This innovative book looks at representations of ethnic and racial identities in relation to the development of urban culture in postindustrialised American cities. The concept of 'urban space' organises the detailed illustration of a series of themes which structure chapters on white paranoia and urban decline; memories of urban passage; the racialised underclass; urban crime and justice; and globalisation and citizenship.The book focuses on a range of literary and visual forms including novels, journalism, films (narrative and documentary) and photography to examine the relationship between race and representation in the production of urban space. Texts analysed include writings by Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities), Toni Morrison (Jazz), John Edgar Wildeman (Philadelphia Fire) and Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress). Films covered include Falling Down, Strange Days, Hoop Dreams and Clockers.Provocative and absorbing, this interdisciplinary treatment of urban representations engages contemporary theoretical and sociological debates about race and the city. Issues of space and spatiality in representations of the city are explored and the author shows how expressive forms of literary and visual representation interact with broader productions of urban space.

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.

Examines the portrayal of race in interwar American art. Focuses on the works of urban realist Reginald Marsh and his contemporaries to show how black figures acted as cultural and visual markers and embodied complex concerns about the presence of African Americans in urban centers.

Extra-Ordinary Men analyzes popular cinematic representations of white heterosexual masculinity as the 'ordinary' form of male identity, one that enjoys considerable economic, social, political, and representational strength. Nicola Rehling argues that while this normative position affords white heterosexual masculinity ideological and political dominance, such 'ordinariness' also engenders the anxiety that it is a depthless, vacuous, and unstable identity. At a time when the neutrality of white heterosexual masculinity has been challenged by identity politics, this insightful volume offers lucid accounts of contemporary theoretical debates on masculinity in popular cinema, and explores the strategies deployed in popular films to reassert white heterosexual male hegemony through detailed readings of films as diverse as Fight Club, Boys Don't Cry, and The Matrix. Accessible to undergraduates, but also of interest to film scholars, the book makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the ways in which popular film helps construct and maintain many unexamined assumptions about masculinity, gender, race, and sexuality.

This book examines the post-1990s African American novels, namely the "neo-urban novel," and develops a new urban discourse for the twenty-first century on how the city, as a social formation, impacts black characters through everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in a racial context is important in considering diverse forms of the lived reality of black everyday life in the novelistic representations of the white dominant urban order. African American fictional representations of the city have political significance in that the "neo-urban novel" explores the nature of the American society at large. This book explores the need to understand how whiteness works, what it forecloses, and what it occasionally opens up in everyday life in American society.

Interdisciplinary in nature, this project draws on fiction, non-fiction and archival material to theorize urban space and literary/cultural production in the context of the United States and New York City. Spanning from the mid-1970s fiscal crisis to the 1987 Market Crash, New York writing becomes akin to geographical fieldwork in this rich study.

Divided into four volumes, Race and Ethnicity in America provides a complete overview of the history of racial and ethnic relations in America, from pre-contact to the present. The five hundred years since Europeans made contact with the indigenous peoples of America have been dominated by racial and ethnic tensions. During the colonial period, from 1500 to 1776, slavery and servitude of whites, blacks, and Indians formed the foundation for race and ethnic relations. After the American Revolution, slavery, labor inequalities, and immigration led to racial and ethnic tensions; after the Civil War, labor inequalities, immigration, and the fight for civil rights dominated America's racial and ethnic experience. From the 1960s to the present, the unfulfilled promise of civil rights for all ethnic and racial groups in America has been the most important sociopolitical issue in America. Race and Ethnicity in America tells this story of the fight for equality in America. The first volume spans pre-contact to the American Revolution; the second, the American Revolution to the Civil War; the third, Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement; and the fourth, the Civil Rights Movement to the present. All volumes explore the culture, society, labor, war and politics, and cultural expressions of racial and ethnic groups.

Sociologists have long been curious about the ways in which city dwellers negotiate urban public space. How do they manage myriad interactions in the shared spaces of the city? In Urban Nightlife, sociologist Reuben May undertakes a nuanced examination of urban nightlife, drawing on ethnographic data gathered in a Deep South college town to explore the question of how nighttime revelers negotiate urban public spaces as they go about meeting, socializing, and entertaining themselves. May’s work reveals how diverse partiers define these spaces, in particular the ongoing social conflict on the streets, in bars and nightclubs, and in the various public spaces of downtown. To explore this conflict, May develops the concept of “integrated segregation”—the idea that diverse groups are physically close to one another yet rarely have meaningful interactions—rather, they are socially bound to those of similar race, class, and cultural backgrounds. May’s in-depth research leads him to conclude that social tension is stubbornly persistent in part because many participants fail to make the connection between contemporary relations among different groups and the historical and institutional forces that perpetuate those very tensions; structural racism remains obscured by a superficial appearance of racial harmony. Through May’s observations, Urban Nightlife clarifies the complexities of race, class, and culture in contemporary America, illustrating the direct influence of local government and nightclub management decision-making on interpersonal interaction among groups. Watch a video with Reuben A. Buford May: Watch video now. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCs1xExStPw).

Examining the ways in which majority Western cultures govern, represent and exclude those that are considered to be ethically 'other', this book asks what is the impact of globalization, governance and Western immigration controls on the construction of the majority 'self' and the minority 'other'?

The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My House Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin’s home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin's influence on the writer. The house was partially torn down in 2014. Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students, scholars, and fans of Baldwin.