Race and Urban Space in American Culture

Liam Kennedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136598173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

This innovative study looks at the formation of ethnic and racial identities in relation to the development of urban culture. The concept of urban space provides the means of organization for comprehensive illustrations of a series of themes, including white paranoia and urban decline; imagined urban communities; urban crime and justice; the racialized underclass; globalization; and new ethnicities. Race and Urban Space in American Culture focuses on a wide range of contemporary film and literature (including works by African-American, Irish-American, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, and Iranian-American authors), and examines the ways in which representations of urban space define issues of rights, community and citizenship.

1

White Noise

A discourse of urban decline has been centrally embedded in American responses to the city since the mid twentieth century. It provides, in Robert Beauregard’s terms, ‘a spatialfix’ for ‘generalised insecurities and anxieties’ about American society.¹ In the 1980s and 1990s this discourse remained open-ended in relation to the uneven development of urban space, while taking on distinctive ideological investments and meanings. A major function of the discourse in this period was to focus anxieties about the emergence of a new urban order in the context of forces of globalisation and postnationalism which posed new challenges to the securities of ‘American’ identity. New York and Los Angeles, newly nominated as ‘global cities’, drew particular attention as their rapid restructurings provided a spatial fix for debates on citizenship, multiculturalism and race relations. With the cartographies of these cities in many ways defined by the workings of late imperialism they began to appear in cultural representations as emblematic sites of strain and fracture in the symbolic order of the national culture. In this chapter I will examine literary and film representations of these cities which allegorise the discourse of urban decline to (re)produce a paranoid urban imaginary focused on issues of ethno-racial difference in urban space. In the texts centrally examined here, this paranoia signifies a growing visibility of whiteness as a social category and more especially of white male selfhood as a fragile and besieged identity.

Drawing attention to ‘whiteness’ in narrative representation has become a common interest in literary, film and cultural studies in recent years. Crucial to this critical project is the insistence that whiteness neither exists outside of culture nor transcends race but functions as the invisible norm of dominant cultural values and assumptions while concealing its dependency upon racialised others. To examine whiteness as a category of identity formation is no simple matter though. As Richard Dyer notes, whiteness is ‘everything and nothing … [it] both disappears behind and is subsumed into other identities’, with the result that ‘white domination is then hard to grasp in terms of the characteristics and practices of white people’.² One way we can begin to particularise recognitions of American whiteness is to place it in the context of the peculiar conditions of the United Sates as an imperial culture – conditions which very much influence the texts I will shortly examine.

Imperialism is commonly disavowed in discourses of American identity (it is what others do abroad) yet remains a crucially defining feature of American history, stretching from the conquest of the New World to the creation of the New World Order. Recent studies have challenged this common disavowal to argue that the United States is an imperial nation in which domestic cultures and mythologies have been, and still are, shaped by the global workings of empire building. ‘Imperialism as a political or economic process’, Amy Kaplan argues, ‘is inseparable from the social relations and cultural discourses of race, gender, ethnicity, and class at home’.³ That there is little common acknowledgement of such interconnections is not surprising if we consider that they exist within the virtually invisible American imperium of ‘Empire as a way of life’, a naturalised system of meanings and values.⁴ This invisibility of empire, the result of hegemonic imperial relations, has strong historical and imaginary correlations with the invisibility of whiteness. More particularly, it has long worked to secure the white male’s privileged role of universal subject – at once central and invisible – while displacing questions of race onto others. This displacement is also a form of dependency, for the historical formation of imperial white manhood has required a self-disciplining mastery of the other. In Eric Lott’s words,

the domination of international others has depended on mastering the other at home – and in oneself: an internal colonisation whose achievement is fragile at best and which is often exceeded or threatened by the gender and racial arrangements on which it depends.⁵

Lott is right to suggest that this internal colonisation is rarely stable, and I believe that the very public emergence of specifically white male anxieties and anger in the United States in recent years reveals the workings of the imperial unconscious of white American manhood. Here, I am particularly concerned to examine how issues of white male (self-)mastery are mediated in paranoid responses to racialised urban spaces.⁶

