Eds. Richard Koeck and Les Roberts. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 183–204. Print. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Unknown. “Arthouse Movie Listings February 5-11, 2014.” SF Weekly (2014): n. pag. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.

C OMMENTS i

From now on, the title of the film discussed here, Boom: The Sound of Eviction, will be shortened to Boom.

“[A] freeing of myself from this life from this city” The Queer Spaces of the Hudson River Piers in Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz F AYE C HISHOLM G UENTHER

One of the ways to consider urban transformations and subcultural formation in an American context is through an examination of queer spatial practices, constructs, and histories. In his essay “Queer Space,” Jean-Ulrick Désert states that “[a] queer space is an activated zone made proprietary by the occupant or flâneur, the wanderer […]. Our cities and landscapes double as queer spaces […] the place of fortuitous encounters and juxtapositions. It is the place in which our sensibilities are tested” (20-22). Désert goes on to explain how “[q]ueer space is in large part the function of wishful thinking or desires that become solidified: a seduction of the reading space where queerness, at a few brief points and for some fleeting moments, dominates the (heterocentric) norm, the dominant social narrative of the landscape” (21). In this article I consider the narrative strategies and constructs David Wojnarowicz uses to represent the queer space of the Hudson River piers in New York City in the 1980s, both pre-AIDS and during the AIDS crisis. An American writer and visual artist who died of AIDS-related causes in 1992 at the age of 38, Wojnarowicz published a collection of autobiographical narratives, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, a year before his death. As a creative and critical documentation of queer spaces situated in New York City, his text focuses on what Jennifer Doyle identifies in his visual art, as “an awareness of the historical dimensions of experience” (146). Wojnarowicz’s writing also emphasizes the material nature of history. His first-person narration reveals the states of emergency in which the narrator dwells, first as a queer homeless youth in New York City, and later as a queer adult witnessing the AIDS epidemic in

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America. The tone, style, and language of the narrative voice produce an intense awareness and enactment of both spatial and temporal movement, perpetuated by the fleeting nature of the queer spaces the narrator experiences. These narrative elements are particularly amplified in Wojnarowicz’s writing about the Hudson River Piers. A series of large, abandoned industrial warehouses along the Hudson River, running from Christopher Street to 14th Street, the piers were key sites where gay men went to cruise and meet for sex in New York City, and they became a central part of Wojnarowicz’s life from 1979 to 1981. By 1984, many of the piers were torn down. As Wojnarowicz’s biographer, Cynthia Carr, explains, the West Side Highway, closed to traffic since 1973, separated the piers from Greenwich Village and provided shelter to transsexual prostitutes along the strip (132). Gay bars lined the city side of the elevated highway and trucks parked along the highway also provided spaces for casual sex (132). Pier 34 at Canal Street was often used as a site for gay cruising, and in 1983 it became a hub for the creative culture of artists from the East Village and Lower East Side, who had begun to discover it (224). Wojnarowicz also explored Pier 28 at Spring St, which was a less popular site because the floor was collapsing (204). Wojnarowicz’s writing underscores the crucial historical significance of the Hudson River Piers as a queer counterpublic site in New York City. He invests the piers with dream-like, poetic qualities, as erotic spaces that are scavenged, precarious, collapsing, fading, and stolen away. They are also doubled spaces, abandoned in their official use and appropriated for queer use. In Wojnarowicz’s narratives about the piers, qualities of anonymity or the possibility of danger make the experiences of the queer spaces fleeting. The narrative voice in Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration catches at these transitory spaces. The text forms a queer archive as a complex record of spatial memories. The phrase “queer archive” is one I take up from Jack Halberstam, who argues that new models for queer memory are needed in the form of archives capable of recording and tracking the subcultures of the queer past (169). My notion of archive is informed by Halberstam’s argument that “the archive is not simply a repository; it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity” (169-70). Wojnarowicz’s written accounts of the piers highlight their functions as sites of public intimacy, both social and sexual. The piers also generated creative potency. Artists, including Wojnarowicz, used the warehouses as temporary, makeshift studios and galleries by painting and stenciling murals on the walls. Through poetic depictions of spatial and temporal movement, Wojnarowicz’s

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writing captures the creative and erotic energy of the piers as marginal, queer, counterpublic spaces. Especially during the AIDS crisis, forms of queer spatial temporality are an important aspect of Wojnarowicz’s representations of the piers. He envisions the scale of human history in their ruin and reads the merging of different places and times in the features of strangers he sees there. In my analysis I consider his literary renderings of the piers in relation to Walter Benjamin’s concept of profane illumination, natural history, and the realm of the creaturely.

W RITING THE P IERS

BEFORE

AIDS

1979 was a significant turning point in Wojnarowicz’s life as a writer and artist because of his discovery of the piers. They were a pre-AIDS space that he wrote about before he was conscious of AIDS as a reality in his life and community. They also represented a space for the queer erotics of everyday life, a theme that is amplified throughout his writing. In 1979, he connected experiences of anonymous sex with possibility (Carr 142): “Really it’s this lawlessness and anonymity simultaneously that I desire, living among thugs, but men who live under no degree of law or demand, just continual motion and robbery and light roguishness and motion” (Fales Series 1. 2.36. Oct. 7, 1979). Writing about the piers and the sex that happened there, pre-AIDS, was erotically charged for Wojnarowicz, whether the scenes and exchanges he described involved him or not (Carr 143). He was motivated to document, articulate, and represent the queer spaces he found at the piers, especially the freedom they provided, the anonymity in movement, and what Carr calls the “autonomous zone” that they represented (132). He found aesthetic beauty and power in their deteriorating, broken, and sometimes dangerous qualities. He called the queer space of the piers, “picturesque ruins” (quoted in Carr, 3), carefully documenting and recreating them in his writing. Wojnarowicz began to record the piers with a Super 8 camera—a mode of recording and expression that had profound effects on much of his work. Super 8 mm sound film was first introduced in 1973, and audio could be recorded either concurrently to the filming, or afterwards from an audiotape or record, on its magnetic sound-strip (Yokobosky 127, n. 1). As a result, this kind of filming was more versatile and accessible than other alternatives, which led to its popularity among video artists in the 1970s. Wojnarowicz’s use of the Super 8 camera at the piers marks the point when he first started representing queer spaces of sex and intimacy, often as anony-

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mous exchanges, which then became a consistent theme throughout his work. In 1980 he wrote two scripts for a silent, black-and-white Super 8 film, which Carr describes as dealing with the “eroticism in everyday life” such as cruising, “but also about repression, represented by cops bursting into a room” (153). He planned, in his handwritten script, to feature a naked man bound to a chair to show “that waterfront/bar sexuality can be seen as either a result of, or an attempt to break the weight of social/political restraints” (quoted in Carr 153). In Wojnarowicz’s work there is an ambiguity and simultaneity of meanings in his representations of queer spaces. Violence and danger are presented as a result of policing and homophobia, as well as a reaction to these forms of repression and discrimination. At the piers, Wojnarowicz cruised for sex and created art, taking photos and making stencil murals, drawings, or spray paintings on the walls. He also wrote descriptions to record the spaces, which became part of the narrative “Losing the Form in Darkness” in Close to the Knives. Carr describes how Wojnarowicz began going to the piers to write, “[t]o record the whole scene, including its architecture and ambience—headlights moving across a wall, the sound of tin doors banging, water slashing at pier posts” (140). She relates how Wojnarowicz told her that he perceived the piers as “dying structures” and “symbols of what was essentially a dying country” (140). This claim Wojnarowicz made about America was both subversive and oppositional. His queer perception of the “dying country” demonstrated his resistance to dominant ideologies of nationhood, including idealism, patriotism, and imperialism. Wojnarowicz drew the face of the late nineteenth-century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, on a windowpane in one of the abandoned buildings (Carr 132), marking his space as an artist, but also suggesting that he found traces of this literary figure at the piers. Cruising and creative activity were two aspects of experience often linked in Wojnarowicz’s work. After Pier 34 became a hub for artists, Wojnarowicz’s cartoon imagery, painted directly on the wall, was recognized there. According to Carr, he was learning how to be a painter in these deteriorating structures (205). The piers were a queer space collectively created by the men who visited for sex, and by the artists who gave the site meaning through their work. A selfappointed artist in residence, Tava, painted what Wojnarowicz called “thug frescoes” (Carr 141), huge murals of men engaged in sexual activities that covered the inner and outer walls of the warehouses (141). According to artist Mike Bidlo, an acquaintance and collaborator, the artist Luis Frangella also made art at the piers, painting floor to ceiling murals and portraits on cardboard boxes that were cut at forty-five degree angles (29). The queer spaces of the

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piers provided opportunities for intimacy with strangers and for artists to intervene in the landscape with work that was creatively and erotically charged. The piers were also a site for scavenging—as a hustle or a search—for encounter, for beauty, for a place lending itself to artistic practice. Carlo McCormick points out that “David was very much into scavenging. That’s part of the aesthetic that developed out of Civilian Warfare and other East Village galleries: it was taking the detritus of the city and using it as material for art” (13). The piers were littered with broken down furniture and cabinets of docu-ments. Wojnarowicz would move through this wreckage just like he walked the shores in New Jersey looking for driftwood to use in his early sculptures and installations. In his descriptions of sexual encounters at the piers, Wojnarowicz begins and ends up alone, but the interactions he has there are depicted as glimpsed revelations. The first time he writes about the piers is in October of 1979 (Carr 140). The entry in his journal begins, “I’m losing myself in the language of his movements,” and describes a sexual encounter with a stranger, concluding “all these unspoken sentences at the tip of my tongue” (Fales Series 1.2.36. Oct. 7, 1979). This is also the first draft of “Losing the Form in Darkness,” a narrative that is included in Close to the Knives (Carr 144). Soon after this particular sexual encounter, Wojnarowicz decided that he wanted to live his life for experiences like it: “the combination of time, elements, visuals, visions, light, movements, all associations […] as if that past moment holds everything that will make my life valid, that will save my life […] having tasted a real freedom, a freeing of myself from this life from this city rotating with the world on its axis” (Fales Series 1.2.36, Oct. 9, 1979). In fact, he conceives of these interactions not simply in terms of the physical and emotional experience of sex, but also in literary terms. His written descriptions become an attempt to embody the different aspects of the sexual encounters through poetic documentation, highlighting the precise and fleeting erotic details. Very often his renderings of sex and eroticism in this pre-AIDS queer space deal specifically with the compression or elongation of time. Watching men at the piers drift over to a sexual exchange in the corner of a warehouse, which they take part in as spectators, he declares his wish for “lifelong moments, unbreathing, no need for food, no need to scratch or shift, the lengths of measure contained in the dragging feet of the large man who follows me from room to room, emptiness shadowed by rusting floor safes and broken glass that holds pieces of the sky along the dark floorboards” (Fales Series 1.2.36. Oct. 22, 1979; Carr 143). In the summer of 1980, Wojnarowicz goes up onto the roofs of piers where men lay sunbathing nude, and has a vision of vastness:

378 | F AYE CHISHOLM GUENTHER I pulled myself up through the roof overhead and stood above the city and saw […] the red hint of the skies where the west lies; saw myself in other times, moving my legs along the long flat roads of asphalt and weariness moving in and out of cars […] dust storms rolling across the plains and the red neoned motels of other years and rides and the distant darkness of unnameable cities (Fales Series 1.1.14. July 6, 1980).

