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129 books match the query 'City and town life' and 7 start with u

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Unknown Tongues

Black Women's Political Activism in the Antebellum Era, 1830-1860

Gayle T. Tate

Michigan State University Press, 2003

Unknown Tongues examines the social and economic factors of northern industrialization, social reform, and black nationalism, all of which undergirded black women’s political consciousness during the decades before the American Civil War. The linkages between black women’s roles in the “culture of resistance” in slave communities and their transformations in the urban market economy fueled the development of black women’s political consciousness. As community activists and then as abolitionists, black urban women organized and protested against slavery, racism, sexism, and its attendant ills. Driven by market forces of nascent capitalism, black women created broad- based protest responses to the white power structure. Unknown Tongues explores the material realities that underpinned black women’s political development as well as the transformative stages of their political consciousness and activity.

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Unlearning the City

Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

Swati Chattopadhyay

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern urban theory does not have the language to describe and debate the vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of cities and towns. Swati Chattopadhyay has written a nuanced argument for a new vocabulary of the city in Unlearning the City, proposing a way of analyzing the materiality of the urban that captures the ever-changing element of human experience.

Urban life is intrinsically messy and usually refuses to conform to the rigid views laid down in much of urban studies theory. Chattopadhyay looks at urban life in India with a fresh perspective that incorporates the everyday and the unstructured. As the first to apply the theories of subalternity for an understanding of urban history, Chattopadhyay provides an in-depth study of vehicular art, street cricket, political wall writing, and religious festivities that link the visual and spatial attributes of these popular cultural forms with the imagination and practices of urban life. She contends that these practices have a direct impact on the configuration and knowledge of public space, and the political potential of the people inhabiting cities.

Unlearning the City uses the popular culture of Indian cities to question the dominant conception of urban infrastructure and encourage a conceptual realignment in how the city is seen, discussed, and even experienced.

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Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America

The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life

By Viviane Mahieux

University of Texas Press, 2011

An unstructured genre that blends high aesthetic standards with nonfiction commentary, the journalistic crónica, or chronicle, has played a vital role in Latin American urban life since the nineteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, Viviane Mahieux delivers new testimony on how chroniclers engaged with modernity in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when avant-garde movements transformed writers' and readers' conceptions of literature. Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life examines the work of extraordinary raconteurs Salvador Novo, Cube Bonifant, Roberto Arlt, Alfonsina Storni, and Mário de Andrade, restoring the original newspaper contexts in which their articles first emerged.

Each of these writers guided their readers through a constantly changing cityscape and advised them on matters of cultural taste, using their ties to journalism and their participation in urban practice to share accessible wisdom and establish their role as intellectual arbiters. The intimate ties they developed with their audience fostered a permeable concept of literature that would pave the way for overtly politically engaged chroniclers of the 1960s and 1970s. Providing comparative analysis as well as reflection on the evolution of this important genre, Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America is the first systematic study of the Latin American writers who forged a new reading public in the early twentieth century.

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Urban Encounters

Helen Liggett

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

In words and photographs, reimagining the city as lived space

In contrast to Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, and other European thinkers engaged with the concept of the urban, American intellectuals tend to envision the modern city as a dystopia, their perception of urban life influenced by negative stereotypes and fictional depictions in popular culture. In Urban Encounters, Helen Liggett challenges this fatalism by approaching the city as a vibrant, lived space. Combining a sophisticated critique of the urban with striking, street-level images, Liggett reclaims the human experience of the city.

Liggett’s “encounters” with the urban are sequences of images and text that combine the joy of observing with the pleasure of making connections. For Liggett, this entails recognizing both beauty and danger. Alternately complementing and complicating her text, Liggett’s photographs capture the small details—the gestures, glances, and reflections—that together compose the urban experience. As a whole, Urban Encounters reimagines the city as a site of profound engagement with life.

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