A recent post on the suburbs closed with the observation that there is an important "other" social space in the United States beyond the categories of urban, rural, and suburban. These are the small cities throughout the United States where a significant number of people come to maturity and develop their families and careers. I speculated that perhaps there is a distinctive sociology associated with these lesser urban places. Here I will look into this question a bit more fully.
There are about 275 cities in the US with populations 100,000 or larger (Wikipedia link). 201 of these cities are small, with populations between 100,000 and 250,000. There are 30.3 million people living in these cities -- about 10% of the US population. A certain number of these cities fall within the metropolitan areas of larger cities, but a significant number are at least 50 miles from a major city.
Here is a map of 200 cities with populations between 100,000 and 250,000:
Google Maps limits the number of objects that can be placed on a map to 200 items, so it isn't possible to overlay these maps using Google Maps. Google Earth does not have this limitation, and all these points are included on the Google Earth version of the map. Here is what the overlay looks like:
And here is a map of the Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the US in 1999. Wikipedia provides an up-to-date list of the MSAs in the US (link). (Many of the small cities actually constitute an MSA of their own; so determining whether a small city is "metropolitan" really involves the question of whether the place falls within one of the top 25-50 MSAs by population.)
The group of cities I'm interested in here is a subset of the cities on the first map: those that are more than 50 miles from one of the top 25 cities on the second map. This still leaves well over 100 cities in the United States with a couple of interesting characteristics: they are relatively small, so they can be expected to lack a number of higher-level functions and industries; and they are relatively isolated from other larger cities, so their populations are extensively dependent on the resources of the city itself for employment, social services, entertainment, consumption, education, etc.
So the takeaway question here is this: what is life like in Billings MT, Topeka KS, Norman OK, Pueblo CO, Springfield IL, Knoxville TN, Cary NC, Green Bay WI, Grand Rapids MI, Allentown PA, Shreveport LA, and Killeen TX? What is it like to grow up in these places? Where do young people go for post-secondary education? What percentage of young people leave these places permanently in the course of their careers? Where do the elected officials in these places come from? How are these cities doing, from the perspective of unemployment, neighborhood and business district decline, and social problems?
Further, we can ask whether there are any structural features in common that imply that these places are more similar to each other than they are to larger cities or smaller towns. Are issues of immigration, race relations, drug use, teen pregnancy, or high school dropout rates different in these places?
Finally, we can ask whether growing up in these places gives rise to a specific mentality. Do those of us who grew up in small cities like these -- Peoria, Rock Island, Springfield -- have a different set of values, a different way of looking at the world, or perhaps different ways of relating to people in ordinary social life? Or are regional differences (south, midwest, Pacific Coast) more of a determinant of one's mentality?
(I've placed the lists of cities and MSAs I've used here as spreadsheets at Google Docs; link, link. Both lists come from Wikipedia entries on US Cities and Metropolitan Statistical Areas.)
A recent post on the suburbs closed with the observation that there is an important "other" social space in the United States beyond the categories of urban, rural, and suburban. These are the small cities throughout the United States where a significant number of people come to maturity and develop their families and careers. I speculated that perhaps there is a distinctive sociology associated with these lesser urban places. Here I will look into this question a bit more fully.
There are about 275 cities in the US with populations 100,000 or larger (Wikipedia link). 201 of these cities are small, with populations between 100,000 and 250,000. There are 30.3 million people living in these cities -- about 10% of the US population. A certain number of these cities fall within the metropolitan areas of larger cities, but a significant number are at least 50 miles from a major city.
Here is a map of 200 cities with populations between 100,000 and 250,000:
Google Maps limits the number of objects that can be placed on a map to 200 items, so it isn't possible to overlay these maps using Google Maps. Google Earth does not have this limitation, and all these points are included on the Google Earth version of the map. Here is what the overlay looks like:
And here is a map of the Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the US in 1999. Wikipedia provides an up-to-date list of the MSAs in the US (link). (Many of the small cities actually constitute an MSA of their own; so determining whether a small city is "metropolitan" really involves the question of whether the place falls within one of the top 25-50 MSAs by population.)
The group of cities I'm interested in here is a subset of the cities on the first map: those that are more than 50 miles from one of the top 25 cities on the second map. This still leaves well over 100 cities in the United States with a couple of interesting characteristics: they are relatively small, so they can be expected to lack a number of higher-level functions and industries; and they are relatively isolated from other larger cities, so their populations are extensively dependent on the resources of the city itself for employment, social services, entertainment, consumption, education, etc.
So the takeaway question here is this: what is life like in Billings MT, Topeka KS, Norman OK, Pueblo CO, Springfield IL, Knoxville TN, Cary NC, Green Bay WI, Grand Rapids MI, Allentown PA, Shreveport LA, and Killeen TX? What is it like to grow up in these places? Where do young people go for post-secondary education? What percentage of young people leave these places permanently in the course of their careers? Where do the elected officials in these places come from? How are these cities doing, from the perspective of unemployment, neighborhood and business district decline, and social problems?
Further, we can ask whether there are any structural features in common that imply that these places are more similar to each other than they are to larger cities or smaller towns. Are issues of immigration, race relations, drug use, teen pregnancy, or high school dropout rates different in these places?
Finally, we can ask whether growing up in these places gives rise to a specific mentality. Do those of us who grew up in small cities like these -- Peoria, Rock Island, Springfield -- have a different set of values, a different way of looking at the world, or perhaps different ways of relating to people in ordinary social life? Or are regional differences (south, midwest, Pacific Coast) more of a determinant of one's mentality?
(I've placed the lists of cities and MSAs I've used here as spreadsheets at Google Docs; link, link. Both lists come from Wikipedia entries on US Cities and Metropolitan Statistical Areas.)
A recent post on the suburbs closed with the observation that there is an important "other" social space in the United States beyond the categories of urban, rural, and suburban. These are the small cities throughout the United States where a significant number of people come to maturity and develop their families and careers. I speculated that perhaps there is a distinctive sociology associated with these lesser urban places. Here I will look into this question a bit more fully.
There are about 275 cities in the US with populations 100,000 or larger (Wikipedia link). 201 of these cities are small, with populations between 100,000 and 250,000. There are 30.3 million people living in these cities -- about 10% of the US population. A certain number of these cities fall within the metropolitan areas of larger cities, but a significant number are at least 50 miles from a major city.
Here is a map of 200 cities with populations between 100,000 and 250,000:
Google Maps limits the number of objects that can be placed on a map to 200 items, so it isn't possible to overlay these maps using Google Maps. Google Earth does not have this limitation, and all these points are included on the Google Earth version of the map. Here is what the overlay looks like:
And here is a map of the Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the US in 1999. Wikipedia provides an up-to-date list of the MSAs in the US (link). (Many of the small cities actually constitute an MSA of their own; so determining whether a small city is "metropolitan" really involves the question of whether the place falls within one of the top 25-50 MSAs by population.)
