Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Abstract The city as a site of everyday practice provides valuable insights into
▪
the linkages of the global capitalist economy with the texture and fabric of
human experience. My comments focus on cities as centers of abuse, violence
and enslavement as documented in the papers of Ida Susser and Peter Kwong. I
place each author’s critique within this urban order by using the images of the
’ethnic city’, ’gendered city’, and ’global city’. By focusing on spatial images of
cities, I redirect our attention to the sites of social problems produced by expan-
sion of global capitalism, and to the location of possible resistance.
Keywords ▪ ethnicity ▪ gender ▪ globalization ▪ urban anthropology ▪ urban
theory
Introduction
403-
because, from the bosses’ perspective, the illegals better because they
are
are young and willing to work longer hours. These issues and others are dis-
cussed at greater length in Kwong’s book (forthcoming).
In his article, however, even a raid by the Brooklyn District Attorney to
enforce labor standards and protect the workers’ interests, was met with
what seemed to uninformed observers to be a demonstration of ethnic soli-
darity and a political statement that Chinese workers did not mind working
under sweatshop conditions. The reality, though, is that workers had no
choice and were forced to march since the owners closed the factories and
paid workers for showing up at the rally. The constraints of being an illegal
immigrant, without adequate English, dependent on Chinese associations
and network of affiliations creates an ethnic enclave that limits new immi-
grants looking for other options, and plays into the hand of Chinese
employers (Kwong, forthcoming). Chinatown, like Little Italy in Philadel-
phia and Little Saigon in Los Angeles, is an urban neighborhood where
people of the same ethnic group exploit rather than support one another
based on their common cultural ties of language and custom.
This portrayal of ethnic group betrayal is one of the most salient aspects
of the ’ethnic city’. As illustrated by the difficulties facing the protagonist in
Little Odessa (1994), a movie about a man who is trying to escape the Russian
mafia who control the immigrant community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn,
it is impossible to escape the pressures of one’s cultural group when one stays
-
but trying to leave can lead to unexpected, and sometimes unfortunate cir-
cumstances such as one’s own death. Little Odessa depicts one of the mythic
images of an east coast ethnic city. This image, which has deep historical
roots, gives increased attention to ethnic politics and ethnically based urban
social movements. These communities are different from other parts of the
city in their structure of job opportunity, access to local power, location of
headquarters and subsidiary relations, and self-conscious creation of collec-
tive identities that define the parameters of group success and failure.
There are two dominant streams of research in the study of the ethnic
city: first, the ethnic city as a mosaic of enclaves that are economically, lin-
guistically and socially self-contained as a strategy of political and economic
survival (Zhou, 1992); and, second, studies of ethnic groups that may or
may not function as enclaves, but are defined by their location in the occu-
pational structure (Markowitz, 1993), their position in the local immigrant
social structure (Margolis, 1994), their degree of marginality (Mahler,
1995) and/or their historical and racial distinctiveness as the basis of dis-
crimination and oppression (Fong, 1995).
Peter Kwong’s work on Chinatown and Sunset Park demonstrates how
studies of urban ethnic communities provide critical insights into collective
ethnic politics and how these politics can work against the worker, but also
generates questions about the intentions of the individual within this
system. Is there only the ’pull’ of the demand for low-cost illegal workers in
the United States, or is there an equally powerful push from the poverty
and family circumstances of prospective immigrants in China? How do we
include the individual’s motivation and experience within this structural
analysis? Where is the textured analysis of structure and experience, of the
social production of the sweatshops mediated by the social construction of
the world of the Chinese immigrant? These questions need to be answered
in order to understand fully the dialectic of how the needs of the individual
articulate with the larger, in this case oppressive, social system.
gendered city.
Blim, however, finds something wrong with this global economic
picture. He is concerned with ’meaningful anomalies’ where there is no
adequate fit between the empirical evidence and the theory. He identifies
one area where the process of capital accumulation and outcomes of social
relations are now what would be predicted by the increasingly global and
flexible character of the capitalist world economy: property connections.
In terms of the global city it is still an open question whether a change
in property connections offers an alternative urban model. While Susser’s
and Kwong’s critiques respond to the city as a center of enslavement and
abuse, Blim’s critique suggests an oppositional urban image, one based on
collective and communal property rights found in industrializing China. It
is too early in his analysis for Blim to direct us to the urban consequences
of such restructuring, and the challenge will be to make these linkages
explicit. If Blim is correct that the changes we have observed in property
practices are not due to the globalizing of the economy, then are there
’global’ cities in his vision of late capitalism?
Is the image of a global city that fragments bodies and places useful in
Blim’s oppositional model, or does his critique also bring into question the
work of Sassen (1991) and the theory of the global city? Where would
Conclusion
A number of useful images of the city have been identified that organize
this commentary. The ethnic city provides a forum for discussing illegal
immigration and the development of ethnic politics, the gendered city
creates a new vision of urban poverty and homelessness, while the theory
of a global city has been called into question.
Some of these areas of research have been particularly influential. The
anthropological twist on globalization has focused attention on the trans-
national aspects of migration, culture-making and identity management,
and on the shifting cultural environments and meanings that contextualize
and decontextualize behavior. Ethnographies offer a critique of inner-city
life that provides a more complex understanding of the differences
between cities’ and residents’ responses to racial segregation, gender
degradation and class inequality. And these detailed examinations of the
relationship of labor practices and late capitalism illustrate how workers
have become enslaved within the global economy.
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