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City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930s Reviewed by Stephen Shapiro Note: Review also available on H-Amstdy Logs. |
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Review of "City Sites" City Sites invites us to reconsider iconic locations of metropolitan modernity through the new lens of the web. With ten essays, five each on New York and Chicago, it broadly explores three-inter-related themes: the U.S. city as amplifier and articulator of race, where social experience is materialized through the urban built environment; the stakes of modernism's uneasy encounter with nineteenth century ideologies of naturalism; and the implications of visual representation.Collectively the essays tend to approach urban modernity as dominantly constituted by the eye, where subjectivity (the "I") is sited by sight. Though considerations of city vision and cognitive landscaping have a long cherished tradition in urban studies, it might next be useful to consider other phenomenological aspects of the metropole's cultural economy. For instance, the aural symphony of Gershwin's An American in Paris, which has as much to do with Second Avenue as with the Champs-Elysees, asks the question: do we move through the soft city to consume new experience or does the city's vortex of noise construct its own time-space pressures and limits? Given the web's ability to embed sound files, an interesting approach of linking pictorial and sound analysis might be in the offing. Another way of complicating the dominance of visuality would be to balance the gaze of urban spectacle with the optics of surveillance and crowd control. Foucault famously attributes spectacle as a pre-modern formation, while surveillance institutionalizes modern subjectification. If cities are the paradigmatic topoi of modernity, the "just looking" flaneur-consumer might not be the only mode of conceptualizing how the control-mechanics of urban density were engineered to suture capital flows and the traffic of goods and people. For instance, the electrification of Times Square's White Way for shopping convenience was also a strategy for gentrifying a red light district. With its use of Shockwave technology and interlinking reading pathways, City Sites uses the medium of the web as more than an empty container. A particularly entrancing example of these techniques with a reading of an illustration of Chicago's harbor that actively unfolds the implicit logic of the image. Providing a structured unstructure to how the reader can negotiate the essays, the editors self-reflexively attempt to enact the city's multiple avenues of movement. Furthermore, they have been careful to produce material a project that delivers new research in ways are viable for undergraduate pedagogy. And, lest the tailor's labor not disappear in the threads, special mention goes to Mike Beilby for making the site's technical demands appear seamless. That said, it remains difficult to download or print the entire essay, with all its nestled sections, for later consideration away from the computer. While new software, like Adobe Acrobat 5.0's web capture can acrobatize all of a site's levels, not every reader will have use of these applications. But there's a larger issue here. Because a monitor's image is the result of pixellating movement, it creates an entirely different perceptual physiology than static print. Since the human body is a sympathetic device, our eyes begin to mirror the screen's oscillation. This quasi-REM activity triggers a sleep-like response that changes the balance between considered thought and ambient intuition as well as lowering the body's metabolism. Hence our dreamy sense of time when working before a screen and likewise tendency to gain weight after prolonged periods of computer use (it's not just the pizza and chips). Although City Sites will appear as a book, it might be that educative prose on the web has a special challenge to confront with this new medium. Beyond the specific arguments of its contributors or the relative advantages of its format, City Sites seems to me to be particularly important on three grounds. First, it presents the initial chapter of an ongoing joint venture between Birmingham (England) and Nottingham's American Studies departments. City Sites is perhaps best read as the announcement card of a longer course of research. Because of its collaborative nature, which brings together a group of like-minded young scholars focusing on a shared set of issues, City Sites recalls the early stages of another Birmingham endeavour, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. With the present canonical status of the Birmingham School of cultural studies, the CCCS's long gestation period is often forgotten. Formed in the 1960s, the Centre produced its key works in the 1970s and had to wait another decade before its influence slowly became wide-spread. Similarly, City Sites is a telegraph of things to come; it's that rare thing, a collective work-in-progress that is busy laying the foundation for what may prove to be decades of fruitful investigation. Secondly, City Sites attempts to overcome productively the deeply entrenched hegemony of the U.S. Despite the current fad for "internationalizing" research, the U.S. academy is often the worst offender in promulgating intellectual globalization, which uses a language of universalism to aggravate divisions of inequality. Because the new electronic bibliographic indexes, like the MLA's, routinely (intentionally?) fail to include citations from non-U.S. university presses and journals (aside from Routledge and Oxbridge), the overwhelming bulk of research from the European Community, let alone Asia, Africa, and South America, remains as silenced as ever in cyberspace's public sphere . Writing this for H-Amstdy is to speak to an audience already sensitive to the need for thinking outside the box, but the greater problem remains. If U.S.-centric electronic forums won't acknowledge publications outside the institutional privileges of the U.S., then foreign scholars have the burden of creatively circumventing unevenly distributed resources. With recourse to the web, the editors of City Sites might not succeed in levelling the playing field, but they deserve the support of all those who care about democratizing collegiality. Finally, City Sites 's focus on New York, Chicago, and (soon) L.A. lays the groundwork for what might be the next comparative phase of urban studies. Percolating through all these essays is the question about the relationship between capitalist modernity and the urban form. But is capitalism intrinsically a Western phenomenon best epitomized by the U.S. or is it a dynamic that increasingly seems organized by Asia? Given that the vast majority of ongoing urbanization now occurs outside North America, it's incumbent on urbanists to take all of the arguments (about race, etc.) that City Sites intertwines with American Studies and test their claims elsewhere to see what, if anything, is American about urban experience. My own personal choice for the next three cities would be these: Shanghai, Jakarta, and Bangladore. |
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Copyright 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu. CITATION: Stephen Shapiro, "Review of City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930s," H-Amstdy, N-Net Reviews (18 May 2001). URL: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Amstdy&month=0105&week=c&msg=JCgN1Z3jI1Ra%2bEjWa7SXAQ&user=&pw= |
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