The group of cities I'm interested in here is a subset of the cities on the first map: those that are more than 50 miles from one of the top 25 cities on the second map. This still leaves well over 100 cities in the United States with a couple of interesting characteristics: they are relatively small, so they can be expected to lack a number of higher-level functions and industries; and they are relatively isolated from other larger cities, so their populations are extensively dependent on the resources of the city itself for employment, social services, entertainment, consumption, education, etc.
So the takeaway question here is this: what is life like in Billings MT, Topeka KS, Norman OK, Pueblo CO, Springfield IL, Knoxville TN, Cary NC, Green Bay WI, Grand Rapids MI, Allentown PA, Shreveport LA, and Killeen TX? What is it like to grow up in these places? Where do young people go for post-secondary education? What percentage of young people leave these places permanently in the course of their careers? Where do the elected officials in these places come from? How are these cities doing, from the perspective of unemployment, neighborhood and business district decline, and social problems?
Further, we can ask whether there are any structural features in common that imply that these places are more similar to each other than they are to larger cities or smaller towns. Are issues of immigration, race relations, drug use, teen pregnancy, or high school dropout rates different in these places?
Finally, we can ask whether growing up in these places gives rise to a specific mentality. Do those of us who grew up in small cities like these -- Peoria, Rock Island, Springfield -- have a different set of values, a different way of looking at the world, or perhaps different ways of relating to people in ordinary social life? Or are regional differences (south, midwest, Pacific Coast) more of a determinant of one's mentality?
(I've placed the lists of cities and MSAs I've used here as spreadsheets at Google Docs; link, link. Both lists come from Wikipedia entries on US Cities and Metropolitan Statistical Areas.)
There has been lots of work on urban history, and rural life has come in for its own specialized study for almost two centuries as well. But what about the suburbs? Is there anything distinctive about suburban life in the United States that suggests that it needs its own sociology and history? Kevin Kruse and Tom Sugrue think so, and their volume, The New Suburban History (Historical Studies of Urban America), makes the case. Kruse and Sugrue think that this history is actually crucial to understanding many things about the United States since the 1950s.
In the still-developing history of the postwar United States, suburbs belong at center stage. The rise and dominance of suburbia in America after the Second World War is inescapable. In 1950, a quarter of all Americans lived in suburbs; in 1960, a full third; and by 1990, a solid majority. (1)
This question divides naturally into two tracks. First, has there been a distinctive sociology of suburban life that needs to be tracked? And second, does this social-demographic fact about post-war America have important consequences for larger issues -- electoral politics, race, education, cultural homogenization, and economic competitiveness? Kruse and Sugrue think that suburbanization has implications for each of these topics, and the volume makes the case.
The subject of suburban history isn't a new one. But what is new about the approach taken by the contributors is the fact that they treat the suburbs as part of a system. They treat regions as metropolitan systems including inner cities and multiple suburban places.
[The contributors] take a broader metropolitan perspective, paying attention to the place of suburbs in political and economic relationship with central cities, competing suburbs, and their regions as a whole. (6)
Another distinctive part of their approach is that they look at suburbanization as chiefly a long-running political process. It was the result of many layers of federal, state, and local public policies. Here is how David Freund puts it in his essay:
The modern American suburb is heavily indebted to the federal government. For decades writers have chronicled this debt, documenting how state policy fueled the rapid suburban growth that has so decisively shaped U.S. politics and culture since World War II. ... Meanwhile the nation's cities, and especially the minority populations concentrated within them, were left behind. (11-12)
And it led to a powerful new set of political dynamics of competition.
The history of suburbanization and its consequences is, in large part, a question of power. (6)
In fact, the editors point out that a number of key electoral issues in the past half century have emerged out of the conflicts of interest that arose out of the shift of population to the suburbs and competition between suburban communities -- for example, the anti-tax movement that originated in California. (Robert Self analyzes this dynamic in his contribution, "Prelude to the Tax Revolt.")
Arnold Hirsch picks up the issue of segregation in his essay.
The cumulative effect of federal housing policies ... was to produce a federally sponsored social centrifuge that not only separated black from white but increasingly linked the latter to placement on the economically dynamic fringe as opposed to the crumbling core. (35-36)
It is also interesting to understand in hindsight that these implications of federal housing policy were fairly clearly understood on both sides -- by advocates of a radicalized housing policy and by advocates for the civil rights of African Americans. Hirsch summarizes the prescient views of George Nesbitt:
In 1952, Racial Relations Service officer George B. Nesbitt addressed the meeting of the National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials and warned that the programs then being implemented under the rubric of urban redevelopment would establish the spatial and psychological framework within which the civil rights struggle would take place in "decades to come". The racial implications of the program were awesome and could not be avoided. (52)
Kruse and Sugrue and most of the contributors to the volume emphasize the range of variation that has existed in American suburbs. The racial and class homogeneity that earlier historians have highlighted has a realistic core -- Federal housing policies certainly contributed to de facto segregation across metropolitan regions -- but the editors note that there were a fair number of embedded clusters of minority residents and low-income workers as suburbs developed. And these facts of race and class diversity -- and sometimes conflict -- have had large consequences.
Detroit and its suburbs provide an almost pure case for the processes described in the volume. White flight beginning in the 1950s, the provision of county and municipal governments, and a very strong separation between Oakland County, Wayne County, and the city of Detroit illustrate many of the social and economic dynamics that are described in the volume. This has left a legacy of fragmented governance where it is very difficult to achieve anything like a shared regional perspective on problems that cross over the whole region. The fate of unified mass transit (which still doesn't exist in the region) and the bitter arguments among governments over the fate of Cobo Hall point to the failure of regionalism to date and the sub-par outcomes that are the result for almost all the 4.5 million people who live in the metropolitan region. Tom Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton Studies in American Politics)does a masterful job of telling the story of how we got here.
Kruse and Sugrue and the contributors to the volume succeed in establishing the importance of suburban history within American social development and public policy change, and they do a good job of drilling down into the policy choices that were made at all levels leading to this course of development in the U. S. They also demonstrate how the politics and sociology of race relations played an essential role in this history. What the volume doesn't even try to do is to get at the sociological dynamics that this form of residence, work, and socialization created. So plainly there is still a lot to do in the field by sociologists and ethnographers to capture the suburban experience.
