Fifty years of large-scale immigration has brought significant ethnic, racial, and religious diversity to North America and Western Europe, but has also prompted hostile backlashes. In Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity, a distinguished multidisciplinary group of scholars examine whether and how immigrants and their offspring have been included in the prevailing national identity in the societies where they now live and to what extent they remain perpetual foreigners in the eyes of the long-established native-born. What specific social forces in each country account for the barriers immigrants and their children face, and how do anxieties about immigrant integration and national identity differ on the two sides of the Atlantic?
Western European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have witnessed a significant increase in Muslim immigrants, which has given rise to nativist groups that question their belonging. Contributors Thomas Faist and Christian Ulbricht discuss how German politicians have implicitly compared the purported “backward” values of Muslim immigrants with the German idea of Leitkultur, or a society that values civil liberties and human rights, reinforcing the symbolic exclusion of Muslim immigrants. Similarly, Marieke Slootman and Jan Willem Duyvendak find that in the Netherlands, the conception of citizenship has shifted to focus less on political rights and duties and more on cultural norms and values. In this context, Turkish and Moroccan Muslim immigrants face increasing pressure to adopt “Dutch” culture, yet are simultaneously portrayed as having regressive views on gender and sexuality that make them unable to assimilate.
Religion is less of a barrier to immigrants’ inclusion in the United States, where instead undocumented status drives much of the political and social marginalization of immigrants. As Mary C. Waters and Philip Kasinitz note, undocumented immigrants in the United States. are ineligible for the services and freedoms that citizens take for granted and often live in fear of detention and deportation. Yet, as Irene Bloemraad points out, Americans’ conception of national identity expanded to be more inclusive of immigrants and their children with political mobilization and changes in law, institutions, and culture in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Canadians’ views also dramatically expanded in recent decades, with multiculturalism now an important part of their national identity, in contrast to Europeans’ fear that diversity undermines national solidarity.
With immigration to North America and Western Europe a continuing reality, each region will have to confront anti-immigrant sentiments that create barriers for and threaten the inclusion of newcomers. Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity investigates the multifaceted connections among immigration, belonging, and citizenship, and provides new ways of thinking about national identity.
A fascinating deep dive into one city’s urban policy—and the anxiety over immigrants that informs it
The city of Toronto is often held up as a leader in diversity and inclusion. In Fearing the Immigrant, however, Parastou Saberi argues that Toronto’s urban policies are influenced by a territorialized and racialized security agenda—one that parallels the “War on Terror.” Focusing on the figure of the immigrant and so-called immigrant neighborhoods as the targets of urban policy, Saberi offers an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to the politics of racialization and the governing of alterity through space in contemporary cities.
A comprehensive study of urban policymaking in Canada’s largest city from the 1990s to the late 2010s, Fearing the Immigrant uses Toronto as a jumping-off point to understand how the nexus of development, racialization, and security works at the urban and international levels. Saberi situates urban policymaking in Toronto in relation to the dominant policies of international development and public health, counterinsurgency, and humanitarian intervention. Engaging with the genealogies and contemporary developments of major policy techniques involving mapping and policy concepts such as poverty, security, policing, development, empowerment, as well as social determinants of health, equity, and prevention, she scrutinizes the parallel ways these techniques and concepts operate in urban policy and international relations.
Fearing the Immigrant ultimately asserts that the geopolitical fear of the immigrant is central to the formation of urban policy in Toronto. Rather than addressing the root causes of poverty, urban policy as it has been practiced aims to pacify the specter of urban unrest and to secure the production of a neocolonial urban order. As such, this book is an urgent call to reimagine urban policy in the name of equality and social justice.
Film noir remains one of the most enduring legacies of 1940s and ’50s Hollywood. Populated by double-crossing, unsavory characters, this pioneering film style explored a shadow side of American life during a period of tremendous prosperity and optimism. Edward Dimendberg compellingly demonstrates how film noir is preoccupied with modernity—particularly the urban landscape.
The originality of Dimendberg’s approach lies in his examining these films in tandem with historical developments in architecture, city planning, and modern communications systems. He confirms that noir is not simply a reflection of modernity but a virtual continuation of the spaces of the metropolis. He convincingly shows that Hollywood’s dark thrillers of the postwar decades were determined by the same forces that shaped the city itself.
Exploring classic examples of film noir such as The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Naked City alongside many lesser-known works, Dimendberg masterfully interweaves film history and urban history while perceptively analyzing works by Raymond Chandler, Edward Hopper, Siegfried Kracauer, and Henri Lefebvre. A bold intervention in cultural studies and a major contribution to film history, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity will provoke debate by cinema scholars, urban historians, and students of modern culture—and will captivate admirers of a vital period in American cinema.
Harold Washington’s historic and improbable victory over the vaunted Chicago political machine shook up American politics. The election of the enigmatic yet engaging Washington led to his serving five tumultuous years as the city’s first black mayor. He fashioned an uneasy but potent multiracial coalition that today still stands as a model for political change.
In this revised edition of Fire on the Prairie, acclaimed reporter Gary Rivlin chronicles Washington’s legacy—a tale rich in character and intrigue. He reveals the cronyism of Daley’s government and Washington’s rivalry with Jesse Jackson. Rivlin also shows how Washington’s success inspired a young community organizer named Barack Obama to turn to the electoral arena as a vehicle for change. While the story of a single city, , this political biography is anything but parochial.