Here, Wojnarowicz’s depiction of America emphasizes a sense of queer freedom through movement and the unfolding of history. In the Acknowledgments section of Close to the Knives, which Wojnarowicz wrote at the end of his life, he refers to the piers and the pre-AIDS queer space they represented. He offers a dedication to “[t]he Drag Queens along the Hudson River and their truly revolutionary states” (n. p.). The piers represent the queer space which enables the “revolutionary” queer existence he witnesses (Close 9). The permeable and porous qualities of the queer spaces of the piers are significant for the way they allow passage, entry, and exit, thereby removing boundaries or barriers between categories and containments. As a result, inner and outer spaces coalesce: “See the quiet outline of a dog’s head in plaster, simple as the splash of a fish in dreaming, and then the hole in the wall farther along, framing a jagged sky swarming with glints of silver and light. So simple, the appearance of night in a room full of strangers” (9). Here, a painting on a wall is compared to a movement in a dream, and both images are conveyed through words denoting sound, such as “quiet” and “splash.” Literal gaps in the structure of the building produce a “framing” of the sky, like another kind of painting on the wall. The figurative image of night appears inside a room and changes its dimensions, making it possible for anything imagined to occur privately, in darkness. Later in the narrative, this trope of the outside coming in is repeated with “small rectangles of light and wind and river over on the far wall” (16). Glass, usually the demarcation between outside and inside, is “emptied” from the window, so that “sunlight is burning through” (16). This entrance of the light occurs just as the narrator is entering a stranger: “We’re moving around, changing positions that allow us to bend and sway and lean forward into each other’s arms […]. He is […] pulling my body into his” (16). In describing people he sees at the piers Wojnarowicz makes reference to significant cultural figures or historical imagery, thereby merging different temporal and spatial locations within the scenes that are represented: “[T]he drag queen in the dive waterfront coffee shop,” whose “coy seductive smile […] reveals a mouth of rotted teeth,” reminds him of “the childlike rogue slipped out from the white-sheeted bed of Pasolini” (10). The tattoos on a stranger, “lift around his neck like frescoes of faded photographs of samurai warriors: a sudden

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flash of Mishima’s private army standing still as pillars along the sides of the river” (14). The narrative observations turn self-reflective, as if implying that his own desire were the motivation for some of the references being made. He notes how a stranger appears: “[H]andsome like some face in old boxer photographs, a cross between an aging boxer and Mayakovsky. He had a nose that might have once been broken in some dark avenue barroom in a distant city invented by some horny young kid” (14-15). According to this observation, the entire frame of reference for the image could be fantasized by Wojnarowicz as narrator. In another narrative in Close to the Knives, “Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-Inch Politician,” Wojnarowicz talks about how one of his strategies for survival growing up in American society where his sexuality was denied or vilified was to produce his own imagery and cultural references (138157). His creative iconography, both as a strategy of survival and an exploration of queer experience, emerges throughout the narratives about the piers. The reader becomes witness to the narrator’s personal associations, cultural references, and imagination. A figure who grabs at him in one of the warehouses is described as “someone out of an old Todd Browning image” (19). A man he sees in a waterfront bar “looked like some faraway character straight from the fields of old skittering wheat and someone I once traveled with by pickup truck with beer cans in the dusty backseat and buzz in the head from summer” (20). There is also a sense of collapse and fading in the space of the piers, referred to by Wojnarowicz as “abandoned structures” (16). These marginal spaces are depicted as falling away, yet the descriptive, poetic language used to convey the piers retains their vividness: “[T]he man without an eye against a receding wall, the subtle deterioration of weather, of shading, of images engraved in the flaking walls” (9). The space at the piers described as “small offices” or an “office cubicle,” seems to have suffered attack: “Paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture” (16). Language such as “receding,” “deterioration,” “flaking,” and “fracturing,” suggests that the whole structure of the space is gradually coming apart (9). These qualities represent a metaphor for America, which Wojnarowicz perceives as a dying country (Carr 140). The narrator and a stranger have sex inside an office cubicle where the floor itself seems to be sinking into the water: “[T]he carpet beneath our shifting feet reveals our steps with slight pools of water” (Close 16). For Wojnarowicz, as narrator, a sense of accumulation and heightening is sustained by qualities of ambiguity and recklessness in the disintegrating environment of the piers: “Old images race back and forth and I’m gathering a heat in the depths of my belly from them […]. I’m being buoyed by these discreet pleasures, walking the

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familiar streets and river” (12-13). Here, Wojnarowicz echoes Whitman and the legacy of a queer American vision, cataloguing the details and accumulating elements of his surroundings, celebrating the diversity, which brings him “pleasures.” The narrator is attuned to simultaneous sensory experiences of sound and vision: “Each desire, each memory so small a thing, becomes a small river tracing the outlines and the drift of your arms and bare legs, dark mouth and the spoken words of strangers” (13). The space of the piers allows for an ambiguity that is full of possibility, and again a movement between present and past in the form of memories, halfdeciphered and recalled. The connection between memory and dream is underscored: Outside the darkness has “a seediness like dream darkness you can breathe in or be consumed by,” and inside, “layers of evening” produce the emergence of a “stranger” like “a dim memory,” who remains “faceless for moments, just the movements of his body across the floor” (10-11). The narrative perspective drifts outside again where car headlights illuminate “the outlines of men, of strangers, people I might or might not have known because their faces were invisible” (11). The narrator speaks of the limitations of his own memories and yet he is vulnerable to what the past brings back, both in terms of pain and desire: “I can barely remember the senses I had when viewing these streets for the first time. There’s a whole change in psyche and yet there are slight traces that cut me with the wounding nature of déjà vu, filled with old senses of desire” (13). His memories lose their sounds, as if they are reduced to an elementary state: “Something silent that is recalled, the sense of age in a familiar place, the emptied heart and light of the eyes, the white bones of street lamps and moving autos, the press of memory turning over and over” (ibid.). A rain reminds him of rain showers as a kid, situated in an American landscape of “old jersey,” where “nuns in the cool green summers would hitch up their long black skirts and toss a large white medicine ball to each other in a kind of memory slow motion” (14). Just like Wojnarowicz’s descriptions of the physical site of the piers function as a metaphor for America, his memories are consistently focused on American landscapes, inscribing these sites with a range of poetic qualities, often emerging from a queer perspective. His memory has similar weight and movement throughout the narrative, slow and hovering in the air as if it bears the quality of a dream-state. Just as the space of the piers provides certain perceptions and encounters with memory, it also allows a larger perspective on the city. From one of the warehouses he “[l]ooked out the side windows into the squall, tiny motions of the wet city” (19) and beside the river he can see “way over the movements of the city” (17). The sights and sounds of “coasting images” the narrator

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encounters in his “restless walks” at the piers also allow him to hear a broad spectrum of the city itself: “[F]araway sounds of voices and cries and horns roll up and funnel in like some secret earphone connecting me with the creaking movements of the living city” (12). A recurring image of slanted light passing over figures and forms is used to explore and convey the experience of gay cruising at the piers. The narrator notes: “[T]he light of doorway after doorway casting itself across the length” of a stranger’s legs (11). He observes “[h]eadlights like lighthouse beacons drifted over the surface of the river, brief and unobtrusive, then swinging around and illuminating the outlines of men, of strangers” (ibid.). He notes how “swinging headlights from cars entering the riverside parking lot” catch a stranger “among the fine slanting lines of wind and water” (14). This is the motion of cruising— the brief revelatory glances, emboldened by subsequent darkness, the catching or grasping at quick visions of another to attain the possibility and recognition of attraction or possible intimacy: “Various smiles spark from the darkening rooms, from behind car windows” (13). The expansiveness of space is suggested in these descriptions, because open space is needed to allow the light to travel across lengths and distances, to stretch across perimeters. At the piers, the narrative describes how bodies produce the queer space. A stranger becomes part of the structure of a building while retaining his physical separateness: “[T]he man without the eye against a receding wall” (9). The man approaches as the background that frames him disappears, filling up the narrator’s frame of vision: “He was moving in with the gradual withdrawal of light” (10). The stranger’s body, as queer space, is a physical presence in the visual landscape: “a passenger on the shadows” (ibid.). He communicates to the narrator and is read by him through a “language of […] movements” (ibid.). Part of what this communication triggers in the narrator is desire, even if reciprocation or the possibility of meeting the stranger remains elusive. The turnon for the narrator emerges in imagined interactions: “Standing there sipping from a green bottle, I could see myself taking the nape of his neck in my teeth as he turned and stared out the window at the rolling lines of traffic for a moment” (20). The narrator feels the stranger’s body in his own hands: “Light curved around his face and the back of his head, the shaved hair produced sensations that I could feel across the palm of my hand, my sweating hand, all the way from where I stood on the other side of the room” (ibid.). Under the stranger’s studying glance, “for indiscernible reasons,” the narrator feels himself “blush” (21). Watching the stranger’s interactions with another man, the narrator is “overcome with the sensations of touch, of my fingers and palms smoothing along some untouched body in some imagined and silent sun-filled room,

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overcome with the heat” (ibid.). The space of the waterfront bar at the piers allows for these interactions, but it also represents a kind of body in itself, which the narrator must leave as if escaping the hold of a lover: “I […] push open the doors and release myself from the embrace of the room and the silent pockets of darkness and the illuminating lines of light” (21-22). The use of the term “loving” in the narrative occurs in relation to the queer body in a series of figurative images that all suggest aspects of the American landscape. The images serve to repeat and heighten the qualities of accumulation and deterioration as they juxtapose various geographical locations in America: “In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill […]. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas” (17). There is also attention to the permeability of structures, both physical and social, where the inside and outside converge or open to each other: “In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room, and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms […]. I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill” (ibid.). Cinematic qualities also characterize this narrative description: “In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings” (ibid.). Many of the metaphors for intimate love and desire in Wojnarowicz’s narratives about the piers contain cinematic qualities because they are rendered through imagistic forms, as if on a screen. Finally, the tensions the narrator experiences between private interior life and the public exterior life are contended with and released in his acts of love: “I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life” (ibid.). The last section of the narrative “Losing the Form in Darkness” addresses the piers as a permeable creative space where art and life collide. Wojnarowicz’s descriptions of “vagrant frescoes painted with rough hands on the peeling walls,” may be a reference to the work of Tava, an artist who frequently painted at the piers (22; Carr 141). The narrator describes these images as “huge murals of nude men painted with beige and brown colors coupling several feet above the floorboards” (Close 22). Along with these murals there are smaller illustrations of “crayoned buddhas,” representing a kind of sacredness that is being combined with the sexual imagery (ibid.). The final description of the visual art in the warehouses notes the literal permeability of the walls, where “a series of black wire-strewn holes pull apart the surface,” produced by “crowbars and hammers” used to find “copper pipes and wires” to sell (ibid.). However, the porous, dilapidated surface, is also “filled” with the “floating faces” of queer figures with “high-boned cheeks and multicolored eyelids, a stream of hair touched by loving