(It is interesting to consider that there is a significant slice of the American population who live in places that are neither urban, suburban, nor rural. These are people who live in towns and small cities -- population 50,000 to 250,000. This is small-city America -- Peoria, Youngstown, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Orlando. These places often have many of the same challenges as major cities, without the dynamism and opportunity that are part of the scene in Chicago, Miami, Seattle, or New York. It would be very interesting to see data on things like social and geographical mobility, innovative business ideas, and average educational levels for places like these. Richard Florida has made the case for large cities and their inherent dynamism; do any of these effects extend down the scale to Peoria or Syracuse? Take Peoria, Rockford, and Chicago -- what does a detailed history of Illinois electoral politics and public policy tell us about the relations of competition, cooperation, and dominance that these three cities demonstrate over time?)
There has been lots of work on urban history, and rural life has come in for its own specialized study for almost two centuries as well. But what about the suburbs? Is there anything distinctive about suburban life in the United States that suggests that it needs its own sociology and history? Kevin Kruse and Tom Sugrue think so, and their volume, The New Suburban History (Historical Studies of Urban America), makes the case. Kruse and Sugrue think that this history is actually crucial to understanding many things about the United States since the 1950s.
In the still-developing history of the postwar United States, suburbs belong at center stage. The rise and dominance of suburbia in America after the Second World War is inescapable. In 1950, a quarter of all Americans lived in suburbs; in 1960, a full third; and by 1990, a solid majority. (1)
This question divides naturally into two tracks. First, has there been a distinctive sociology of suburban life that needs to be tracked? And second, does this social-demographic fact about post-war America have important consequences for larger issues -- electoral politics, race, education, cultural homogenization, and economic competitiveness? Kruse and Sugrue think that suburbanization has implications for each of these topics, and the volume makes the case.
The subject of suburban history isn't a new one. But what is new about the approach taken by the contributors is the fact that they treat the suburbs as part of a system. They treat regions as metropolitan systems including inner cities and multiple suburban places.
[The contributors] take a broader metropolitan perspective, paying attention to the place of suburbs in political and economic relationship with central cities, competing suburbs, and their regions as a whole. (6)
Another distinctive part of their approach is that they look at suburbanization as chiefly a long-running political process. It was the result of many layers of federal, state, and local public policies. Here is how David Freund puts it in his essay:
The modern American suburb is heavily indebted to the federal government. For decades writers have chronicled this debt, documenting how state policy fueled the rapid suburban growth that has so decisively shaped U.S. politics and culture since World War II. ... Meanwhile the nation's cities, and especially the minority populations concentrated within them, were left behind. (11-12)
And it led to a powerful new set of political dynamics of competition.
The history of suburbanization and its consequences is, in large part, a question of power. (6)
In fact, the editors point out that a number of key electoral issues in the past half century have emerged out of the conflicts of interest that arose out of the shift of population to the suburbs and competition between suburban communities -- for example, the anti-tax movement that originated in California. (Robert Self analyzes this dynamic in his contribution, "Prelude to the Tax Revolt.")
Arnold Hirsch picks up the issue of segregation in his essay.
The cumulative effect of federal housing policies ... was to produce a federally sponsored social centrifuge that not only separated black from white but increasingly linked the latter to placement on the economically dynamic fringe as opposed to the crumbling core. (35-36)
It is also interesting to understand in hindsight that these implications of federal housing policy were fairly clearly understood on both sides -- by advocates of a radicalized housing policy and by advocates for the civil rights of African Americans. Hirsch summarizes the prescient views of George Nesbitt:
In 1952, Racial Relations Service officer George B. Nesbitt addressed the meeting of the National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials and warned that the programs then being implemented under the rubric of urban redevelopment would establish the spatial and psychological framework within which the civil rights struggle would take place in "decades to come". The racial implications of the program were awesome and could not be avoided. (52)
Kruse and Sugrue and most of the contributors to the volume emphasize the range of variation that has existed in American suburbs. The racial and class homogeneity that earlier historians have highlighted has a realistic core -- Federal housing policies certainly contributed to de facto segregation across metropolitan regions -- but the editors note that there were a fair number of embedded clusters of minority residents and low-income workers as suburbs developed. And these facts of race and class diversity -- and sometimes conflict -- have had large consequences.
Detroit and its suburbs provide an almost pure case for the processes described in the volume. White flight beginning in the 1950s, the provision of county and municipal governments, and a very strong separation between Oakland County, Wayne County, and the city of Detroit illustrate many of the social and economic dynamics that are described in the volume. This has left a legacy of fragmented governance where it is very difficult to achieve anything like a shared regional perspective on problems that cross over the whole region. The fate of unified mass transit (which still doesn't exist in the region) and the bitter arguments among governments over the fate of Cobo Hall point to the failure of regionalism to date and the sub-par outcomes that are the result for almost all the 4.5 million people who live in the metropolitan region. Tom Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton Studies in American Politics)does a masterful job of telling the story of how we got here.
Kruse and Sugrue and the contributors to the volume succeed in establishing the importance of suburban history within American social development and public policy change, and they do a good job of drilling down into the policy choices that were made at all levels leading to this course of development in the U. S. They also demonstrate how the politics and sociology of race relations played an essential role in this history. What the volume doesn't even try to do is to get at the sociological dynamics that this form of residence, work, and socialization created. So plainly there is still a lot to do in the field by sociologists and ethnographers to capture the suburban experience.
(It is interesting to consider that there is a significant slice of the American population who live in places that are neither urban, suburban, nor rural. These are people who live in towns and small cities -- population 50,000 to 250,000. This is small-city America -- Peoria, Youngstown, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Orlando. These places often have many of the same challenges as major cities, without the dynamism and opportunity that are part of the scene in Chicago, Miami, Seattle, or New York. It would be very interesting to see data on things like social and geographical mobility, innovative business ideas, and average educational levels for places like these. Richard Florida has made the case for large cities and their inherent dynamism; do any of these effects extend down the scale to Peoria or Syracuse? Take Peoria, Rockford, and Chicago -- what does a detailed history of Illinois electoral politics and public policy tell us about the relations of competition, cooperation, and dominance that these three cities demonstrate over time?)
There has been lots of work on urban history, and rural life has come in for its own specialized study for almost two centuries as well. But what about the suburbs? Is there anything distinctive about suburban life in the United States that suggests that it needs its own sociology and history? Kevin Kruse and Tom Sugrue think so, and their volume, The New Suburban History (Historical Studies of Urban America), makes the case. Kruse and Sugrue think that this history is actually crucial to understanding many things about the United States since the 1950s.
In the still-developing history of the postwar United States, suburbs belong at center stage. The rise and dominance of suburbia in America after the Second World War is inescapable. In 1950, a quarter of all Americans lived in suburbs; in 1960, a full third; and by 1990, a solid majority. (1)
This question divides naturally into two tracks. First, has there been a distinctive sociology of suburban life that needs to be tracked? And second, does this social-demographic fact about post-war America have important consequences for larger issues -- electoral politics, race, education, cultural homogenization, and economic competitiveness? Kruse and Sugrue think that suburbanization has implications for each of these topics, and the volume makes the case.