Between 1875 and 1920, Chicago's homicide rate more than quadrupled, making it the most violent major urban center in the United States--or, in the words of Lincoln Steffens, "first in violence, deepest in dirt." In many ways, however, Chicago became more orderly as it grew. Hundreds of thousands of newcomers poured into the city, yet levels of disorder fell and rates of drunkenness, brawling, and accidental death dropped. But if Chicagoans became less volatile and less impulsive, they also became more homicidal.
Based on an analysis of nearly six thousand homicide cases, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt examines the ways in which industrialization, immigration, poverty, ethnic and racial conflict, and powerful cultural forces reshaped city life and generated soaring levels of lethal violence. Drawing on suicide notes, deathbed declarations, courtroom testimony, and commutation petitions, Jeffrey Adler reveals the pressures fueling murders in turn-of-the-century Chicago. During this era Chicagoans confronted social and cultural pressures powerful enough to trigger surging levels of spouse killing and fatal robberies. Homicide shifted from the swaggering rituals of plebeian masculinity into family life and then into street life.
From rage killers to the "Baby Bandit Quartet," Adler offers a dramatic portrait of Chicago during a period in which the characteristic elements of modern homicide in America emerged.
In most cities today, fire has been reduced to a sporadic and isolated threat. But throughout history the constant risk of fire has left a deep and lasting imprint on almost every dimension of urban society. This volume, the first truly global study of urban conflagration, shows how fire has shaped cities throughout the modern world, from Europe to the imperial colonies, major trade entrepôts, and non-European capitals, right up to such present-day megacities as Lagos and Jakarta. Urban fire may hinder commerce or even spur it; it may break down or reinforce barriers of race, class, and ethnicity; it may serve as a pretext for state violence or provide an opportunity for displays of state benevolence. As this volume demonstrates, the many and varied attempts to master, marginalize, or manipulate fire can turn a natural and human hazard into a highly useful social and political tool.
Joseph considers New York's relation to the water that surrounds and defines it. Her reflections reach back to the city's heyday as a world-class port—a past embodied in a Dutch East India Company cannon recently unearthed from the rubble at the World Trade Center site—and they encompass the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. They suggest that New York's future lies in the reclamation of its great water resources—for artistic creativity, civic engagement, and ecological sustainability.
Drawing on his nearly fifteen years of work in African cities—as an activist, teacher, development worker, researcher, and advisor to ngos and local governments—Simone provides a series of case studies illuminating the provisional networks through which most of Africa’s urban dwellers procure basic goods and services. He examines informal economies and social networks in Pikine, a large suburb of Dakar, Senegal; in Winterveld, a neighborhood on the edge of Pretoria, South Africa; in Douala, Cameroon; and among Africans seeking work in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He contextualizes these particular cases through an analysis of the broad social, economic, and historical conditions that created present-day urban Africa. For the City Yet to Come is a powerful argument that any serious attempt to reinvent African urban centers must acknowledge the particular history of these cities and incorporate the local knowledge reflected in already existing informal urban economic and social systems.
From Improvement to City Planning emphasizes the ways people in nineteenth-century America managed urban growth. Historian Henry Binford shows how efforts to improve space were entwined with the evolution of urban governance (i.e., regulation)—and also influenced by a small group of advantaged families.
Binford looks specifically at Cincinnati, Ohio, then the largest and most important interior city west of the Appalachian Mountains. He shows that it was not just industrialization, but also beliefs about morality, race, health, poverty, and “slum” environments, that demanded an improvement of urban space. As such, movements for public parks and large-scale sanitary engineering in the 1840s and ’50s initiated the beginning of modern city planning. However, there were limitations and consequences to these efforts..
Many Americans believed that remaking city environments could also remake citizens. From Improvement to City Planning examines how the experiences of city living in the early republic prompted city dwellers to think about and shape urban space.
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was once synonymous with steel. But after the factories closed, the city bet its future on a new industry: casino gambling. On the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant, thousands of flashing slot machines and digital bells replaced the fires in the blast furnaces and the shift change whistles of the industrial workplace. From Steel to Slots tells the story of a city struggling to make sense of the ways in which local jobs, landscapes, and identities are transformed by global capitalism.
Postindustrial redevelopment often makes a clean break with a city’s rusted past. In Bethlehem, where the new casino is industrial-themed, the city’s heritage continues to dominate the built environment and infuse everyday experiences. Through the voices of steelworkers, casino dealers, preservationists, immigrants, and executives, Chloe Taft examines the ongoing legacies of corporate presence and urban development in a small city—and their uneven effects.
Today, multinational casino corporations increasingly act as urban planners, promising jobs and new tax revenues to ailing communities. Yet in an industry premised on risk and capital liquidity, short-term gains do not necessarily mean long-term commitments to local needs. While residents often have few cards to play in the face of global capital and private development, Taft argues that the shape economic progress takes is not inevitable, nor must it always look forward. Memories of corporations’ accountability to communities persist, and citizens see alternatives for more equitable futures in the layered landscapes all around them.
From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years.
First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects.
Co-Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Favorite Book of the Year
In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.
“An extraordinary and important new book.”
—Jill Lepore, New Yorker
“Hinton’s book is more than an argument; it is a revelation…There are moments that will make your skin crawl…This is history, but the implications for today are striking. Readers will learn how the militarization of the police that we’ve witnessed in Ferguson and elsewhere had roots in the 1960s.”
—Imani Perry, New York Times Book Review
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