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City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930s Reviewed by William J. Maxwell
Note: Review also available on H-Amstdy Logs. |
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Comments on the "City Sites" Web-Based Collaboration As a literary historian---and someone who takes his sense of contemporary media technology from the movies---I'm often disappointed when the promise of interactivity fails to provide personal time transport. Yet the City Sites research collaboration supplies an unusually satisfying approximation of historical travel. For all its emphasis on cognitive mapping and spatial simulation, on deriving electronic similes for the much-theorized experience of street-level urban navigation, the City Sites e-book also encourages visitors to wander through and as urban history.The cross-cutting directional feature called "Pathways" allows readers to "pursue[...] non-linear forms of analytical engagement," correlating portions of different essays on different city scenes along the axis of larger common categories: architecture, leisure, space, and race. This feature also explicitly invites guests to "meander" through distinct urban topics, to ramble and loiter at will, if always with an eye to the serious pleasure of botanizing the pavement. In many such words, sounds, and images, the pathways of City Sites cast their user as the flaneur, the prototypical meandering stroller through the modern city, now more a creation of 20th-century academic citations than of 19th-century Paris arcades. Among other enjoyments, this e-book thus doubles as a Baudelairian fantasy camp, offering the experience of creative anachronism to those who'd like to escape scholarly cliché and take their own turn walking like a modernist. As an African-Americanist as much as a literary historian, my own first walk down City Sites pathways took the avenue of "Race." A piece on Dreiser's Sister Carrie led the way, uncovering a seemingly trivial narrative detail---a brief Elks club "black-face turn"---as a fleeting reference to white Chicago's necessary manufacture of racial purity. The virulence of blackface minstrelsy is itself over-purified in this mini-essay---as a gang of Americanists have recently argued---its mockery and dehumanization of African Americans camouflaged white envy, but the discovery of minstrel traces in Carrie successfully revises the urban scene of literary naturalism. My second stop, "The Real Black Subject," transported me several miles into Chicago's South Side and the painting of Archibald Motley. The willingness of City Sites to reproduce "the work of key [scholarly] thinkers and writers on a topic" here shows itself to good effect, illuminating terms of art-historical controversy over Motley's use of stereotype. But so does this e-book's dissatisfaction with scanning-as-scholarship: the text ends with a novel dialectical thesis on the artist's "admixture of caricature and agency." My third stop on the "Color Line" in Jacob Riis's New York revealed another strength of the site's multiple pathways: their ability to recontextualize beyond the broadest knowledge of single authors and single versions of interdisciplinarity. Quoted Riis comments suddenly struck me as a forgotten preamble to the Harlem Renaissance: "The colored citizen whom this year's census man found in his Ninety-ninth street 'flat' is a very different individual from the 'nigger' his predecessor counted in the black-and-tan slums of Thompson and Sullivan Streets." Paired with this loaded opposition between old "nigger" and new "colored citizen," the Renaissance's Old Negro/New Negro topos is notable for its respectful continuity of racial self-description, not its avant-gardist investment in newness. Another enlightening juxtaposition was provided by my final destinations, locales devoted to Harlem's "Race Capital" and Southside Chicago's "Black Metropolis," respectively. The user's ability to migrate instantaneously between these two meccas of black urbanism discloses surprising similarities---literary critics, at least, need such stimulation to recall black Chicago's '20s boom, fully contemporaneous with Harlem's vogue. Irreconcilable differences were also declared-unlike Harlem's high-flown artistic rebirth, Chicago's specifically cultural renaissance of the '30s was boosted by the inverse fuel of economic depression. My trip through "Race" now finished, I realized that the virtual flanerie of the book's pathways was designed to dispel fetishisms of sight and space: walking like a modernist here entails the power to accost passers-by for more than their transient beauty. The streets of City Sites are paved with cues for dense historical exploration, as if fellow-walkers could easily be stopped and searched for family records, their points of production, and the genealogy of their metropolitan surroundings. Still, the end of the road through City Sites left me wondering if the book's orienting rhetoric wasn't somewhat too indebted to modernist figures. With fair consistency, the authors describe the site's innovations in familiar high modernist terms: the recommended mode of interpretation is complex, anti-narrative, and reader-controlled; the favored fruit of collaboration is "juxtaposition rather than synthesis"; and the implicit house style tends to "spatial form" on the classical model of Joseph Frank. The point is not that such modernist tropes and values are ironically old school, or inappropriate for an e-book devoted to the modern American city (I myself employed and enjoyed them during my visit). Rather, it's that such tropes and values may paradoxically hamper readers' independent access to a determinedly open city. The one urban freedom that City Sites does not encourage is the freedom to read the modern metropolis against the grain of modernist unconventionality, to carve out linear trails of syntheses, in the other words, the freedom to proceed like the considerable number of New Yorkers and Chicagoans who found their urban homes more Gemeinschaft than Gesellschaft, less discordantly alienating than liberatingly consistent. |
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Copyright (c) 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@H-Net.Msu.Edu. CITATION: William J. Maxwell, "Comments on the 'City Sites' Web-Based Collaboration," a review of City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930s, H-Amstdy, N-Net Reviews (17 May 2001). URL: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-amstdy&month=0105&week=c&msg=IVZJ5OtG7w3AtnNzb%2b21Eg&user=&pw= . |
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