The subject of suburban history isn't a new one. But what is new about the approach taken by the contributors is the fact that they treat the suburbs as part of a system. They treat regions as metropolitan systems including inner cities and multiple suburban places.
[The contributors] take a broader metropolitan perspective, paying attention to the place of suburbs in political and economic relationship with central cities, competing suburbs, and their regions as a whole. (6)
Another distinctive part of their approach is that they look at suburbanization as chiefly a long-running political process. It was the result of many layers of federal, state, and local public policies. Here is how David Freund puts it in his essay:
The modern American suburb is heavily indebted to the federal government. For decades writers have chronicled this debt, documenting how state policy fueled the rapid suburban growth that has so decisively shaped U.S. politics and culture since World War II. ... Meanwhile the nation's cities, and especially the minority populations concentrated within them, were left behind. (11-12)
And it led to a powerful new set of political dynamics of competition.
The history of suburbanization and its consequences is, in large part, a question of power. (6)
In fact, the editors point out that a number of key electoral issues in the past half century have emerged out of the conflicts of interest that arose out of the shift of population to the suburbs and competition between suburban communities -- for example, the anti-tax movement that originated in California. (Robert Self analyzes this dynamic in his contribution, "Prelude to the Tax Revolt.")
Arnold Hirsch picks up the issue of segregation in his essay.
The cumulative effect of federal housing policies ... was to produce a federally sponsored social centrifuge that not only separated black from white but increasingly linked the latter to placement on the economically dynamic fringe as opposed to the crumbling core. (35-36)
It is also interesting to understand in hindsight that these implications of federal housing policy were fairly clearly understood on both sides -- by advocates of a radicalized housing policy and by advocates for the civil rights of African Americans. Hirsch summarizes the prescient views of George Nesbitt:
In 1952, Racial Relations Service officer George B. Nesbitt addressed the meeting of the National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials and warned that the programs then being implemented under the rubric of urban redevelopment would establish the spatial and psychological framework within which the civil rights struggle would take place in "decades to come". The racial implications of the program were awesome and could not be avoided. (52)
Kruse and Sugrue and most of the contributors to the volume emphasize the range of variation that has existed in American suburbs. The racial and class homogeneity that earlier historians have highlighted has a realistic core -- Federal housing policies certainly contributed to de facto segregation across metropolitan regions -- but the editors note that there were a fair number of embedded clusters of minority residents and low-income workers as suburbs developed. And these facts of race and class diversity -- and sometimes conflict -- have had large consequences.
Detroit and its suburbs provide an almost pure case for the processes described in the volume. White flight beginning in the 1950s, the provision of county and municipal governments, and a very strong separation between Oakland County, Wayne County, and the city of Detroit illustrate many of the social and economic dynamics that are described in the volume. This has left a legacy of fragmented governance where it is very difficult to achieve anything like a shared regional perspective on problems that cross over the whole region. The fate of unified mass transit (which still doesn't exist in the region) and the bitter arguments among governments over the fate of Cobo Hall point to the failure of regionalism to date and the sub-par outcomes that are the result for almost all the 4.5 million people who live in the metropolitan region. Tom Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton Studies in American Politics)does a masterful job of telling the story of how we got here.
Kruse and Sugrue and the contributors to the volume succeed in establishing the importance of suburban history within American social development and public policy change, and they do a good job of drilling down into the policy choices that were made at all levels leading to this course of development in the U. S. They also demonstrate how the politics and sociology of race relations played an essential role in this history. What the volume doesn't even try to do is to get at the sociological dynamics that this form of residence, work, and socialization created. So plainly there is still a lot to do in the field by sociologists and ethnographers to capture the suburban experience.
(It is interesting to consider that there is a significant slice of the American population who live in places that are neither urban, suburban, nor rural. These are people who live in towns and small cities -- population 50,000 to 250,000. This is small-city America -- Peoria, Youngstown, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Orlando. These places often have many of the same challenges as major cities, without the dynamism and opportunity that are part of the scene in Chicago, Miami, Seattle, or New York. It would be very interesting to see data on things like social and geographical mobility, innovative business ideas, and average educational levels for places like these. Richard Florida has made the case for large cities and their inherent dynamism; do any of these effects extend down the scale to Peoria or Syracuse? Take Peoria, Rockford, and Chicago -- what does a detailed history of Illinois electoral politics and public policy tell us about the relations of competition, cooperation, and dominance that these three cities demonstrate over time?)
Cities capture much of what we mean by "modern," and have done so since Walter Benjamin's writings on Paris (link). But unlike the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, much of our imagining of cities since the early twentieth century has been dark and foreboding. A recent volume edited by Gyan Prakash, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, offers a collection of recent work in cultural studies that attempts to decode some of this dark imagery.
Several things are particularly interesting about the volume. Most basically, it represents an interesting conjunction of humanities perspectives and sociology. The articles are individually very good. And as a group they pose a series of important questions. How does a film set in Los Angeles or Shanghai serve to depict the city? Is there sociological content in a film that can contribute to a better sociology of the city? But also -- what can we say about the cultural currents that produce a particular vision of the city? Are there post-modern sensibilities and fears that lead filmmakers to turn the ambience dark?
The volume treats cities and their depictions in many parts of the world -- China, South Africa, Mexico, India, Europe, and the United States. What is unusual about the volume is the fact that it is not a collection in "film studies" or in "urban studies", but rather a series of contributions taking seriously representation and the represented. Moreover, there is no effort to force the perspectives taken into a common theory of "noir representation"; there are common themes that emerge, but each contributor brings forward a singular perspective, informed by the specifics of the region and genre that he/she studies. It is a project on the nexus between imaginative representation and existing social realities.
Prakash's excellent introduction begins with these observations:
As the world becomes increasingly urban, dire predictions of an impending crisis have reached a feverish pitch. Alarming statistics on the huge and unsustainable gap between the rates of urbanization and economic growth in the global South is seen to spell disaster. The unprecedented agglomeration of the poor produces the specter of an unremittingly bleak "planet of slums." Monstrous megacities do not promise the pleasures of urbanity but the misery and strife of the Hobbesian jungle. The medieval maxim that the city air makes you free appears quaint in view of the visions of an approaching urban anarchy. Urbanists write about fortified "privatopias" erected by the privileged tow all themselves off from the imagined resentment and violence of the multitude. Instead of freedom, the unprecedented urbanization of poverty seems to promise only division and conflict. The image of the modern city as a distinct and bounded entity lies shattered as market-led globalization and media saturation dissolve boundaries between town and countryside, center and periphery. From the ruins of the old ideal of the city as a space of urban citizens there emerges, sphinx-like, a "Generic City" of urban consumers.