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or by winds, small crudely drawn lanterns serving no purpose but to genie these faces from the vague surface of the plaster” (ibid. 22). As the narrator continues his wandering, he finds moments when the bodies of men merge with the art on the walls, becoming stuck in time, “briefly framed in the recesses of a room […] in various stages of leaning […] flesh of the frescoes come to life: the smooth turn of hands over bodies, the taut lines of limbs and mouths” (ibid. 22). This merging of physical bodies and art also signals a gathering collectiveness and heightened physical interaction as more men emerge within the scene: “[T]he intensity of the energy bringing others down the halls where guided by little or no sounds they pass silently over the charred floors. They appear out of nowhere and line the walls” (ibid.). A merging of historical eras and geographical locations is conveyed through the descriptive language. The men appear like “figurines before firing squads or figures in a breadline in old times pressed into history” (22-23). Wojnarowicz’s final description of the piers in “Losing the Form in Darkness” renders the queer space ancient and static, caught in time. The narrator relates the denizens of the piers to “the eternal sleep of statues, of marble eyes and lips” with “illuminated arms corded with soft unbreathing veins” or “the wounding curve of ancient backs stooped for frozen battles” (23). Life seems to dissipate from the piers in this moment, leaving a “face beneath the sands of the desert still breathing” (ibid.). This description is eerily close to the photograph that Marion Scemama takes of Wojnarowicz near the end of his life when he knew he was dying of AIDS, titled Last collaboration, May 1991. In an interview, Scemama, a friend of Wojnarowicz’s, recalls the process of taking that photograph, describing the precise instructions he gave her: “I took the camera, stood above him with his body between my legs, and photographed him from different angles […]. Then I realized he was giving me what he would not be able to give me later: he had made me a witness to his death” (Scemama 140).

W RITING THE P IERS

IN THE MIDST OF THE

AIDS C RISIS

Near the end of Close to the Knives, in a narrative written during the AIDS crisis, Wojnarowicz inserts earlier writing begun in the second half of 1980, preAIDS (187-188). This insertion corresponds closely to entry that was written in his journal, published after he died, as a collection entitled In the Shadow of the American Dream (169). He describes going to the piers and witnesses himself there, as if detached: “There are times I see myself from a distance entering the

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torn, ribbed, garage-like doors of this place from the highway—I step away from myself for a moment and watch myself climbing around and I wonder, what keeps me going? Why is it these motions continue over and over, animal sexual energy?” (Close 187). Later in this passage, Wojnarowicz is preoccupied with conveying the gritty details of the queer space: The smell of shit and piss is overwhelming; everybody uses this place as an outdoor toilet, getting fucked in the ass and then letting it loose in some spare corner […]. To get further into the warehouse I have to breathe lightly and stay near the openings in the walls and walk quickly way back into the darkness to the farthest point, where the walls open out to the river, and a concrete platform that seems to ride the waves, every so often crumbling and sinking as if into the raging seas. (ibid.)

In this description, which was incorporated into a narrative written during the AIDS crisis, Wojnarowicz perceives the queer spaces of the piers as altered from the way they were when he first discovered them. Based on the description of the smell and refuse, they are more public and more frequently used than they were previously, and they are now full to the brim with histories, some of which he wants to remember and some of which he wishes would fall away. He imagines that the piers would burn down so that the memories they held could disappear. In this fantasy, queer space is presented as a site that has become a container for what is abject but is also remembered as pleasurable, attractive, and sheltering: Deep in the back of my head I wish it would all burn down, explode in some screaming torrent of wind and flame, pier walls collapsing and hissing into the waters. It might set us free from our past histories. Once it was all beautiful rooms that permitted living films to unwind with a stationary silence that didn’t betray the punctuations of breathing, the rustle of shirts and pants sliding. (ibid.)

In his journal entry containing this same description, he also includes references that are explicitly literary when he describes his memories of the piers. He notes how “its once long ago beautiful rooms […] permitted live films of Genet and Burroughs to unwind with a stationary kind of silence, something punctuated by breathing alone, and the rustle of shirts and pants sliding, being unbuttoned or folded back” (In the Shadow 169). The narrative conveys a shift over time from a space of beauty, where bodily expression occurs through acutely aesthetic silent movement and material texture, to a space that is ugly and repellant, as if it is being polluted and is existing in a changing state of deterioration and personal regret (Close 187). This final narrative featuring the piers seems to be

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Wojnarowicz’s attempt to grapple with their ultimate destruction after they became more popular with the East Village art scene, and soon attracted the presence of police (Carr 226-27). Eventually Piers 34 and 28 were both torn down in 1984 (227). Wojnarowicz’s new consciousness of the AIDS epidemic resonates in this passage. His descriptions of the piers also reflect how the reality of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s changed the way queer spaces were understood and their histories were made visible. During the AIDS crisis, Wojnarowicz writes a scene of cruising and sex at the piers that is part of a larger narrative entitled “Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration” (Close 64-66). The descriptions of fantasy-charged longing in this scene are reflected in the physical space of the piers—a fantastical, permeable, elemental place: “I’m walking through these hallways where the windows break apart a slow dying sky and a quiet wind follows the heels of the kid as he suddenly steps through a door frame ten rooms down” (64). The kid is not a figure of innocence, but he does seem to represent someone younger than the narrator, perhaps Wojnarowicz himself at a younger age: “His eyes make him look like he’s starving for food or just feeling lust or else he’s got the look of one of those spiritual types that hover on street corners” (65). The scene situated at the piers does not make any direct reference to AIDS even though the narrative as a whole is preoccupied with expressing the experience of living with AIDS in America as a queer man. At one point the kid seems to represent life convening with death: “He turned and leaned up against the wall at a point where a crack in the roof let light pass through illuminating the wall and his head like some old russian [sic] icon of a saint in mausoleum darkness” (ibid.). This description conjoins the queer body with the structure of the piers. Like the earlier narratives situated at the piers, the references to another historical period and geographical location have the effect of merging time and space. The narrator and the kid need to go into hiding to find space to connect: “I could feel his lips against mine from across the room, tasting reefer or milk on them as he disappears through a square hole in the ceiling” (ibid.). The kid recedes “farther back in the attic crawlspace” (ibid.). Qualities of deterioration and abandonment at the piers make them subject to less institutional and corporate surveillance or control. These qualities produce a space that allows for privacy within a queer counterpublic sphere but at the same time is precarious in terms of safety: “Like him I had to crouch in order to move through the narrow space, walking along the tops of spaced beams like a horizontal ladder so as not to tip and crash through the rotting tin ceiling” (ibid.). The piers are also a temporary space, given specificity and value through the fleeting connections they allow. Wojnarowicz conveys their particular qualities

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and their significance within the anonymity of the vast American industrial landscape. By representing the piers in intimate detail, he prevents them from vanishing from historical memory, even though the physical sites were torn down and the landscape was altered: If viewed from miles above, this place would just appear to be a small boxlike structure like thousands of others set down along the lines of the rivers in the world; the only difference being that in this one the face of the kid starts moving up the wall past a window framing the perfect hazy coastline with teeth of red factories and an incidental gas tank explosion which sends flowers of black smoke reeling up into the dusk. (ibid.)

In closely observing the piers, the narrator also becomes a visionary, witnessing history on a massive scale. What he sees is not in forward motion, but a kind of simultaneity “of a minute vision” that reflects the merging of various times and places described throughout many of the collected narratives (69). Here, Wojnarowicz conveys historical development as full of violence that is bodily, industrial, and technological: The center is something outside of what we know as visual, more a sensation: a huge fat clockwork of civilizations […]; a malfunctioning cannonball filled with bone and gristle and gearwheels and knives and bullets and animals rotting with skeletal remains and pistons and smokestacks pump-pumping cinders and lightning and shreds of flesh, spewing language and motions and shit and entrails in its wake. It’s all swirling in every direction simultaneously so that it’s neither going forward nor backward, not from side to side, embracing stasis beyond the ordinary sense of stillness one witnesses in death. (ibid.)

The narrator is haunted by his sense of how history is proceeding, both in the face of his own huge personal loss, and also on the larger scale of American civilization. The relationship in Wojnarowicz’s writing to material space can be considered in relation to Walter Benjamin’s concept of profane illuminations. Eric L. Santner discusses how Benjamin introduced the concept of profane illuminations in his essay, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” to describe the way surrealists viewed material culture and in particular objects that “had become outmoded” and “had acquired the status of detritus, as a result of the accelerated rhythms of capitalist temporality” (60). I argue that in his writing about the Hudson River Piers in New York City, Wojnarowicz is continuing the tradition of profane illumination through a queer perspective. Queer desire inflects his narratives both in terms of the profane, via

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the sexual and social encounters that occur in the context of a homophobic society, and also in terms of illumination, via the revelatory or rejuvenating elements within these encounters. The piers themselves allow for the profane illumination in their physical state characterized as broken, deteriorating, leaking, and abandoned by American capitalist systems, as well as in the nooks and crannies they provide for various excesses or releases of emotion, tension, and bodily fluids. Benjamin argued that André Breton was the first to perceive the “revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’” (“Surrealism” 210). Likewise, the surrealists as a group were able to perceive “how destitution—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects—can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism” (210). Wojnarowicz’s own writing about the piers reflects these perceptions. Benjamin explains in his essay that this nihilism arises from the destitution and outmoded spaces that surround us in capitalist society (216). The destitution produced by capitalism is also what creates outmoded spaces such as the piers. According to Benjamin, when confronted with the unknown and obscure elements of these sites, “we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday” (216). This is one of the modes by which Wojnarowicz writes about his encounters with the queer space of the piers. He penetrates them as narrator, through his descriptions of their mysteries, but also re-inscribes their impenetrability, even as he witnesses them. The piers and their events are not clarified through Wojnarowicz’s observations or his interactions there—though they are revealed in greater detail and vividness, and often work an energizing change upon him. He is moved by the queer spaces of the piers and is consistently emotionally and creatively charged by them, but they remain less than fully known or understood by him. Santner explains that as a political thinker writing in Europe during the rise of fascism, in the years leading up to the Holocaust, Benjamin believed there was a revolutionary potential in the profane illuminations of the surrealists, and artists who carried on this tradition. According to Santner, Benjamin attributes this potential to the artists’ roles as witnesses, because their “gaze on the detritus of the capitalist universe is sustained by a vision of political acts that would interrupt the course of history (understood as that of capitalist globalization)” (61-62). In Wojnarowicz’s representations of the queer space of the piers— before the AIDS crisis, but especially when he was living with AIDS—this sense of political significance emerges as a conscious choice and action to make these spaces visible and vivid in the face of homophobic obliteration or revulsion.

