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Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940, by Chad Heap. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. $29.00, paperback, 432 pages.
Articulating the complex and multi-faceted world of American popular culture is no easy task, yet Chad Heap's monograph Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 is an illuminating study of Chicago and New York nightlife and popular culture through the activity of "slumming." This phenomenon appeared in large American cities and involved middle- and upper-class white Americans leaving the social constraints of their own neighborhoods to observe first-hand the living conditions and entertainment venues of southern and eastem-European immigrants, blacks, the artists and radicals of bohemia, and those deemed sexually "deviant" or queer. As Heap argues, slumming "contributed significantly to the emergence and codification of a new twentieth-century hegemonic social order - one that was structured primarily around an increasingly polarized white/black racial axis and a heterohomosexual binary that were defined in reciprocal relationship to one another" (3). While he is primarily concerned with the relationship between those who participated in the practice of slumming and those who were marginalized and exploited by it, he provides some fascinating insight into the ways in which socially marginalized groups resisted slummers' incursions into their neighborhoods by using slumming as a useful shorthand to encapsulate the full range of cross-racial and sexual encounters that occurred at this time.
Heap successfully writes a history of urban American nightlife by structuring his book thematically. The book's six chapters begin with a broad discussion of the red-light districts of New York and Chicago. Heap discusses the development of slumming as a practice that came to define the urban...