As important as it is to assess the substance of these readings of contemporary trends in urbanization, it is equally necessary to examine their dark form as a mode of urban representation. This form is not new. Since the turn of the twentieth century, dystopic images have figured prominently in literary, cinematic, and sociological representations of the modern city. In these portrayals, the city often appears as dark, insurgent (or forced into total obedience), dysfunctional (or forced into machine-like functioning), engulfed by ecological and social crises, seduced by capitalist consumption, paralyzed by crime, wars, class, gender, and racial conflicts, and subjected to excessive technological and technocratic control What characterizes such representations is not just their bleak mood but also their mode of interpretation, which ratchets up a critical reading of specific historical conditions to diagnose crisis and catastrophe. (1)
All the essays are interesting and insightful, but I was particularly interested in the Asian contributions -- India, China, and Japan.
First is Li Zhang's treatment of some current treatments of the dark side of Chinese cities (Shanghai and Shenyang) in "Postsocialist Urban Dystopia?". She treats the Sixth Generation and New Documentaries movements in contemporary Chinese filmmaking, focusing on two recent works (Wang Bing's West of the Tracks, about the decline of a rust-belt city in the Northeast, and Lou Ye's Suzhou River, about the lives of poor and disaffected people in Shanghai).
Both works serve as powerful examples of "noir urbanism" in a Chinese context. West of the Tracks is a nine-hour documentary capturing the lives and declining prospects of working class people in Shenyang following the reform of Chinese industry in the 1990s. (C. K. Lee describes this process in Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt.) Here is a link to West of the Tracks, well worth viewing. And Suzhou River captures some of the gritty, squalid aspects of life in contemporary Shanghai, but also dwells on the moral shift that China is undergoing, towards a consumerist, wealth-oriented corrupt society. Here is a clip from Suzhou River:
Zhang combines her own anthropological fieldwork in Chinese cities with her reading of these films, giving her essay a multiple sense of authority. Here is a brief description of West of the Tracks that illustrates the intersection of criticism and fieldwork:
While capturing the "raw and the real" experiences of workers, West of the Tracks offers a subtle yet powerful critique of the postsocialist state and its neoliberal turn. What is so striking in the story told here is the lack of government help and the indifference of society toward workers' dilemmas. (137)
She refers to the bleak setting of the break room at the factory:
In their daily conversations in the break room, smelting workers frequently talk about how the managers and cadres of the factories steal public money to line their own pockets by taking kickbacks at the expense of the enterprise. The management and bosses rarely appear in the film. The longest presence is a banquet gathering at a local restaurant where factory managers and cadres talked about the imminent total privatization. They are well dressed in leather and wool coats with fur collars. (137)
So there are several key themes here: First, there is a critical perspective on the rising inequalities and dispossession of ordinary people that have followed from China's growth policies; this is the documentary aspect of the films she discusses, and plainly reflects the filmmakers' interest in capturing an important and disturbing contemporary social reality in China. And second, there is a critical vision of the moral dislocations that China has undergone, from Maoist egalitarianism to capitalist and consumerist pursuit of wealth. Zhang captures this element of contemporary China in her discussion of both films, but especially in Suzhou River. There is squalor and poverty, to be sure, but more pervasive is the sense of moral ungroundedness.
Moneymaking, market exchange, and pleasure-seeking are the dominant forces of everyday life. For example, the power of money erodes Mardar's blossoming love for Mudan and eventually destroys her, the symbol of innocent, unpolluted love. Human greediness corrupts souls and drives violent acts such as kidnaping and murder. (139)
Zhang's summary is explicit:
During market liberalization, Chinese society has irrevocably changed into a mass consumer society in which money increasingly controls people's lives and determines their lifestyles. (139)
Another fine contribution to the volume shifts focus to India's cities. Ranjani Mazumdar's "Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema" focuses on the mental urban landscape -- the way in which an Indian city is perceived by its residents, and the ways in which the residents are impaired by the city. Mazumdar discusses three "urban fringe" films, Dombivli Fast, Being Cyrus, and No Smoking. Here is a clip from Dombivli Fast:
Dombivli Fast is quite different from the films discussed by Zhang. It is reflective of the current social realities of Mumbai -- meaningless work, endless commuting on super-crowded trains. But it is more personal and introspective than the Chinese works, in that it focuses on one man and his family; it attempts to reveal his inner anxieties and thoughts. The dystopia here is not crushing poverty -- Madhav Apte and his family live a middle-class life in Mumbai. Here the dystopia is the pressure, stress, and callous injustice of society that drives Madhav to the breaking point.
Madhav Apte does not go back home for three days after he explodes. Armed with a cricket bat, Apte acquires a menacing persona as he moves through a city that is almost fated to collapse because of corruption, inequality, and indifference. In his journey across Bombay's deadly streets, Madhav becomes an active figure whose rage makes him see the city with a heightened perception. (159)
(There are clips from Being Cyrus and No Smoking on Youtube as well. This is one of the fascinating realities of reading the volume: it is possible for us non-specialists to view segments from most of the films that are discussed.)
David Ambaras takes up Tokyo in its cultural representations in "Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930." He too highlights the discrepancy between official, ideological expressions of the city, and the underlying grinding reality that modern cities often represent.
Yet despite this ebullience, to many contemporaries, urban modernity signaled the destruction of Japanese social values by Western materialism and individualistic hedonism, of which the modern girl served as the prime example. (188)
Ambaras doesn't work through cinema, but rather what he calls "slum discourse" and graphic pictorial representations of urban life. He highlights the popular and journalistic literature of the 1870s through the early 1900s as a barometer of the anxieties Tokyo residents experienced about their changing city. Stories of disease, child murder, beggars, and abject poverty permeate this literature.
These various forms of representation, ... had combined to produce in the Iwanosaka case a set of images that both shocked the sensibilities of readers and investigators and were necessary to their understanding of themselves as part of a modern metropolitan social formation. They reinforced the sense, common to many interpretations of the modern condition, that modernity was best apprehended through contrasts -- between, for example, utopian promise and dystopian reality -- or in terms of dark mysteries concealed beneath the surface of social relationships, and that the modern (urban) subject was compelled to navigate anxiously between these two positions, ever unsure as to which was the "truth" or in which direction he/she was being led. (210-11)
It is worth sorting out the different perspectives on social knowledge represented in this volume. First, there is the question of knowledge of the object, the contemporary city. Does cinema shed light on the current social realities of Shanghai or Mumbai? Can cinema contribute to urban sociology? Second is the question of the mentality of a place and time; the way that contemporary Mumbai-ers or Shanghai-ers think of themselves and their society. Can cinema accurately capture some strands of social consciousness and anxiety that are real threads in the social landscape? Is cinema a legitimate form of ethnography? And third is the mentality and intentions of the creative class itself -- the filmmakers. Can the critic discover threads in the filmmaker's work that sheds important light on the preoccupations of this slice of contemporary society?