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Similarly, as Santner points out, Benjamin’s argument in his theses “On the Concept of History” is that “reanimation can take place only based on and as a fundamental political decision and act; there can be no neutral place from which such work intervenes into the past” (62). According to Santner, this understanding represents “the central point of Benjamin’s notion of Jetztzeit— the present situation of danger and crisis” (62). In his representation of queer spaces while living with AIDS, part of Wojnarowicz’s project is a reanimation of his past before AIDS. According to Wojnarowicz’s vision, and his motivation for writing, an interruption of history as global capitalism would also be an interruption of heteronormativity that determines the rhythms of capitalist temporality. During the AIDS crisis, he revises and publishes early writing about the pre-AIDS spaces that had been marked as outmoded detritus, such as the piers, which queers infiltrated. These spaces were subsequently destroyed through gentrification as a function of American capitalism. Wojnarowicz’s representations of queer space in this context can be understood as a form of reanimation through his documentation of what was once there, as well as his questioning and challenging of the capitalist system of replacement. By extension, in social terms, the narratives are an interruption of history emerging from Wojnarowicz’s contemporary queer Jetztzeit—which is represented as the experiences of being a homeless queer youth, and later, living with the AIDS epidemic in the homophobic culture of America in the late twentieth century. He insists, through written reanimation, on the recognition of these experiences. This form of queer visibility and its counterpublic resonance are central to his work. Wojnarowicz’s concept of the “pre-invented world,” which he hopes to interrupt and also envisions as plummeting towards total wreckage, has much to do with queer space. Its spatial significance can be understood via Benjamin’s notion of creaturely life against the background of his concept of natural history. Santner explains the meaning of natural history as the “paradoxical exchange of properties between nature and history that constitutes the material density of natural historical being” (17). According to this theory, “artifacts of human history tend to acquire an aspect of mute, natural being at the point where they begin to lose their place in a viable form of life (think of the process whereby architectural ruins are reclaimed by nature)” (16-17). Yet, “when an artifact loses its place in a historical form of life—when that form of life decays, becomes exhausted, or dies—we experience it as something that has been denaturalized, transformed into a mere relic of historical being” (17). In this “undead” space “between real and symbolic death,” natural history occurs (ibid.). It is a queer space that Wojnarowicz returns to often, both in the face of AIDS and in his

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vision of the future catastrophe for the “pre-invented world” as natural history progresses. Wojnarowicz shares Benjamin’s belief in what Santner calls “the ceaseless repetition of […] cycles of emergence and decay of human orders of meaning, cycles that are, for him […] always connected to violence” (ibid.). Like Benjamin, Wojnarowicz perceives allegory as a way to symbolize the “irremediable exposure to the violence of natural historical temporality” (18). I argue that Wojnarowicz understands “progression,” especially in a homophobic society, in very similar terms to “Benjamin’s own allegory of the angel of history staring helplessly at the wreckage of such ‘progress,’” which Benjamin had envisioned while living in a society reeling from the emergence of Fascism (ibid.). For Wojnarowicz, like Benjamin, dwelling within this allegorical mode, “rendered a sense of life bereft of any secure reference to transcendence, of life utterly exposed to the implacable rhythms of natural history” (ibid.). In Wojnarowicz’s narratives, the deteriorating piers produce a space of poetic allegory, which, as Benjamin writes, “declares itself to be beyond beauty” (Origin 178). For Benjamin, “[a]llegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (Origin 178). In Wojnarowicz’s texts, allegory is produced in the mind of the narrator who is witness to the ruins of his exterior surroundings, a ruin also experienced in his body through AIDS. Similarly, in Benjamin’s conceptualization of poetic allegory, the body, like the mind, produce a “melancholic disposition” that is fundamental to the creaturely life (Santner 20). The narrator in Wojnarowicz’s text inhabits this creaturely life with melancholic presence, which means, according to Benjamin, to be immersed “in the life of creaturely things […]. Everything saturnine points down into the depths of the earth […] the downward gaze is characteristic of the saturnine man, who bores into the ground with his eyes” (Origin 152). This characteristic of attentiveness to the ground is especially appropriate if we extend its meaning to include an attentiveness to not only the earth but also human and animal bodies, as well as qualities of the gritty, the dirty, the grotesque, and waste. These are all abject elements considered profane in a homophobic society, often linked in Wojnarowicz’s texts to queer sex and desire, and to queer spaces more generally. Eventually for Benjamin, a melancholic disposition leads to “the point of alienation from the body,” where “the utensils of active life are lying around unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation” (140). Similarly, Wojnarowicz is concerned with the queer body as a form of contemplation: “It is the appearance of a portrait, not the immediate vision I love so much” (Close 9-10). With references to the past and future, the queer body becomes a site of sexual encounter and desire but also of allegory, which is where, according to Benjamin, “transitoriness and eternity confronted

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each other most closely” (Origin 224). This is a confrontation that, in Wojnarowicz’s narratives, leads to the final wreckage of the pre-invented world. According to Benjamin, a creaturely stance involves a bent posture in melancholic attentiveness to the ground’s spectral ruins (Santner 86). In Wojnarowicz’s descriptions of the piers, these spectral ruins include the bodily and profane. A creaturely stance also has a “‘cringe’ that bends the back of the creature, that figure of pure exposure to the state of exception immanent to law” (ibid.). In Wojnarowicz’s text, the state of exception is figured as the expression and visibility of queer identity and desire, despite ideological systems that deny, or aim to punish and even obliterate, queer existence. This creaturely stance is depicted throughout Wojnarowicz’s writing. In particular, Dianne Chisholm notes that Wojnarowicz’s narrative “Losing the Form in Darkness,” which is situated at the piers, consistently features a pose of “leaning” and bent angles (94). Regarding one particular sexual encounter described in the narrative, Wojnarowicz writes, “I lean toward him, pushing him against the wall […]. We’re moving around, changing positions that allow us to bend and sway and lean forward into each other’s arms” (Close 16). In another encounter, he notes, “I lean down and find the neckline of his sweater and draw it back and away from the nape of his neck which I gently probe with my tongue” (Close 17). On the walls, “huge” murals depict “nude men painted with beige and brown colors coupling several feet above the floorboards. Some of them with half-animal bodies leaning into the room’s darkness” (22). Through the doorways of various rooms at the piers the narrator sees “a series of men in various stages of leaning” (ibid.). In Wojnarowicz’s writing, this leaning stance also transforms into an act of love and a kind of liberation that is found through the sexual encounters: “In loving him […] I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life” (Close 17). Similarly, as Santner describes, Benjamin considered an interruption of the “capture and captivation” of the leaning stance to be “the only possibility for genuinely new social, political, and ethical relations in human life,” and “for genuine creativity in these domains” (Santner 86). In his memoir, Wojnarowicz envisions various queer spaces he occupied, such as the Hudson River piers, as intertwined with memories of his personal history. As he writes, “I came to understand that to give up one’s environment was also to give up biography and all the encoded daily movements” (Close 108). In his journal, he considers physical space in particular as a container for memories, both personal and public. In March of 1980, after detailing a sexual encounter at the piers, he writes:

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If those floorboards could talk, if those streets could talk, if the whole huge path this body has traveled—roads, motel rooms, hillsides, cliffs, subways, rivers, planes, tracks—if any of them could speak, what would they remember most about me? What motions would they unravel within their words, or would they turn away faceless like the turn of this whole river and waterfront street, all of its people, its wanderers, its silences, beneath the wheels of traffic and industry and sleep. (In the Shadow 147)

In Wojnarowicz’s personal, poetic accounts of queer space in America, including his representations of the Hudson River piers, he makes crucial contributions to literary archives of queer space. A close reading of the queer spaces represented in Wojnarowicz’s work provides insight into physical and social transformations within urban American landscapes, including the spatial histories of queer subcultures and counterpublic practices in New York City in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

W ORKS C ITED Ambrosino, Giancarlo, ed. David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-1934. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Eds. M. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. 207-224. Print. ---. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans John Osborne. London: NLB, 1977. Print. ---. The Arcades Project. Trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print. Bidlo, Mike. Interview by Sylvère Lotringer. Ambrosino 26-33. Print. Carr, Cynthia. Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2012. Print. Chisholm, Dianne. “Outlaw Documentary: David Wojnarowicz’s Queer Cinematics, Kinerotics, Autothanatographics” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. March-June 1994. 81-102. Print. Désert, Jean-Ulrick. “Queer Space.” Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites of Resistance. Eds. Gorden Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter. Seattle: Bay Press, 1997. Print. Doyle, Jennifer. Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Print.

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Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgendered Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print. McCormick, Carlo. Interview by Sylvère Lotringer. Ambrosino 10-17. Print. Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print. Scemama, Marion. Interview by Sylvère Lotringer. Ambrosino 122-141. Print. Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print. ---. In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz. Ed. Amy Scholder. New York: Grove Press, 1999. Print. ---. Journals. Fales series 1, Box 1, Folder 14. June 18, 1980, New York. ---. Journals. Fales Series 1, Box 2, Folder 36. October 7 1979, New York. ---. Journals. Fales Series 1, Box 2, Folder 36. October 8/9 1979, New York. ---. Journals. Fales Series 1, Box 2, Folder 36. October 22 1979, New York. Yokobosky, Matthew. “Not Part of Any Wave: No Wave Cinema.” Taylor 117130. Print.

