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Abstract
Though W. E. B. DuBois declared “the color line” the central problem of the ensuing twentieth century, his guarded, if not battered, optimism still led him to underestimate the United States' commitment to inscribe that geographic metaphor onto the nation's cities. Northern urban formations provided the terrain upon which DuBois would witness the reification of his most tragic conceit. When large numbers of European immigrants arrived in these industrial cities almost simultaneously with a formidable influx of blacks fleeing destitution and oppression in the American South, transportation technology, government, the real estate industry, and corporate capital conspired to racialize the urban landscape. These forces awarded white racial identity to the aforementioned European immigrants before the Second World War; sponsored a pan-ethnic white exodus out of urban centers into burgeoning postwar suburbs; and jailed populations of color into the industrial burial ground that the urban core became during the height of the Civil Rights era. The actualization of this apartheid arrangement, Michael Keith and Malcolm Cross note, has made “race the privileged metaphor through which the city is rendered comprehensible.” It has also made DuBois the Ezekiel of United States urban history.
My project employs postmodern geography, critical race theory, urban sociology, and urban history, to chart the ways in which American novelists—Anzia Yezierska, Michael Gold, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman—have imagined ghettoes as sites for the production and physical movement of racialized bodies. I approach these texts as travelogues and urban ethnographies to track how encounters between characters and their movement through urban space create racial identity. This work explores the cofunctionality of race and space in the production of US citizen-subjects and shows how cities and ghettoes have provided complex arenas in which labor exploitation and racial re/production have occurred.