Finally, we can ask the question of perspectivalism: how many Shanghai's are there? Zhang refers to the Maoist preference for social realism or socialist romanticism; there are the entertainment-oriented Shanghai thrillers; there is the global Shanghai as an exotic backdrop to drama; and there is the noir representation of the social problems of the city. Can we say that one depiction is more veridical than the other? Or perhaps, can we say that several of these perspectives are compatible with the truth of Shanghai; and that optimism and pessimism are equally distorting frames for social perception?
(I note that several of the essays refer to Mike Davis's Planet of Slums; this is worth reading.)
Cities capture much of what we mean by "modern," and have done so since Walter Benjamin's writings on Paris (link). But unlike the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, much of our imagining of cities since the early twentieth century has been dark and foreboding. A recent volume edited by Gyan Prakash, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, offers a collection of recent work in cultural studies that attempts to decode some of this dark imagery.
Several things are particularly interesting about the volume. Most basically, it represents an interesting conjunction of humanities perspectives and sociology. The articles are individually very good. And as a group they pose a series of important questions. How does a film set in Los Angeles or Shanghai serve to depict the city? Is there sociological content in a film that can contribute to a better sociology of the city? But also -- what can we say about the cultural currents that produce a particular vision of the city? Are there post-modern sensibilities and fears that lead filmmakers to turn the ambience dark?
The volume treats cities and their depictions in many parts of the world -- China, South Africa, Mexico, India, Europe, and the United States. What is unusual about the volume is the fact that it is not a collection in "film studies" or in "urban studies", but rather a series of contributions taking seriously representation and the represented. Moreover, there is no effort to force the perspectives taken into a common theory of "noir representation"; there are common themes that emerge, but each contributor brings forward a singular perspective, informed by the specifics of the region and genre that he/she studies. It is a project on the nexus between imaginative representation and existing social realities.
Prakash's excellent introduction begins with these observations:
As the world becomes increasingly urban, dire predictions of an impending crisis have reached a feverish pitch. Alarming statistics on the huge and unsustainable gap between the rates of urbanization and economic growth in the global South is seen to spell disaster. The unprecedented agglomeration of the poor produces the specter of an unremittingly bleak "planet of slums." Monstrous megacities do not promise the pleasures of urbanity but the misery and strife of the Hobbesian jungle. The medieval maxim that the city air makes you free appears quaint in view of the visions of an approaching urban anarchy. Urbanists write about fortified "privatopias" erected by the privileged tow all themselves off from the imagined resentment and violence of the multitude. Instead of freedom, the unprecedented urbanization of poverty seems to promise only division and conflict. The image of the modern city as a distinct and bounded entity lies shattered as market-led globalization and media saturation dissolve boundaries between town and countryside, center and periphery. From the ruins of the old ideal of the city as a space of urban citizens there emerges, sphinx-like, a "Generic City" of urban consumers.
As important as it is to assess the substance of these readings of contemporary trends in urbanization, it is equally necessary to examine their dark form as a mode of urban representation. This form is not new. Since the turn of the twentieth century, dystopic images have figured prominently in literary, cinematic, and sociological representations of the modern city. In these portrayals, the city often appears as dark, insurgent (or forced into total obedience), dysfunctional (or forced into machine-like functioning), engulfed by ecological and social crises, seduced by capitalist consumption, paralyzed by crime, wars, class, gender, and racial conflicts, and subjected to excessive technological and technocratic control What characterizes such representations is not just their bleak mood but also their mode of interpretation, which ratchets up a critical reading of specific historical conditions to diagnose crisis and catastrophe. (1)
All the essays are interesting and insightful, but I was particularly interested in the Asian contributions -- India, China, and Japan.
First is Li Zhang's treatment of some current treatments of the dark side of Chinese cities (Shanghai and Shenyang) in "Postsocialist Urban Dystopia?". She treats the Sixth Generation and New Documentaries movements in contemporary Chinese filmmaking, focusing on two recent works (Wang Bing's West of the Tracks, about the decline of a rust-belt city in the Northeast, and Lou Ye's Suzhou River, about the lives of poor and disaffected people in Shanghai).
Both works serve as powerful examples of "noir urbanism" in a Chinese context. West of the Tracks is a nine-hour documentary capturing the lives and declining prospects of working class people in Shenyang following the reform of Chinese industry in the 1990s. (C. K. Lee describes this process in Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt.) Here is a link to West of the Tracks, well worth viewing. And Suzhou River captures some of the gritty, squalid aspects of life in contemporary Shanghai, but also dwells on the moral shift that China is undergoing, towards a consumerist, wealth-oriented corrupt society. Here is a clip from Suzhou River:
Zhang combines her own anthropological fieldwork in Chinese cities with her reading of these films, giving her essay a multiple sense of authority. Here is a brief description of West of the Tracks that illustrates the intersection of criticism and fieldwork:
While capturing the "raw and the real" experiences of workers, West of the Tracks offers a subtle yet powerful critique of the postsocialist state and its neoliberal turn. What is so striking in the story told here is the lack of government help and the indifference of society toward workers' dilemmas. (137)
She refers to the bleak setting of the break room at the factory:
In their daily conversations in the break room, smelting workers frequently talk about how the managers and cadres of the factories steal public money to line their own pockets by taking kickbacks at the expense of the enterprise. The management and bosses rarely appear in the film. The longest presence is a banquet gathering at a local restaurant where factory managers and cadres talked about the imminent total privatization. They are well dressed in leather and wool coats with fur collars. (137)
So there are several key themes here: First, there is a critical perspective on the rising inequalities and dispossession of ordinary people that have followed from China's growth policies; this is the documentary aspect of the films she discusses, and plainly reflects the filmmakers' interest in capturing an important and disturbing contemporary social reality in China. And second, there is a critical vision of the moral dislocations that China has undergone, from Maoist egalitarianism to capitalist and consumerist pursuit of wealth. Zhang captures this element of contemporary China in her discussion of both films, but especially in Suzhou River. There is squalor and poverty, to be sure, but more pervasive is the sense of moral ungroundedness.
Moneymaking, market exchange, and pleasure-seeking are the dominant forces of everyday life. For example, the power of money erodes Mardar's blossoming love for Mudan and eventually destroys her, the symbol of innocent, unpolluted love. Human greediness corrupts souls and drives violent acts such as kidnaping and murder. (139)
Zhang's summary is explicit:
During market liberalization, Chinese society has irrevocably changed into a mass consumer society in which money increasingly controls people's lives and determines their lifestyles. (139)
Another fine contribution to the volume shifts focus to India's cities. Ranjani Mazumdar's "Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema" focuses on the mental urban landscape -- the way in which an Indian city is perceived by its residents, and the ways in which the residents are impaired by the city. Mazumdar discusses three "urban fringe" films, Dombivli Fast, Being Cyrus, and No Smoking. Here is a clip from Dombivli Fast:
Dombivli Fast is quite different from the films discussed by Zhang. It is reflective of the current social realities of Mumbai -- meaningless work, endless commuting on super-crowded trains. But it is more personal and introspective than the Chinese works, in that it focuses on one man and his family; it attempts to reveal his inner anxieties and thoughts. The dystopia here is not crushing poverty -- Madhav Apte and his family live a middle-class life in Mumbai. Here the dystopia is the pressure, stress, and callous injustice of society that drives Madhav to the breaking point.