Perspectives in Urban American Studies

City Scripts Urban American Studies and the Conjunction of Textual Strategies and Spatial Processes B ARBARA B UCHENAU AND J ENS M ARTIN G URR A great city may be seen as the construction of words as well as stone. YI-FU TUAN/ “LANGUAGE AND THE MAKING OF PLACE” (686) The American city is a text created, a story written by people who sought to impose their vision of order, their designs upon the world, and to some extent to control the wilderness into a contained and disciplined environment. NEIL

CAMPBELL

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ALASDAIR

KEAN/

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Empirically speaking, contemporary urban U.S. America is a space that makes up just about 3% of the national territory, though it is the home of more than 80% of the population.i This disjuncture of territorial expansion and demographic density is inversely mirrored, but also replicated in literature, media, and the arts, where the city takes up an astounding amount of narrative and visual space, while the rural and the anti-urban function as tightly woven and emotionally powerful asides. In the public imagination—in the United States and abroad—contingencies and contradictions apparently rule the representation of urban spaces and urban lifestyles. Cities that look and feel like Los Angeles or other major U.S. American cities seem ubiquitous and yet exceptional.ii Found in the classics of the Hollywood noir and continually reframed in global screen cul-

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ture as well as in urban theory, these cities are represented in scenarios of urbanization and urban transformation that are glorious and fearful at the same time.iii While it is tempting to follow the work of scholars such as Edward Soja and Mike Davis, who have highlighted urban blight and post-metropolitan unrest in L.A., this essay is not so much interested in urban critique and the dystopian character of many artistic representations of the contemporary city. We accordingly will not inquire whether Mike Davis’ noir aesthetic or Soja’s posturban sense of crisis manifest themselves in representations of New Orleans, Quebec and Port-au-Prince. Neither will we ask how the awareness of urban crisis might change when the focus is shifted to the deindustrialization and depopulation of the Rust Belt. Within these frames we would expect to find a public imagination concerned with and about the ethnicization and resegregation of urban spaces, as we do most noticably in the cities of California, though also in Vancouver, Atlanta, and New York For the purposes of this paper, we instead want to study American moments of faith in the city more closely, inquiring to what extent this faith owes its strength to the media, to literature and cultural production. When we consider the particular dynamics of North American urban development as well as the subtle powers of anti-urban imaginaries on the continent, it would seem that an analytical focus on North American urbanity and its scripts – its proscriptive and descriptive systems of reading and writing— might be able to yield a novel conjunction of narrative and urban theory, allowing for fundamental insights into the mediation of and between social process and urban form.iv Is it possible to relate fundamental strategies of textual representation to key processes of urban development? The current turn to stories in the field of urban planning seems to suggest as much (Sandercock; Throgmorton). But how can this be done and what would the assumption of analogies between textual practice, social process and urban form entail?

U RBAN S TUDIES , AMERICAN S TUDIES , U RBAN AMERICAN S TUDIES ? As Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch have recently stated, “cities have become both the nemesis and the laboratory of human life in the new millennium” (xi). And Andrew Ross (in his contribution to Orvell and Benesch’s volume Rethinking the American City) indicates that faith and anxiety are equally pivotal to U.S. American concepts of the city and of urbanity.v The fascination and the fear that is affiliated with North American urban spaces is matched by utopic as

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well as dystopic discursive modes, which accompany recent discussions of the erasure of North American rurality and the supposedly unchallenged hegemony of North American urbanity (Soja Postmodern Geographies). Regarding these conflictive conjunctions, our question is the following: how can recent turns as well as more or less unchallenged paradigms in another multidisciplinary field— urban research—help to answer a few of the most pressing questions in the fields of North American literary, cultural, medial, and historical scholarship? What are the prospects of bringing American studies’ current focus on media, materiality and knowledge into a structured conversation with another field’s increasing attention to story, narrative and space? Urban research is characterized by a far greater interdisciplinarity than American Studies—it brings together researchers from fields as diverse as engineering, urban planning, the social sciences, and the humanities. Recently, however, urban research has begun to engage with the concerns American Studies scholarship (or North American Studies, as we call it in the context of the University Alliance Ruhr—an alliance that allows for the cooperation and exchange of students, faculty and research between TU Dortmund University, the Ruhr University Bochum and the University of Duisburg-Essen). Not unlike American Studies, urban research focuses on space and place. Cities are its core matter, just as North American Studies have the North American continent as their major object of inquiry. American Studies, of course, has sought to overcome this spatial limitation and so has urban research. The transnational turn in American Studies finds its counterpart in Urban Studies’ assumption that the contrast between city and country, the distinctions between the urban and the rural that had previously served to delimit the field, have been softened, erased and made inconsequential by global urbanization.vi Thus, while the field of American Studies has long been widely interdisciplinary, this is truer still of the field of Urban Studies, which cannot even be said to constitute an established discipline in the institutional sense. What is more, given the fact that, in an urbanized world, virtually any discipline will have something to contribute to urban research, Urban Studies is a scattered and dispersed field of research—so much so that it may not be a “field” at all, as Frank Eckardt lamented a few years ago. The field of urban research has come to include much more than all aspects of material form. Beyond architecture, infrastructure and technology, urban researchers with disciplinary homes in the social sciences, the natural sciences, public health, the fields of engineering, planning, design and the humanities investigate the mobility of goods, people, information, and urbanity. They explore the cognitive and the affective sides of condensed human settlements, and they continue to investigate the social,

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political and cultural dynamics of urban spaces. Thus, urban researchers foster faith in smart, sustainable and global cities, while simultaneously highlighting urban vulnerability, dwelling on the risks of the particular condensation that is the hallmark of cities and urban lifestyles. From the perspective of urban North America and its regionally unspecific partner in academia, the interdisciplinary openings of recent spatial and story turns in American studies and in urban studies challenge us to pay more attention to questions of form and shape as they affect both, narrativity and the built environment. Focusing on North American urbanity, we need to develop a better understanding of the conjunctions between matters of materiality and matters of media, narrative and representation. We can do so, we suggest, by fostering a structured conversation between narrative theory, media theory and urban theory. The scholarship assembled in this volume has investigated the conjunctions of materiality and representation in ways that suggest the need for further structured conversations between American Studies and the field of urban research. It examines how pivotal urban transformations in the U.S.A. manifest themselves in the physical design and the actual usage of spaces, in the make-up and interaction of communities, in cultural practices, and finally in urban imaginaries. Exploring the three dimensions of spatial, communal and representational change while probing current urban, ethnic, literary, cultural, and medial theories, this collection of essays has sought to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of urban and metropolitan transformation processes in the Western world at large. Thus, our research also takes comparative perspectives into account—e.g. early industrial as well as postindustrial urban transformations in North America and Europe, “smart cities” and the impact of information and communication technology on urban developments, the role of culture in processes of urban innovation and renewal, frontier cities, border cities, and divided cities, the “provincialization” of American urbanity in the light of global megacities, etc. This collection of essays invites future research that can bring two theses into conversation, the first of them developed in the field of cultural studies and the second in the field of the social sciences, each of them having become crucially important for the other. •

The first thesis assigns a central role in “place-making” to cultural narratives and argues that they are central to the persuasive (re-)branding of cities or former industrial sites undergoing redevelopment. This new faith in narratives has provoked a broad and sustained “story turn” in urban planning (Throgmorton, Sandercock; van Hulst).

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•

The other thesis holds that urban culture can be regarded as the engine of contemporary North America, with cities as the major sites and topics of cultural production and consumption as well as of cultural, social and political progress. This thesis has led to a burst of research on the city in American studies (Judd/Simpson; McDonald; see also Stein).

Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place (1995) has shown that both theses can be productively rethought in conjunction with each other. The wide acceptance of the cultural constructedness of social realities that followed the paradigm shift introduced by Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace (1974, Engl. 1991) did carry insights about the social and narrative fabrication of cities into the heart of urban research (e.g. Tuan 686). But these insights are not without complications, as Deborah Stevenson has argued in her critique of the story turn in urban planning. Transformations that have been quantitatively and qualitatively measured and categorized as urban growth, sprawl, shrinkage, depletion, and repurposing deserve to be reassessed with a focus on their manifold scripts and contradictory narratives, in order to develop a critical understanding of their complexity. Here, the later theoretical work of Juri Lotman provides crucial incentives.vii Studying urbanity as the result of inchoate and contradictory cultural processes introduces non-linearity and multidirectionality into the current debate on the so-called “intrinsic logic” of specific cities (Löw/Berking) and provides for a critical intervention into current uses of narrative and creative art in urban planning. We also seek to do justice to the two equally prominent but apparently contradictory notions about the role of the urban in North America and their support of quite distinctive national projects: On the one hand, the strong belief (shared by many readers and writers, as well as planners and sociologists around the globe) that North America was the paradigmatic urban realm and that the American city was the quintessential city. This faith in the American city is often brought up in national discussions of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and justice, but also of wealth, consumption, leisure and learning. On the other hand, there is the long political tradition of “Jeffersonian” urban skepticism and agrarian/rural democracy. In this historically pervasive and affectively persuasive conceptualization of North America as an anti-urban realm, as wilderness and open space, ideas about race, class and gender, as well as about democracy, imperialism and exceptionalism, took shape.viii

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W HY L ITERARY

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Literature and Literary Studies as Alternative Forms for Generating Knowledge on Cities The notion of the “knowledge of literature” (Hörisch) or the production of knowledge in and through literature is conceptually central to our proposal (e.g. Fluck; Gymnich/Nünning; Felski; Gurr “Without contraries”). What is the achievement of literature and literary texts as forms of knowledge in their own right and as forms of producing, storing and transmitting knowledge? It has repeatedly been argued that the ways in which literary texts represent knowledge (or produce it in the first place) differ thoroughly from those of discursive/expository texts (e.g. Glomb/Horlacher; Hörisch). Specific literary procedures therefore become “devices for articulating truth” (Felski 84). Elements of genre and of literary modeling more generally play a central role: how and to what extent do literary texts (and, arguably, especially poetic texts) work differently from discursive texts? What is the specific cognitive gain in narrative models of urban complexity, as opposed to the currently dominant quantitative models? What, ultimately, can the study of complex urban systems and their development learn from literary and cultural studies?ix One answer may be the insight that individual psychological responses to a given urban environment—human desires, hopes and fears—are irreducibly crucial to understanding that environment. Urban literary and cultural studies can contribute an understanding of precisely those elements of the urban that cannot be measured, modeled, classified, or studied in terms of information theory. From the point of view of practical planning, this may mean that what can be planned is very often not what will make a place distinctive. Literature, we argue, may serve as an alternative form of “modeling” that is extremely responsive to space as a place of “dwelling” and “belonging” (Bieger). If we regard “scenario building” and the testing of the impact of alternative parameter settings on a given system as crucial functions of urban systems modeling, further parallels emerge. According to a view formulated by, among others, Kenneth Burke, Dieter Wellershoff, Wolfgang Iser, or, somewhat more recently, Stefan Horlacher and Stefan Glomb, one of the central functions of literature is to serve as a form of “symbolic action” (sensu Burke), as a social experiment free from the constraints of everyday life. In Wellershoff’s classic formulation, literature serves as a “space of simulation for alternative behavior in rehearsal at reduced risk” (57, our translation). Literature allows its readers to symbolically try out in fiction different scenarios or potential solutions for key