Almost forty years ago Lewis Mumford, in The City in History, commented upon what he perceived as ‘the intensified struggle within’ urban culture, suggesting that urban life encourages a ‘paranoid psychal structure’; the city, he observed, is ‘the container of disruptive internal forces, directed towards ceaseless destruction and extermination’.⁷ Mumford’s vision of the psychodrama of the city, in which chaotic feelings of fear and anxiety signify a collectivised paranoia, has had no clear influence on mainstream urban studies in the United States. However, ideas of urban paranoia have found a fresh resonance in the work of American analysts of postmodern urbanism, most notably in studies of what is often described as the privatisation of public space. As we have already seen, Mike Davis provides an influential example in his study City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (1990) where he argues that ‘underlying relations of repression, surveillance and exclusion … characterize the fraemented, paranoid spatiality towards which Los Angeles seems to aspire’. For Davis, this paranoid spatiality is fuelled ‘imaginary dangers’ conjured by urban elites and by ‘the neo-military syntax of contemporary architecture’.⁸

What I particularly want to draw out of Davis’ analysis and expand upon in my study of literature and film is his concept of ‘paranoid spatiality’. While Davis uses it to highlight elements of fear and prejudice in spatial policing and planning he pays relatively little attention to the subjectivity of desires, anxieties and repressions that paranoid spatiality can signify. While there is considerable psychoanalytical debate over the sources and pathogenesis of paranoia as a subjective condition, common elements of Freudian and post-Freudian thought draw attention to the breakdown of subject-object boundaries, the fragmentation or decentring of the self, the concomitant loss of an illusory sense of transcendence, and the projection of aggression and subsequent regarding of that projection as an external threat. In such views normative imaginary relations – of self and other, of the familiar and the unfamiliar – break down, threatening the unity and integrity of the subject.⁹ Though imaginary, these distinctly spatialised relations are also manifested in the positioning of the human body. Elisabeth Grosz observes:

It is our positioning within space, both as the point of perspectival access to space, and also as an object for others in space, that gives the subject a coherent identity…. The subject’s relation to its own body provides it with basic spatial concepts by which it can reflect on its own position. Form and size, direction, centredness (centricity), location, dimension and orientation are derived from perceptual relations. These are not conceptual impositions on space, but our ways of living as bodies in space.¹⁰

The paranoid dilemma of dislocation (mental and corporeal) within space is a key trope in the texts I now turn to – it is also racialised as a dilemma of white male selfhood.

‘IT’S THE THIRD WORLD DOWN THERE’: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

Remarking upon the uneven and inequitable redevelopment of New York in the mid 1980s, Marshall Berman concluded that it marked a culmination of ‘the long-term transformation of New York into a place where capital from anywhere in the world is instantly at home, while everybody without capital is increasingly out of place’.¹¹ Berman was not alone at this point in railing at the impending ‘urbicide’ of the city, but there was precious little dialogic give and take between voices on the political left, those of developers and their friend Mayor Koch, and the vacillating liberal expressions of the New York Times. At the very least all were aware that New York was changing fast and that one product was intensified ethnic, racial and class animus. Whereas Berman and others wanted to harness and politically channel dissent, Koch and friends were keen to simultaneously ignore it and heavily police it, while the Times worried about ‘the fragmentation of New York City into an urban vision of Yugoslavia’.¹² New tribalisations stimulated new passions and even events of violent horror in the mid to late 1980s. From Bernard Goetz’s shooting of four black teenagers on a subway train in 1984, to the cases of ‘wilding’ in Central Park in 1989, fear and division seemed to be the proving ground of New York’s new urbanism. Such ‘flash cases’, as Wesley Brown noted (referring in particular to the Goetz case) ‘touched every nerve where safety and menace intertwine with our conflicting emotions about race’.¹³ In part taking his cue from such cases, but also from many other unsettling changes in the imperial city, one author decided New York in the mid 1980s was a story begging to be told. Step forward Tom Wolfe, who, with no noticeable modesty, believed he was the writer best suited to the job. The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987.¹⁴

In his essay ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel’, published in Harper’s Magazine in 1989, Wolfe tells us that he very deliberately conceived Bonfire as: a novel of the city in the sense that Balzac and Zola had written of Paris and Dickens and Thackeray had written novels of London, with the city always in the foreground, exerting its relentless pressure on the souls of its inhabitants.¹⁵