Madhav Apte does not go back home for three days after he explodes. Armed with a cricket bat, Apte acquires a menacing persona as he moves through a city that is almost fated to collapse because of corruption, inequality, and indifference. In his journey across Bombay's deadly streets, Madhav becomes an active figure whose rage makes him see the city with a heightened perception. (159)
(There are clips from Being Cyrus and No Smoking on Youtube as well. This is one of the fascinating realities of reading the volume: it is possible for us non-specialists to view segments from most of the films that are discussed.)
David Ambaras takes up Tokyo in its cultural representations in "Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930." He too highlights the discrepancy between official, ideological expressions of the city, and the underlying grinding reality that modern cities often represent.
Yet despite this ebullience, to many contemporaries, urban modernity signaled the destruction of Japanese social values by Western materialism and individualistic hedonism, of which the modern girl served as the prime example. (188)
Ambaras doesn't work through cinema, but rather what he calls "slum discourse" and graphic pictorial representations of urban life. He highlights the popular and journalistic literature of the 1870s through the early 1900s as a barometer of the anxieties Tokyo residents experienced about their changing city. Stories of disease, child murder, beggars, and abject poverty permeate this literature.
These various forms of representation, ... had combined to produce in the Iwanosaka case a set of images that both shocked the sensibilities of readers and investigators and were necessary to their understanding of themselves as part of a modern metropolitan social formation. They reinforced the sense, common to many interpretations of the modern condition, that modernity was best apprehended through contrasts -- between, for example, utopian promise and dystopian reality -- or in terms of dark mysteries concealed beneath the surface of social relationships, and that the modern (urban) subject was compelled to navigate anxiously between these two positions, ever unsure as to which was the "truth" or in which direction he/she was being led. (210-11)
It is worth sorting out the different perspectives on social knowledge represented in this volume. First, there is the question of knowledge of the object, the contemporary city. Does cinema shed light on the current social realities of Shanghai or Mumbai? Can cinema contribute to urban sociology? Second is the question of the mentality of a place and time; the way that contemporary Mumbai-ers or Shanghai-ers think of themselves and their society. Can cinema accurately capture some strands of social consciousness and anxiety that are real threads in the social landscape? Is cinema a legitimate form of ethnography? And third is the mentality and intentions of the creative class itself -- the filmmakers. Can the critic discover threads in the filmmaker's work that sheds important light on the preoccupations of this slice of contemporary society?
Finally, we can ask the question of perspectivalism: how many Shanghai's are there? Zhang refers to the Maoist preference for social realism or socialist romanticism; there are the entertainment-oriented Shanghai thrillers; there is the global Shanghai as an exotic backdrop to drama; and there is the noir representation of the social problems of the city. Can we say that one depiction is more veridical than the other? Or perhaps, can we say that several of these perspectives are compatible with the truth of Shanghai; and that optimism and pessimism are equally distorting frames for social perception?
(I note that several of the essays refer to Mike Davis's Planet of Slums; this is worth reading.)
Cities capture much of what we mean by "modern," and have done so since Walter Benjamin's writings on Paris (link). But unlike the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, much of our imagining of cities since the early twentieth century has been dark and foreboding. A recent volume edited by Gyan Prakash, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, offers a collection of recent work in cultural studies that attempts to decode some of this dark imagery.
Several things are particularly interesting about the volume. Most basically, it represents an interesting conjunction of humanities perspectives and sociology. The articles are individually very good. And as a group they pose a series of important questions. How does a film set in Los Angeles or Shanghai serve to depict the city? Is there sociological content in a film that can contribute to a better sociology of the city? But also -- what can we say about the cultural currents that produce a particular vision of the city? Are there post-modern sensibilities and fears that lead filmmakers to turn the ambience dark?
The volume treats cities and their depictions in many parts of the world -- China, South Africa, Mexico, India, Europe, and the United States. What is unusual about the volume is the fact that it is not a collection in "film studies" or in "urban studies", but rather a series of contributions taking seriously representation and the represented. Moreover, there is no effort to force the perspectives taken into a common theory of "noir representation"; there are common themes that emerge, but each contributor brings forward a singular perspective, informed by the specifics of the region and genre that he/she studies. It is a project on the nexus between imaginative representation and existing social realities.
Prakash's excellent introduction begins with these observations:
As the world becomes increasingly urban, dire predictions of an impending crisis have reached a feverish pitch. Alarming statistics on the huge and unsustainable gap between the rates of urbanization and economic growth in the global South is seen to spell disaster. The unprecedented agglomeration of the poor produces the specter of an unremittingly bleak "planet of slums." Monstrous megacities do not promise the pleasures of urbanity but the misery and strife of the Hobbesian jungle. The medieval maxim that the city air makes you free appears quaint in view of the visions of an approaching urban anarchy. Urbanists write about fortified "privatopias" erected by the privileged tow all themselves off from the imagined resentment and violence of the multitude. Instead of freedom, the unprecedented urbanization of poverty seems to promise only division and conflict. The image of the modern city as a distinct and bounded entity lies shattered as market-led globalization and media saturation dissolve boundaries between town and countryside, center and periphery. From the ruins of the old ideal of the city as a space of urban citizens there emerges, sphinx-like, a "Generic City" of urban consumers.
As important as it is to assess the substance of these readings of contemporary trends in urbanization, it is equally necessary to examine their dark form as a mode of urban representation. This form is not new. Since the turn of the twentieth century, dystopic images have figured prominently in literary, cinematic, and sociological representations of the modern city. In these portrayals, the city often appears as dark, insurgent (or forced into total obedience), dysfunctional (or forced into machine-like functioning), engulfed by ecological and social crises, seduced by capitalist consumption, paralyzed by crime, wars, class, gender, and racial conflicts, and subjected to excessive technological and technocratic control What characterizes such representations is not just their bleak mood but also their mode of interpretation, which ratchets up a critical reading of specific historical conditions to diagnose crisis and catastrophe. (1)
All the essays are interesting and insightful, but I was particularly interested in the Asian contributions -- India, China, and Japan.