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societal issues.x Kenneth Burke’s notion of “Literature as Equipment for Living” is a related concept, according to which any work of literature has the social function of being an attempt at naming a situation and coming to terms with it. In this sense, literature can be seen as an assembly of case studies in naming situations and in solving problems—an arsenal of strategies for dealing with situations developed in fiction and applied in life. The views of Jürgen Link, Winfried Fluck, or Hubert Zapf are also helpful here, since they discuss the functions of literature in the system of culture as a “history of its functions.”xi Following Zapf’s suggestive terminology in his triadic model (Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie 63ff.), literature can serve as form of critical cultural diagnosis (“critical meta-discourse”), as a “reintegrating inter-discourse,” which re-integrates into the cultural whole what is otherwise repressed or marginalized. Finally, it may serve as an “imaginative counterdiscourse,” which develops alternatives and thus entails a utopian potential.xii This last notion reframes Wellershoff’s view of literature as a realm in which options for the future can be tried out. It also productively ties in with the recent strand of urban research that highlights the role of narratives in urban planning and urban development (Throgmorton Rhetorical Construction / “Global-Scale Web;” Sandercock; van Hulst). While Zapf speaks of literature as an “imaginative counter-discourse,” Sandercock uses remarkably similar terms to treat the role of narratives in developing and fostering alternative scenarios: “Stories and storytelling can be powerful agents or aids in the service of change, as shapers of a new imagination of alternatives.”xiii It is not hard to see that “stories” can play a powerful role in urban developments. Take the case of ambitious and large-scale urban development projects such as the re-use of former industrial or port areas, where stories have been used to project a genius loci, or to suggest a specific form of urbanity. It is hardly surprising, then, that developers in such large-scale projects occasionally commission literary works for the specific purpose of supporting future scenarios.xiv We believe that there is an untapped potential for literary and cultural studies here. While the role of narratives in urban planning and development has received significant attention in planning theory, this is hardly true to the same extent for literary and cultural studies with their specific competence in the analysis of narratives. There is, as yet, no substantial narratology of urban planning and development.xv

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I NVERTING P RIORITIES From Representations of Urban Change to the Scripting of Urban Pasts, Presents and Futures Representations of the city have, of course, been widely studied, but the normative ways of scripting the city, of rewriting and adapting cityscapes for new purposes and different users as well as audiences, have only recently come into focus. The essays in this volume invite us to assess the impact of U.S. American urbanization and urban change on representations of urban life and its spaces. They also encourage us to inquire into the narrative and medial processes that have made and undone cities. We therefore attempt to map the field of medial and discursive imaginaries of cities as well as of the urban(e) on the basis of insights gained from our work on U.S. American urban transformations. While our earlier MERCUR project, on which this volume is based, took urban phenomena as a given and studied their representations in texts, the media and politics, we now propose to reverse those priorities and study the ways in which urban transformations are initiated and shaped by texts. For this change of analytical perspective, cues can be taken from paradigmatic periods of citiness and urban renewal that would be unthinkable without the narrative and media innovations that accompanied them. To name just a few of these: •

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In the twenty-first century, cities have become, in the words of Chris Barker: “the electronic hubs of a new global information economy” (418, with reference to Castells). The new social media are expressive of citiness; at the same time, they ease its sprawl into rural regions and across the globe In the later twentieth century, NGOs such as Greenpeace came into existence. These organizations are thoroughly tied to innovative North American urban spaces, even though they heavily tap into pastoral traditions to battle against the technological exploitation of non-urban regions (e.g. Drennig) With the rise of mechanical reproduction and electrification at the turn of the twentieth century, printed matter claimed and literally overran urban sites, as Walter Benjamin famously remarked of Paris (171/72). In North America, photographers and artists were particularly drawn to the multilingual nature of the lettered cities and their interdependent trajectories of liberation and segregation

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In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the serialized writings of the muckrakers contributed to the ascent of the magazine industry, helping to invent medleys of journalism and fiction that drew attention to the dark sides of industrialization and urbanization. But muckraking equally nourished dreams of urban redemption, enlightenment and fulfillment In the late eighteenth century, the Federalist Papers brought New York newspapers to prominence when they defended, promoted and popularized the US Constitution. Along the way, they helped to establish the infrastructure for long-distance communication as well as concepts of imagined community (see Kelleter Amerikanische Aufklärung) Beginning in the seventeenth century, North American settler and frontier cities became the home of a transcultural scribal and material culture; in addition, they saw the rise of creolized scientific discourses (Gitlin/ Berglund/Arenson)

Each one of these medial and cultural phenomena is tied to North American urbanization and urban renewal. Not one of them would make sense without the growth and change of cities and urbanized regions. Accordingly, we work with the hypothesis that because today’s new media developments have a profound impact on both the city (“smart” or “digital cities”) and the perception of cities (“the mediated city”), the importance of the mediatization of the city today is unprecedented, and it is therefore a unique moment for an inquiry into the scripting of the North American city throughout history. Today, the new social media permit an unprecedented global access to North American cities and sites—even as electronically underserviced rural American regions move farther into the periphery of national and global discourses and developments. Since the twentieth century, radio and TV have interlinked cities and the countryside more closely than ever before; throughout the nineteenth century, newspapers and pamphlets helped to disseminate notions of the North American city; even earlier, books, maps and illustrations aided the rise of the frontier city; and in precolonial times, artwork and tales sustained visions of cities in North America. Assuming, with Manfred Faßler, that “urban developments are historically inseparable from media evolutions” (21, our translation), distinctive forms of mediating the urban deserve to be understood in their historical specificity. Attention to media evolutions can reveal the situatedness of American cities and urban visions in relations of power and hegemony, of commodification and commerce. Given the high degrees of media access and media production and their comparatively open culture of discourse, the medial

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and discursive preformation of urban life and urban perceptions can be said to be especially pervasive and powerful in North American cities, making them privileged sites of exploration for the type of research we propose.xvi Observing these close ties between media, narratives and (urban) spaces, a fresh look at current literary, cultural, historical, and medial methodologies is warranted. Can we connect analytical insights into processes of invention, imagination, and simulation with our knowledge about how prefiguration, control, anticipation, and restraint function and occur? In our present research landscape, there is a marked divide that needs to be overcome. Scholarship on the liberating impulse of imagination, invention and simulation needs to be brought into conversation with scholarship on the controlling and restraining functions of literary and medial prefiguration and anticipation.xvii Learning from the spatial turn in American Studies and the turn to narrative and stories in Urban Studies, we assume that processes of scripting are central to the ways in which humanity has built its environment. We take the concept of scripting from Walter Benjamin, connecting it to recent considerations about the role of scripts in media culture. Benjamin ruminated in the 1920s that [s]cript—having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence—is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form. (171)

For Benjamin, western urbanization is wedded to a textual, textural and narrative overload that has only become possible with technological reproducibility: before a contemporary finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight. Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what the city dwellers take for intellect, will grow thicker with each succeeding year. (172)

Script, for the modern subject, appears to have been a city’s most visible and most confounding layer and it seems to have hindered the modern subject’s access to the city as much as it disabled him/her from studying literature as an autonomous art form. Moving forward from this disconcerting vision of the coincidence of script and city into current debates about the anthropocene and its insights into the collision of human agency and geological and climatological processes (Whitehead; Hegglund), it can be said that forms of description, inscription, rescription, and prescription have become central to the ways in which

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people and territory intersect. These scripting processes are never teleological or mono-directional, despite the degree of intentionality that is at their core. Suggesting that scripting processes play a central role in the (trans)formation of cities, we hold that procedures familiar from the fields of storytelling and cinematography—acts of scripting the storyline and framing the setting—are central to the making and shaping of cities and city life. Basic elements of film scripts, such as “structural templates” for “plot construction and characterization,” as well as the ensuing selective focalizations and directive texts, help to set up convincing or intriguing narratives for and about concrete cities and urban projects (Bordwell 11, Buchenau). This type of research might be pursued in three arenas of cultural production and consumption that acknowledge the structural and functional analogies between city and text while allowing insights into the narrative overdetermination of the North American city. Scripts in the form of narratives and medial frames lead to re-scriptions of a city’s past in the construction of (alternative) urban heritages, descriptions of its present in modes that look like “the plotting of the everyday,” as well as prescriptions for its future. They relate urban spaces to new purposes and urban populations to new social dynamics, making aspects of the city accessible to different users as well as to previously unaddressed audiences.

O N THE C OINCIDENCE AND U RBAN F ORM

OF

T EXTUAL P ROCESS

Looking forward from the findings of the research assembled in this volume, three paradigmatic forms of urban change appear to have shaped North American cities and their representations throughout history. •

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Urban growth has fostered a series of sprawls (frontier/ suburban/ postmetropolitan) and multiple forms of repurposing (culturally, politically, socially, and economically speaking) while simultaneously galvanizing ethnic communities, enforcing racialization, creating diasporic communities, and fostering forms of condensation—ethnic, gendered, economic, aesthetic, and otherwise. Shrinkage—agrarian, industrial, as well as postindustrial—has equally ini-tiated multiple forms of genteel, cosmopolitan and gentrified repurposing commonly known by terms such as the great migration, mass immigra-tion and white flight. These processes contain striking elements of spatial and social, but also artistic and aesthetic inversion like the

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•

urbanization of rural cultural traditions, the gentrification of rural areas, as well as the aesthetization of ethnic and social segregation. Various waves of depletion (rural/ inner city/ suburban) have spurned ethnic, racial, as well as functional segregation; have pitted, for instance, suburbia against the urban poor, the novel of manners against the naturalist romance; and have led to riots and gated communities. But they have also fostered forms of creative and productive assemblage such as guerilla gardening, street art, or the musealization of industrial ruins or racial ghettos.

