Urban Cultures of/in the United States: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

185 Pages·2010·0.987 MB·English

by  Andrea Carosso (ed.)

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Andrea Carosso (Ed.)
Urban Cultures of/in
the United States
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
This book collects the efforts of a team of scholars working at the University of
Torino under the auspices of the Project WWS (World-Wide Style). Focusing on
diverse areas of inquiry into the transformations of the American city, the essays
in this volume provide perspectives for understanding the complexity of urban
cultures in the United States in the late 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries.
Organized thematically, this book includes contributions in three main areas. The
fi rst area covers studies in U.S. history and history of ideas at the turn of the 20th
century, in light of its migration/immigration processes as well as in its represen-
tations of national greatness and cultural hegemony as refl ected in World’s Fairs.
The second area covers analyses of American literature in the double perspective
of the recent emergence of a new form of “global novel”, as well as the develop-
ments of new subgenres of urban fi ction. A third area on inquiry focuses on new
practices of organized religion in North America arising from the regionalization of
the American metropolis in recent decades.
Andrea Carosso teaches American Literature and Culture at the University of
Torino, where he is also Director of the Master Program in American Studies and
Director of the Centro di Studi Americani ed Euro-Americani “Piero Bairati”. His re-
cent publications include a book length study of Vladimir Nabokov (Invito alla lettura
di Vladimir Nabokov, Milano, 1999) and the forthcoming Redeeming the Fifties:
American Culture in the Age of the Cold War. He is the author of several journal
articles on urban cultures in the U.S., and a forthcoming book-length study of urban
cultures in the American South-West. He has co-edited Real Cities. Rappresen-
tazioni della città negli Stati Uniti e in Canada (Torino, 2006).
Urban Cultures of/in
the United States

Andrea Carosso (Ed.)
Urban Cultures of/in
the United States
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
PETER LANG
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Urban cultures of/in the United States : interdisciplinary perspectives /
Andrea Carosso (ed.).
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-3-0351-0033-4 (alk. paper)
1. American literature–20th century–History and criticism. 2. American literature–
19th century–History and criticism. 3. City and town life in literature. 4. Cities and
towns in literature. 5. City and town life–United States. 6. Cities and towns–United
States. I. Carosso, Andrea, 1958-
PS228.C54U73 2010
810.9'355–dc22
2010000354
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ISBN 978-3-0351-0033-4
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Contents
Introduction .......................................................................................... 7

DANUTA ROMANIUK
How “the Other Half” Eats:
The Cultural Significance of Foodways in
an Urban Context as Reflected in the Writings
of Jewish American Women, 1890–1939 ........................................... 11
LUIGI STEFANIZZI
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Elite from
The Philadelphia Negro to “Talented Tenth” ..................................... 43
BAHAR GURSEL
Two Cities, Two Fairgrounds:
Chicago’s 1893 World Columbians Exposition
and Turin’s1911 International Exposition .......................................... 63
CARMEN CONCILIO
From West Bengal to New York:
The Global Novels of Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai ...................... 87
YOMNA SABER
Self-Perception While Walking in the City in
Charles Johnson’s Faith and the Good Thing .................................. 121
6 Contents

SONIA DI LORETO
Cooking up Mystery:
Contemporary Mystery Novels and American Cities ....................... 147
ANDREA CAROSSO
“Friend of God”:
Megachurches and the New Frontiers of the American Exurb ......... 161

Notes on Contributors ....................................................................... 181
Introduction
This book collects the efforts of a team of scholars working at the
University of Torino in the academic year 2008–2009 under the aus-
pices of the WWS (World-Wide Style) Project. The program, pro-
moted by the University of Torino and sponsored by Fondazione
CRT, aimed at bringing young scholars from new EU accession coun-
tries, Asia, North Africa and Latin America to work at Torino with
already established research units in several disciplinary fields.
The group I coordinated operated around Torino’s Master in
American Studies and contributed original research for a project on
urban cultures in the United States, which this volume intends to pre-
sent. The group consisted of scholars of North American and post-
colonial studies, some of them permanently connected with the uni-
versity of Torino, others on 3 to 9 months fellowships under the WWS
program. The aim of the research was to provide new approaches to
the analysis of urban cultures in America from the interdisciplinary
perspective of the three main areas of specialization of the scholars
involved, namely North American literature, culture and history.
Although focusing on diverse areas of urban studies, the essays in
this volume try to provide a new perspective for understanding the
complexity of urban cultures in the United States in the late 19th, 20th
and early 21st centuries. As a result, studies ranging from an analysis
of the celebration of national greatness at the Chicago World’s Fair of
1893 and related events in Europe to an enquiry into the transforma-
tion of religious practices in the American “exurb” at the dawn of the
21st century, all attempt to contribute added value to the crucial field
of American urban scholarship.
The book is organized thematically. In the opening two essays, two
specific cases of the US migration/immigration process are analyzed.
Danuta Romaniuk’s “How ‘the Other Half’ Eats,” looks at the cultural
significance of foodways in an urban context as reflected in the writ-
ings of Jewish American women of Polish origin in turn-of-the-20th -
8 Introduction
century New York and Chicago. Luigi Stefanizzi’s “Transcending the
Urban Context” studies the way in which, at around the same time,
urban sociologists, and W.E.B. Du Bois in particular, were developing
a language and a practice of analysis of African-American society
which would become the blueprint for many subsequent articulations
of black elitism and intra-racial class stratification.
The third essay in this collection tries to appropriate the methodol-
ogy of the study of World’s Fairs, with specific reference to the vast
scholarship on the Chicago’s Columbia Exposition of 1893, and apply
it to a lesser studied international exposition which took place in
Torino in 1911. Working from the perspective of Euro-American stud-
ies, Bahar Gursel in “Two Cities, Two Fairgrounds” argues that the
Columbian Exposition of 1893 and Torino’s International Exposition
of 1911 shared significant common traits, mostly in the ways both cit-
ies, from the heartlands of their respective continents, strove to reveal
the national greatness and cultural hegemony of their host countries.
The next three essays, more literary in scope, provide interesting
background on three extremely rich areas of urban literature. Carmen
Concilio’s “From West Bengal to New York” offers, from a postcolo-
nial perspective, insights on the literature of the Indian diaspora in New
York City through the writings of two young US-Indian women writ-
ers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai, whose fictions of migration, up-
rootedness and re-territorialization allow for a re-consideration of
American literature in its relationship to the new global novel. Yomna
Saber’s “Self-Perception while Walking in the City” is a study of the
1974 novel Faith and the Good Thing by Caribbean author Charles
Johnson, a novel set in Chicago and thematizing urban flânerie through
the complex and degraded web of post-urban ghettos. And Sonia Di
Loreto’s “Cooking up Mystery” studies the ways in which a contempo-
rary sub-genre of the detective fiction, the so-called “culinary mystery
novel,” uses the urban context, Los Angeles and New York in particu-
lar, in order to make sense of the contemporary urban space.
My concluding “Megachurches and the New Frontiers of the
American Exurb” questions the way in which contemporary American
cities, especially the still growing metropolitan centers of the area once
known as the “American heartland,” have developed into regional cen-
ters that defy more traditional understandings of urbanism, while at the