Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century

Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicage and New York in the Early Twentieth Century By Kevin J. Mumford. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xx, 238 pp. Cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-231-10492-8. Paper, $17.50, ISBN 0-231-10493-6.)

Interzones examines the nexus between race and sexuality in the United States of the early twentieth century by focusing on a series of critical events, both publicly debated and hidden from public view. Drawing its evidence from a wide range of sources, including vice commission reports, novels, sociological accounts, official statistics, and newspaper stories, the book offers several different kinds of views into the ways in which racial categories were constructed and reconstructed over time through interaction with sexual connections and conflicts. As Kevin J. Mumford notes in his epilogue, his approach brings forward both the repressive and the productive aspects of racial politics insofar as race is treated not as a given, but rather...