These forms of urban change are recurrent, and they indicate that the story of accelerating urbanization needs to be rethought. The deployment of terms from the field of the social sciences and urban research to be found in the essays assembled in this collection has allowed for a selectively transdisciplinary intervention into the social production of urban space. These urban transformations can be empirically observed in major historical and present-day American cities and metropolitan regions. But they also provide insights into the multiple interdependences between American cities and processes of text-based identity creation in the face of hybridization and mediatization, ultimately demanding a detailed examination of how urban spaces are constructed through inter- and transcultural communication, literature and art. We propose to conceptualize “condensation,” “inversion” and “assemblage” as three procedures that conjoin texts, cultures and cities. They designate both central patterns of urban change and key processes and strategies of representation in urban cultural production and in narratives of the American city. Condensation Condensation is a process through which matter becomes increasingly dense as it becomes less voluminous. It involves both shrinkage in size and growth in intensity as well as complexity. Cities and narrative imaginaries equally imply and require condensation.xviii Both have only limited space at their disposal and they need to accommodate a myriad of elements in this limited space. Forms of condensation replicate and facilitate the formation of multi-layered, complex semantic as well as spatial networks, in which various elements, developments, interests, and ideologies meet, compete, intersect, fuse, or collide. In metropolitan areas, ethnically defined communities and spaces such as ghettos and ethnic quarters thrive on and suffer from strategies of condensation, because they attract large numbers of people with similar interests without allowing for the

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necessary growth and diversification. A detailed study of this process allows insights into the conceptualization of ethnic and diasporic cities, aesthetic techniques of representing complexity and various forms of city marketing and the production of urban heritage.xix Inversion Inversion is a process by which an element is turned upside down or inside out, reversed, made to face the opposite direction, made to mean the opposite thing, or possibly upset and overthrown. City scripts—no matter whether they are sketched by city planners or artists—are subject to a more or less acknowledged logic of inversion. The space of the inner cities for instance—for a long time written off as lost to decay, poverty and crime—has in many cities come to be characterized by procedures of inversion through revitalization and gentrification and the outward migration of lower-class urban minorities. These planned and spontaneous processes have been closely accompanied by manifold communal and artistic projects aiming at charting, monitoring, or even steering the changes. The involvement of writers and artists in these processes has a history as avantgarde cultural and artistic practices originally developed in connection with urbanization. Hence, the countercultural poets of the 1950s and ‘60s in San Francisco and New York, who stopped foregrounding the elaborate “written” character of poetry to emphasize speech and improvisation as basis and measure of poetic production, took poetry in “performances” from the private study and the university into the bar or onto the street. Thus, they not only widened and in part changed the audience for poetry, but also transformed mundane city spaces into artistic venues. This direct interference with what Lefebvre would have called perceived and conceived space revived and transformed, i.e. inverted it into actively lived space. A comparable kind of connected inversion of representational strategies that invert and thereby revitalize the state of a city can be seen in a recent medialization of a city, namely David Simon’s and Eric Overmeyer’s acclaimed Treme. This HBO drama series uses the strategies of representing a region, i.e. of local color, to fashion an image of New Orleans supporting the re-construction of the city in the aftermath of Katrina (see Freitag; Ehrenhalt). Inversion is also a concept that can appropriately describe the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities. This change from rural to urban life entailed a reversal of life styles and value systems, which found its artistic expression in the exuberant art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet, the embrace of the “emancipatory promise of urban modernity” (Dubey 4)

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was soon inverted in books like Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ann Petry’s The Street (1946). By the beginning of the 1970s, African American literature foreshadowed how “the century-long stream of black migration out of the rural South into the urban North began to reverse direction” (Dubey 4), and how the “vision of the city as the promised land of opportunity” finally became untenable for African Americans at the end of the decade (Dubey 5). This inversion was accompanied by the “emergence of alarmist accounts of urban crisis that were coded in decisively racial terms.” Narratives about the supposed “collapse of black cultural values and community” (Dubey 5) can be read as practices of race (Markus/Moya) that folded the inner city and its population into one. These practices were taken on and ironically inverted by black writers like, e.g. Mat Johnson in Drop (2000) and Hunting in Harlem (2003). Assemblage Assemblage is a process that brings together elements that were previously unconnected and that maintain their original function while obtaining new functions in their assembled state. In literary and aesthetic theory we have come to think of artworks as objects that are produced as assemblages—combining different materials and materialities, citing distinctive contexts, yet repurposing each item by drawing on and revitalizing its earlier function. An assemblage, according to Deleuze/Guattari’s erratic approach to systems analysis and its pragmatic explanation by Manuel DeLanda, is built around ideas of fluidity, exchangeability and multiple, often incommensurable, functionalities. It describes units that apparently function as a whole, but that are compiled with parts that have been “yanked” out of a variety of not necessarily compatible systems and “plugged” into a new context in which they assume a vital function that might be different and even incompatible with their function in the other system. Each item, however, does not lose earlier meanings and purposes through its integration into the assemblage. In city narratives, assemblage is particularly highlighted whenever improbable junctures between forms, media and themes envision simultaneously, for instance, urban decay as well as urban biodiversity, procedures of spatial injustice as well as modes of empowerment and liberation.xx In cities, procedures of assemblage are today particularly noticeable in contexts of repurposing and reinscription, which have become the hallmark of western postindustrial cities. But it stands to reason that this procedure has been driving urban growth, sprawl and depletion all along. These cultural practices of condensation, assemblage and inversion lend themselves to a heuristic classification of most urban phenomena, and they

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highlight the way in which urban processes, developments and interventions are fundamentally initiated in the discourses of cultural production. Moreover, it can be argued that “condensation” (by means of layering, plurimedial experiments, multiple references, and other textual strategies in the compression of meaning), “inversion” (for instance of generic conventions) as well as “assemblage” (in the sense of a montage of distinct, seemingly irreconcilable genres, conventions, styles, or techniques) have all been central to attempts at textually rendering “cityness,” in order to simulate what urban sociologist Gerald D. Suttles has called “the cumulative texture of local urban culture” (283). Such literary innovations have frequently evolved in response to the challenge of representing urbanity (Gurr “The Literary Representation”). In light of the reversal of perspective, we here argue that these analogies between urban processes and textual strategies not only make these textual procedures highly suggestive in attempts at rendering the city, but may also account for the powerful ways in which “scripts” have continued to shape cityness. Addressing these processes on the basis of a methodology derived from the field of literary and cultural studies will foster a better understanding of the multiple roles that literary and discursive texts have played in the construction and transformation of cities in North America. If we want to move beyond the critical consensus about the socially produced, culturally imagined—indeed scripted—nature of the North American city, the emplacement of Scripting/ Schrift in North American cities deserves more thorough attention. Etymologically speaking, scripts are pieces and systems of writing; they are lexical, alphabetical and technical short-hands and typographies; they are known as part and counterpart, script and rescript; and they are understood as social roles, but also as theatrical and cinematic manuscripts and typescripts, maps and other visual media (OED). A focus on scripting processes permits further insights into literature’s ability to tentatively build scenarios and thereby preview future actions. Attending to literary and textual logics of condensation, inversion and assemblage gives us a better sense of how communities are inscribed or inscribe themselves into a given city, its history, shape, architecture, and political and social structure. It indicates how the built environment may script and predicate human behavior and social interactions. In addition, scripting also relates North American urban spaces to international political, economic and philosophical traditions that curtail and/or propel urbanization. In this way, scripts open a given place to new purposes, facilitating and enforcing change. They confront city dwellers with contending social dynamics, making aspects of the city and urbanity in/accessible to different users. In this capacity, scripts can bring in previously unaddressed audiences while antagonizing the authoritative established “reader” of the city.

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United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision. ST/ESA/SER.A/366. New York: United Nations, 2015. Print. United Nations. World Urbanization Prospects. 1999. Print. van Hulst, Merlijn. “Storytelling, a Model of and a Model for Planning.” Planning Theory 11.3 (2011): 299-318. Print. Voelz, Johannes. Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge. Lebanon: Dartmouth College Press, 2010. Print. Wade, Richard. The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830. 1959. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. Print. Wellershoff, Dieter. Literatur und Lustprinzip. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1973. Print. Whitehead, Mark. Environmental Transformations: A Geography of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge, 2014. Print. Zapf, Hubert. “Literature as Cultural Ecology: Notes Towards a Functional Theory of Imaginative Texts with Examples from American Literature.” Literary History/Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions, Ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL 17 [Research in English and American Literature]. Tübingen: Narr, 2001. 85–99. Print. Zapf, Hubert. Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002. Print. Zapf, Hubert, ed. Kulturökologie und Literatur. Beiträge zu einem transdisziplinären Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. Print.

C OMMENTS i

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Nickerson et al. 29-32. According to the US Census of 2010, 81% of the population lives in urban areas. This scenario does not seem to be unique to the U.S.A. The Canadian census data for 2001 and 2006 render similar results: 80% of the Canadian population lives in cities (cited by Lapointe 1). In the Caribbean and in Latin America urbanites also rule: here 75% of the population was classified as urban in 1999 (see United Nations). For Ed Soja the urban is ubiquitous in postmodern times, but he also finds that the so-called postmetropolis might be a phenomenon that is hard to envision anywhere else but on the U.S. American west coast (1995). For a critical discussion of the ubiquity hypothesis see also Dirksmeier 14. For an

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exemplary presentation of U.S. American cities as both exceptional and ubiquitous see Chakrabarty’s A Country of Cities. As Mark Shiel points out, the film noir that originated in Hollywood and that emerged from the lack of understanding and the unease produced by the immense, sprawling growth of Los Angeles. The concept ‘script/Schrift’ is productively employed in many disciplines that are relevant to our inquiry. For the formative impact of script/Schrift on the production of “connective structures” supporting the formation of cultural memory see Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, esp. 87-122 (our translation); for the social complications of written communication – delay of understanding, social redundancy as well as a proliferation of new social connections, the illusionary presence of the past and the future – see Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 249-91; for the role of texts and writing in social inquiry itself see Latour, Reassembling the Social, 121-28 and Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 10-19. On the concept of “scripts” as used in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence see Schank/Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding; for scripts and cultural models as guides of individual and collective human behavior, see Quinn/Holland, “Culture and Cognition”; for a compelling case study on how cultural scripts and models support or impede action, see Ungar, “Knowledge, Ignorance and the Popular Culture.” Andrew Ross notes that in the U.S. there is an old tradition of regarding “cities as sites of salvation” (grounded in John Winthrop’s famous image of the city upon a hill), a younger tradition of fearing “[t]he infernal Victorian city of industry,” while a still younger tradition seeks “to redeem” people caught in the conundrum of industrial city life “through environmental uplift” and “through planning aimed at decongestion” (30). See Lenger 454-62; Sieverts; Davis. Peter Dirksmeier has reviewed the scholarly debate. According to his summary, recent urban research operates with the consensus that concepts such as “city,” “suburbia” and “country” are no longer adequate to grasp the situation: “Stadt und Land haben sich demnach funktional, sozial und kulturell in einer Weise angenähert, die räumliche Differenzierungen als stabile räumliche Ordnung des Sozialen zum Verschwinden gebracht hat” (11). Dirksmeier contends, though, that, for one thing, the hegemony of cities over the countryside, of urbanity over rurality, is best seen as a consistent feature of at least European history since the Middle Ages. Additionally, he surmises that lifestyles that coherently bring together and accommodate urban and rural elements might be the true hallmark of European modern landscapes (12) and that the theoretical conse-

