How international oil companies navigated the local, segregated landscape of north Louisiana in the first decades of the twentieth century.
In 1904, prospectors discovered oil in the rural parishes of North Louisiana just outside Shreveport. As rural cotton fields gave way to dense, industrial centers of energy extraction, migrants from across the US—and the world—rushed to take a share of the boom. The resulting boomtowns, most notoriously Oil City, quickly gained a reputation for violence, drinking, and rough living. Meanwhile, North Louisiana’s large Black population endured virulent white supremacy in the oil fields and the courtrooms to earn a piece of the boom, including one Black woman who stood to become the wealthiest oil heiress in America.
In Oil Cities, Henry Wiencek uncovers what life was like amidst the tent cities, saloons, and oil derricks of North Louisiana’s oil boomtowns, tracing the local experiences of migrants, farmers, sex workers, and politicians as they navigated dizzying changes to their communities. This first historical monograph on the region’s dramatic oil boom reveals a contested history, in which the oil industry had to adapt its labor, tools, and investments to meet North Louisiana’s unique economic, social, political, and environmental dynamics.
This timely and important collection of original essays analyzes China’s foremost social cleavage: the rural–urban gap. It is now clear that the Chinese communist revolution, though professing dedication to an egalitarian society, in practice created a rural order akin to serfdom, in which 80 percent of the population was effectively bound to the land. China is still struggling with that legacy. The reforms of 1978 changed basic aspects of economic and social life in China’s villages and cities and altered the nature of the rural-urban relationship. But some important institutions and practices have changed only marginally or not at all, and China is still sharply divided into rural and urban castes with different rights and opportunities in life, resulting in growing social tensions.
The contributors, many of whom conducted extensive fieldwork, examine the historical background of rural–urban relations; the size and trend in the income gap between rural and urban residents in recent years; aspects of inequality apart from income (access to education and medical care, the digital divide, housing quality and location); experiences of discrimination, particularly among urban migrants; and conceptual and policy debates in China regarding the status and treatment of rural residents and urban migrants.
The effects of global processes such as the growth of transnational corporations and investment, the weakening of state sovereignty, increasing poverty, and the privatization of previously public services are described and analyzed in essays by Teresa P. R. Caldeira (São Paulo), Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires), Néstor García Canclini (Mexico City), Farha Ghannam (Cairo), Gyan Prakash (Mumbai), and Yingjin Zhang (Beijing). Considering Johannesburg, the architect Hilton Judin takes on themes addressed by other contributors as well: the relation between the country and the city, and between racial imaginaries and the fear of urban violence. Rahul Mehrotra writes of the transitory, improvisational nature of the Indian bazaar city, while AbdouMaliq Simone sees a new urbanism of fragmentation and risk emerging in Douala, Cameroon. In a broader comparative frame, Okwui Enwezor reflects on the proliferation of biennales of contemporary art in African, Asian, and Latin American cities, and Ackbar Abbas considers the rise of fake commodity production in China. The volume closes with the novelist Orhan Pamuk’s meditation on his native city of Istanbul.
Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Néstor García Canclini, Okwui Enwezor, Farha Ghannam, Andreas Huyssen, Hilton Judin, Rahul Mehrotra, Orhan Pamuk, Gyan Prakash, Beatriz Sarlo, AbdouMaliq Simone, Yingjin Zhang
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