In detailing his novel’s conception Wolfe uses the essay as a platform to debunk postmodern fiction in favour of social realism. He confides:

To me the idea of writing a novel about this astonishing metropolis, a big novel, cramming as much of New York City between covers as you could, was the most tempting, the most challenging, and the most obvious idea an American writer could possibly have. (p. 45)

He professes his surprise that contemporary writers had no interest in such a challenge, preferring to flee the social terrain for private and esoteric exercises in formal reflexivity. He dismisses the work of two generations of American writers, accusing them of having lost the will and nerve to ‘wrestle the beast’ (p. 56) of social reality. Fusing this willingness to document and report with the ‘freedom of fiction’(p. 56) to condense and dramatise produces Wolfe’s recipe for the social realism which the age demands.

The past three decades have been decades of tremendous and at times convulsive social change, especially in large cities, and the tide of the fourth great wave of immigration has made the picture seem all the more chaotic, random and discontinuous, to use the literary clichés of the recent past. The economy with which realistic fiction can bring the many currents of a city together in a single, fairly simple story was something that I eventually found exhilarating, (p. 56)

This picture of urban change, he argues, is not ‘incomprehensible’(p. 52) to the writer willing to engage its realities.

As literary criticism Wolfe’s essay is a brilliant example of muck-raking, grandstanding journalism. Neither his critique of postmodernist writing nor his wilful ignorance of continued traditions of urban realism can stand up to close analysis. As a rationale of his aims and ambitions in writing his ‘big novel’ of New York City, on the other hand, it is an intriguing portrait of an author’s working assumptions. It underscores his faith not only in ‘a highly detailed realism based on reporting’ (p. 56) but in the totalising, encompassing properties of social realist narrative. It is this totalising perspective, enhanced by his satirical approach to his subject matter, which guides his assumption that realism can provide a necessary comprehension of the urban totality at a time of increasing fragmentation and polarisation in urban social relations. This effort to totalise remains important despite Wolfe’s quite conspicuous failure to bring ‘the many currents of a city together’ in his novel. We might argue that this failure is evident enough at a documentary level – there is no mention of homelessness, for example – but more importantly it is evident in the hierarchy of voices and values his narrative constructs. Far from representing the diverse social realities of a polyglot metropolis he constructs a narrative of two cities – represented by the black Bronx and white Wall Street/Park Avenue – and focalises all the action through the consciousness of white protagonists. Such evident failings, however, must be set against Wolfe’s undaunted faith in a totalising realist narrative and we need to ask: what drives this need to totalise (beyond cockeyed literary criticism) and what comprehension of the city does its failure leave us with? With these questions in mind, I want to interrogate Wolfe’s realist aesthetic and satirical perspective to consider how Bonfire’s narrative of urban decline functions to both illuminate and gloss postnational divisions in American (urban) society.

Bonfire begins with a prologue in which the white Mayor of New York City is addressing a black audience in Harlem. As demonstrators heckle and disrupt the meeting, the Mayor, panicked and angry, thinks of rich white New Yorkers watching on television:

Do you really think this is your city any longer? Open your eyes! The greatest city of the twentieth century! Do you think money will keep it yours?

Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It’s the Third World down there! Puerto Ricans, West Indians, Haitians, Dominicans, Cubans, Colombians, Hondurans, Koreans, Chinese, Thais, Vietnamese, Ecuadorians, Panamanians, Filipinos, Albanians, Senegalese, and Afro-Americans! Go visit the frontiers, you gutless wonders! Morningside Heights, St. Nicholas Park, Washington Heights, Fort Tyron – porque pagar mas! The Bronx – the Bronx is finished for you! …

And you, you Wasp charity-bailers sitting on your mounds of inherited money up in your co-ops … And you German-Jewish financiers who have finally made it into the same buildings … do you really think you’re insulated from the Third World? (pp. 13–14)

This passage is clearly intended by Wolfe to establish the symbolic geography of a city in which ‘the fourth great wave of immigrants … is now pouring in’ and challenging established structures of political and economic power. He positions New York at a point of monumental social change, but also suggests that this change is not understood by white New Yorkers. The Mayor’s thoughts may be ‘paranoid’(p. 14) but they are rhetorically const...