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quence needs to be a theory of urbanity that replaces the spatial dimension through recourse to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus—redefining urbanity as a change in the hysteresis effect of habitus (17). In their introduction to Rethinking the American City, Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch suggest that Mike Davis’ vision for future urbanity is in part utopian, because it promises an ecological turn that will set up new “well-defined boundaries between city and countryside” (xii). For the discussion of one global economic context of what has been called the peri-urbanization of rural landscapes see Bryceson/Kay/Mooij. vii Lotman points out that “one of the foundations of the semiosphere is its heterogeneity. Sub-systems with variable speeds of cyclic motion are drawn together on a temporal axis” (114). viii These distinctive notions have been juxtaposed most prominently by Richard Wade in his 1959 study The Urban Frontier. His study eloquently reflects the postwar turn to the city of the whole multidiscipline of “American Studies”. The contemporary TV series Deadwood (HBO, 2004-06) seems to play rather wistfully with the postwar, frontier-driven ideas about U.S. American urbanization outlined by Wade. ix For the importance of genre and literary modelling see especially the GRK 1886/1 “Literarische Form: Geschichte und Kultur ästhetischer Modellbildung” at the University of Münster. For the “mechanics” of literary as opposed to discursive texts see Gurr, “Two Romantic Fragments.” For the explanatory power of narrative models of urban complexity see Gurr, “Urban Complexity” and “The Modernist Poetics.” x See also Glomb and Horlacher, passim. However, literary texts frequently do not attempt to solve a problem by imposing an answer—and even if they do, they are often less interesting for the answer they propose than for having asked the question and raised awareness for the problem. xi “Funktionsgeschichte;” for an overview see Gymnich/Nünning; for one influential account, see Fluck. xii See also Zapf 2001 as well as several contributions in Zapf, Kulturökologie und Literatur. xiii Sandercock 25; see also van Hulst, 303 et passim. According to Bieger, a central distinction between literary narratology and the narratology employed in the social sciences can be found in the visionary and temporal thrust attributed to stories. Whereas literary narratology thinks of stories as primarily “restorative,” the social sciences tend to treat stories as profoundly “proactive” (21). Thomas Heise has captured the difference in hierarchical rather than temporal terms. He speaks of a “top down” reading of cities by

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“sociologists and planners” and a “bottom up” writing of cities “by writers who speak about the experience of social and spatial isolation, about the experience of being an object of scrutiny, suspicion, and fear” (6). For our purposes it seems best to keep these competing notions of literature at play and to retain Wellershoff’s notion of the “reduced risk” (57): literary scenario building might be tentative and playful, but it is so consequential, so potentially liberating, precisely because it does not directly risk anything. We owe this reference to Lieven Ameel of Helsinki University. In his presentation “Hooked on the Waterfront: The Zoning of Stories in Jätkäsaari from a Narrative Theory Perspective” at the conference on “Writingplace: Literary Methods in Architectural Research and Design” at TU Delft in November 2013, he mentioned the novel commissioned in the course of redeveloping the former port area Jätkäsaari in Helsinki. This need for good stories is also addressed by Löw and Berking in their discussion of the “intrinsic logic” that is unique to each city. A promising path has been projected in the collection of essays Urban Plots, Organizing Cities, edited by Giovanna Sonda, Claudio Coletta and Francesco Gabbi. This volume pursues a sociological perspective on narratives, however. As de Waal shows, the new social media have even been conceptualized as urban media. See also Butler/Gurr. Johannes Voelz discusses two options available for New American studies scholarship—utter distrust of your material (interpellation) or thorough faith (reification). For the notion of “density” as central to urban discourses, see Nikolai Roskamm’s Dichte: Eine transdisziplinäre Dekonstruktion. See, for instance, Olaf Kaltmeier’s edited volume Selling EthniCity. Condensation is also a prerequisite of the formation and often the clash of ecological vs. industrial interests, physical vs. virtual realities, public vs. private spaces, business vs. labor concerns, work vs. leisure activities, surveillance and oppression vs. civil rights, etc. When Clifford Geertz speaks of “webs of significance,” which are superimposed onto each other and interlaced in complex ways, North American cityscapes are prime examples of the ensuing condensation. National and transnational migration and exchange as well as globalization connect the condensed webs of an individual city to the wider North American, inter-American, and world-wide webs of condensed signification. A focus on condensation reviews North American urbanity through the lens of heterogeneous, complex systems with a myriad of internal interconnections as well as relations to what lies outside these

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systems (like the nation, language, or cultural specificity of the geographic origins of a specific community among the city dwellers). A good example can be found in the mixed media text Exit 43 by Italian American poet Jennifer Scappettone (http://arcadiaproject.net/jenniferscappettone-exit-43/). The format, which places writing and visual imagery into cyberspace, is concerned with illegal, poisonous landfills at a New York junction where Scappattone grew up.

Authors

Bacon, Nick, is a PhD student in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is co-editor of Confronting Urban Legacy: Rediscovering Hartford and New England’s Forgotten Cities (Lexington Books, 2013). Bidlingmaier, Selma Siew Li, wrote her dissertation on the re-habilitative value of reading Chinatowns as lived spaces in Chinese American Literature at the Ruhr-University Bochum. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute researching the influence of Social Darwinism and Eugenics on urban development policies from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Her research interest lies in the “legacies” of these urban policies and their impact on the marginalized poor, as well as the current redressing of Social Darwinism and Eugenics in political, economic and social rhetoric and policies that aim to create a “sanitized” global financial capital. Boesenberg, Eva, teaches North American literature and culture at Humboldt University. Among her research interests are Gender Studies, Critical Race and Critical Whiteness Studies, African American literature and culture, South Asian North American literature, literature and economics, graphic novels, and the cultural politics of sports, particularly basketball. She has published Gender— Voice—Vernacular: The Formation of Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, as well as Money and Gender in the American Novel, 1850-2000, and co-edited American Economies (with Martin Klepper and Reinhard Isensee). Buchenau, Barbara, is Professor of North American Cultural Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her research focuses on colonial and early natio-

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nal literary and cultural history of North America and its spatial dimensions, the politics and poetics of the literature of migration, early modern scholarship and its arts, historical fiction and settler colonialism, religious typology, ethnic and racial stereotyping (sounds, sights, verbal features), and Inter-American studies. Freitag, Kornelia, is the Chair of American Studies at Ruhr-University

Bochum. She has published Cultural Criticism in Women’s Experimental Writing: The Poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe (2006) and has coedited Another Language: Poetic Experiments in Britain and North America (2008) and Modern American Poetry: Points of Access (2013). Her major areas of research are American poetry and cultural and literary theory. Guenther, Faye Chisholm, is a doctoral candidate in English literature at York University in Toronto. She is writing her dissertation on memoirs by Eileen Myles, Samuel R. Delany and David Wojnarowicz. Gurr, Jens Martin, is Chair of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research interests include 16th- to twentieth-century British Literature, contemporary US literature and culture as well as global anglophone fiction. More specifically, in recent years he has published widely in the areas of urban cultural studies, theory and methods of interdisciplinary urban research, urban imaginaries, and the literary modeling of urban complexity. Grünzweig, Walter, is Professor of American Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund University and Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the State University of New York at Binghamton. He specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, transatlantic cultural relations, comparative urban cultures, and international educational exchange. Hegglund, Jon, is Associate Professor of English at Washington State University. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on modernist fiction, cultural geography and ecocriticism. His first book is World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (Oxford UP, 2012), and he is currently working on two projects: an edited collection on modernism and the Anthropocene, and a monograph, “Weird Agencies,” which assesses the role of nonhuman actants in the context of narrative theory and experimental fiction.

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Heise, Thomas, is the author of Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2011) and numerous essays in American Literary History, African American Review, Arizona Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He holds a PhD from New York University and is a professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Kaemmerling, Astrid, is a PhD Candidate at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. She earned both her BA and MA from TU Dortmund University, Germany, double majoring in Art and English. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Walking the Gentrifying Streetscape: Artistic Practice in San Francisco’s Mission District (2000-2015),” investigates the roles of artists and the arts in gentrification processes through an exploration and analysis of urban walking art practices. Mikó, Erika, is an instructor of American Studies at the University of Debrecen in Hungary and a PhD candidate at TU Dortmund University. She is writing her dissertation on representations of New York City in Hungarian travel writing, analyzing texts from the early 1900s and from the communist era. Mogultay, Utku, studied English and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne and the University of Duisburg-Essen and received his MA degree in 2009. In 2010, he joined the international doctoral program “Advanced Research in Urban Systems” at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and between 2012 and 2015 he participated in the research project “Spaces—Communities—Representations: Urban Transformations in the USA” at the RuhrCenter of American Studies. His research interests include nineteenth- to twenty-first-century American literature and culture, literary and cultural theory, urban studies, critical spatial theory, literary geographies, and visual culture. Muschalik, Kathrin, studied History as well as English literature and culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She received her Master’s degree in 2012. The topic of her Master’s thesis was “Ethnic Struggles in Contemporary American Film,” which was based on the assumption that far too little attention had been paid to the cinematic representation of multiculturalism in the USA. Affiliated with Ruhr-University Bochum since 2012, she has been working on her doctoral thesis on the representation of the Rodney King incident and the “L.A. riots” in the reporting of the Los Angeles Times.

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Neumann, Insa, received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the University of Duisburg-Essen. Since joining the research project “Spaces— Communities—Representations: Urban Transformations in the USA” at the RuhrCenter of American Studies in 2012, she has been researching historical developments of German and German American self-representation in urban America, specifically New York City. She is currently working on the final chapters of her PhD project. Her research interests include (transnational) identity construction, immigrant literature and urban studies. Raab, Josef, is Professor of American Literary and Media Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen and Founding President of the International Association of Inter-American Studies. He specializes in ethnicity, borders, national identity, and inter-American issues in literature, film and television. His most recent book is New World Colors: Ethnicity, Belonging, and Difference in the Americas (2014). Sattler, Julia, teaches American Studies at TU Dortmund University. Between 2012 and 2015, she was the Academic Coordinator of the project “Urban Transformations in the USA” out of which this volume emerged. Her overriding research interest in American Studies is based on intergenerational legacies and on the presence of the past in the contemporary United States. Her dissertation focused on practices of narrating interracial families, while her current project— located at the intersection of Urban Planning and American Studies—examines transformation processes in the Ruhr Valley and in Detroit, MI, in dialogue. Scales, Gary, is a PhD Student at Temple University. His research examines the intersection of the built environment and everyday experience in the twentiethcentury American city, and how this influences patterns of suburban consumption. His other interests include spatial theory, material culture studies and digital methods. te Reh, Tazalika M., is a PhD candidate at TU Dortmund University, where she is researching Architecture, Space and the Racial in New York City. Before joining the “Urban Transformations”-program to work on her dissertation, she earned degrees from the Universities of Applied Sciences in Cologne and Bochum and the Arts Academy in Düsseldorf. In 2013, she was Fellow (SSASA), and in 2015 faculty member (GCP) of the Salzburg Global Seminar. In 2014, she conducted research at the Avery Architecture & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University and at the Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg

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Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City. Her work experience incorporates architectural practice, her role as curator and executive assistant to the board of the art foundation Stiftung DKM and its museum in Duisburg, and teaching at TU Dortmund University. Wala, Michael, is Professor of North American History at Ruhr-University Bochum. His main research focus is on transatlantic relations in the nineteenth and twentieth century, foreign relations of the United States, the period of the Early Republic, and questions of identity construction, security studies and intelligence history.