First is Li Zhang's treatment of some current treatments of the dark side of Chinese cities (Shanghai and Shenyang) in "Postsocialist Urban Dystopia?". She treats the Sixth Generation and New Documentaries movements in contemporary Chinese filmmaking, focusing on two recent works (Wang Bing's West of the Tracks, about the decline of a rust-belt city in the Northeast, and Lou Ye's Suzhou River, about the lives of poor and disaffected people in Shanghai).
Both works serve as powerful examples of "noir urbanism" in a Chinese context. West of the Tracks is a nine-hour documentary capturing the lives and declining prospects of working class people in Shenyang following the reform of Chinese industry in the 1990s. (C. K. Lee describes this process in Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt.) Here is a link to West of the Tracks, well worth viewing. And Suzhou River captures some of the gritty, squalid aspects of life in contemporary Shanghai, but also dwells on the moral shift that China is undergoing, towards a consumerist, wealth-oriented corrupt society. Here is a clip from Suzhou River:
Zhang combines her own anthropological fieldwork in Chinese cities with her reading of these films, giving her essay a multiple sense of authority. Here is a brief description of West of the Tracks that illustrates the intersection of criticism and fieldwork:
While capturing the "raw and the real" experiences of workers, West of the Tracks offers a subtle yet powerful critique of the postsocialist state and its neoliberal turn. What is so striking in the story told here is the lack of government help and the indifference of society toward workers' dilemmas. (137)
She refers to the bleak setting of the break room at the factory:
In their daily conversations in the break room, smelting workers frequently talk about how the managers and cadres of the factories steal public money to line their own pockets by taking kickbacks at the expense of the enterprise. The management and bosses rarely appear in the film. The longest presence is a banquet gathering at a local restaurant where factory managers and cadres talked about the imminent total privatization. They are well dressed in leather and wool coats with fur collars. (137)
So there are several key themes here: First, there is a critical perspective on the rising inequalities and dispossession of ordinary people that have followed from China's growth policies; this is the documentary aspect of the films she discusses, and plainly reflects the filmmakers' interest in capturing an important and disturbing contemporary social reality in China. And second, there is a critical vision of the moral dislocations that China has undergone, from Maoist egalitarianism to capitalist and consumerist pursuit of wealth. Zhang captures this element of contemporary China in her discussion of both films, but especially in Suzhou River. There is squalor and poverty, to be sure, but more pervasive is the sense of moral ungroundedness.
Moneymaking, market exchange, and pleasure-seeking are the dominant forces of everyday life. For example, the power of money erodes Mardar's blossoming love for Mudan and eventually destroys her, the symbol of innocent, unpolluted love. Human greediness corrupts souls and drives violent acts such as kidnaping and murder. (139)
Zhang's summary is explicit:
During market liberalization, Chinese society has irrevocably changed into a mass consumer society in which money increasingly controls people's lives and determines their lifestyles. (139)
Another fine contribution to the volume shifts focus to India's cities. Ranjani Mazumdar's "Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema" focuses on the mental urban landscape -- the way in which an Indian city is perceived by its residents, and the ways in which the residents are impaired by the city. Mazumdar discusses three "urban fringe" films, Dombivli Fast, Being Cyrus, and No Smoking. Here is a clip from Dombivli Fast:
Dombivli Fast is quite different from the films discussed by Zhang. It is reflective of the current social realities of Mumbai -- meaningless work, endless commuting on super-crowded trains. But it is more personal and introspective than the Chinese works, in that it focuses on one man and his family; it attempts to reveal his inner anxieties and thoughts. The dystopia here is not crushing poverty -- Madhav Apte and his family live a middle-class life in Mumbai. Here the dystopia is the pressure, stress, and callous injustice of society that drives Madhav to the breaking point.
Madhav Apte does not go back home for three days after he explodes. Armed with a cricket bat, Apte acquires a menacing persona as he moves through a city that is almost fated to collapse because of corruption, inequality, and indifference. In his journey across Bombay's deadly streets, Madhav becomes an active figure whose rage makes him see the city with a heightened perception. (159)
(There are clips from Being Cyrus and No Smoking on Youtube as well. This is one of the fascinating realities of reading the volume: it is possible for us non-specialists to view segments from most of the films that are discussed.)
David Ambaras takes up Tokyo in its cultural representations in "Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930." He too highlights the discrepancy between official, ideological expressions of the city, and the underlying grinding reality that modern cities often represent.
Yet despite this ebullience, to many contemporaries, urban modernity signaled the destruction of Japanese social values by Western materialism and individualistic hedonism, of which the modern girl served as the prime example. (188)
Ambaras doesn't work through cinema, but rather what he calls "slum discourse" and graphic pictorial representations of urban life. He highlights the popular and journalistic literature of the 1870s through the early 1900s as a barometer of the anxieties Tokyo residents experienced about their changing city. Stories of disease, child murder, beggars, and abject poverty permeate this literature.
These various forms of representation, ... had combined to produce in the Iwanosaka case a set of images that both shocked the sensibilities of readers and investigators and were necessary to their understanding of themselves as part of a modern metropolitan social formation. They reinforced the sense, common to many interpretations of the modern condition, that modernity was best apprehended through contrasts -- between, for example, utopian promise and dystopian reality -- or in terms of dark mysteries concealed beneath the surface of social relationships, and that the modern (urban) subject was compelled to navigate anxiously between these two positions, ever unsure as to which was the "truth" or in which direction he/she was being led. (210-11)
It is worth sorting out the different perspectives on social knowledge represented in this volume. First, there is the question of knowledge of the object, the contemporary city. Does cinema shed light on the current social realities of Shanghai or Mumbai? Can cinema contribute to urban sociology? Second is the question of the mentality of a place and time; the way that contemporary Mumbai-ers or Shanghai-ers think of themselves and their society. Can cinema accurately capture some strands of social consciousness and anxiety that are real threads in the social landscape? Is cinema a legitimate form of ethnography? And third is the mentality and intentions of the creative class itself -- the filmmakers. Can the critic discover threads in the filmmaker's work that sheds important light on the preoccupations of this slice of contemporary society?
Finally, we can ask the question of perspectivalism: how many Shanghai's are there? Zhang refers to the Maoist preference for social realism or socialist romanticism; there are the entertainment-oriented Shanghai thrillers; there is the global Shanghai as an exotic backdrop to drama; and there is the noir representation of the social problems of the city. Can we say that one depiction is more veridical than the other? Or perhaps, can we say that several of these perspectives are compatible with the truth of Shanghai; and that optimism and pessimism are equally distorting frames for social perception?
(I note that several of the essays refer to Mike Davis's Planet of Slums; this is worth reading.)
, makes the case. Kruse and Sugrue think that this history is actually crucial to understanding many things about the United States since the 1950s.
.)
does a masterful job of telling the story of how we got here.
, offers a collection of recent work in cultural studies that attempts to decode some of this dark imagery.
.) Here is a 
; this is worth reading.)