Harvard University Press Blog

Going Downtown

As a child in Chicago, Emily Remus was enchanted by the sights and sounds of its downtown. Here she tells how those early experiences influenced her in writing A Shoppers’ Paradise, a book about how women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown.

“Downtown,” Petula Clark’s 1964 hit single about the vibrancy of the city center, entranced me long before I began studying urban life. In the early 1990s, nearly three decades after the song’s release, I replayed it endlessly on a plastic phonograph in my bedroom in suburban Chicago. Clark’s crooning insistence that “everything’s waiting for you” downtown seemed patently true to me as a young girl. Downtown—in my case, Chicago’s Loop—was the site of my greatest adventures, a font of novelty and excitement. The lights were “much brighter there,” I thought. You could “forget all your troubles, forget all your cares.”

The commercial landscape of the downtown was especially captivating to my youthful imagination. On every trip with my parents and sisters, I would marvel at the grand hotels, elegant theaters, and lively restaurants. Even more enticing were the glittering store fronts of State Street, especially during the holidays. The mix of color, light, and glass seemed to transform the retail district into a bustling winter wonderland. Nowhere was this effect more pronounced than at Marshall Field & Co., Chicago’s most beloved department store (later acquired by Macy’s). After surveying Field’s elaborate annual window displays, we would, like countless other families, retreat to the store’s seventh floor to sip hot cocoa beneath the twinkling glow of the Walnut Room’s famous Christmas tree. 

Even as a child, I wondered how and by whom the downtown had been created. I could not then have appreciated that the Loop was a product of innumerable policy decisions, commercial choices, cultural priorities, social inequalities, and political exigencies. Nor could I have grasped that its contours had been shaped not only by government officials, business leaders, and reformers but by historical actors not very different from my mother, sisters, and me—by women shoppers.      

This history began, slowly, to come into focus when I entered graduate school at the University of Chicago to study gender and capitalism. Inspired by historians such as Lizabeth Cohen and William Cronon, whose landmark works illuminated the imprint of industrial capitalism on Chicago’s material and cultural landscape, I began to investigate how the expansion of consumer capitalism influenced the urban environment. I probed the early growth of the State Street retail district, tracing the rise of new commercial spaces that catered primarily to female customers—department stores, theaters, grand hotels, restaurants, and soda fountains. These businesses, which proliferated in the 1880s and 1890s, drew an unprecedented number of moneyed white women into the downtown.

As I dug into my research, I expected to find a seamless incorporation, even a warm embrace, of these women into the commercial life of the Loop. After all, their consuming practices helped to fuel Chicago’s remarkable economic development in the late nineteenth century. To my astonishment, I instead uncovered heated conflict and resistance. Far from welcoming female consumers, many Chicago industrialists, city officials, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens challenged the growing presence and pursuits of moneyed women in the city center. Their conspicuously feminine clothing, street etiquette, dining and drinking preferences, entertainment choices, and very manner of walking distinguished them from traditional male occupants of the Loop and provoked intense opposition. The battles ranged from efforts to deny women shoppers access to downtown sidewalks during evening rush hour to the enactment of new laws banning voluminous hoopskirts and large hats to crusades against alcohol consumption in ladies’ cafés and tearooms.

A Shoppers’ Paradise probes these tensions and their consequences. As the book reveals, incorporating women into a downtown dominated by men—and creating an atmosphere favorable to female consumption—was not easy or automatic. In negotiating the terms of women’s public presence, Chicagoans clashed over the appropriate use of downtown space, the rights of women, and the moral legitimacy of new forms of consumption. This conflict, I argue, shaped the creation of a built environment and cultural norms that upheld moneyed white women’s new consuming habits and sustained the growth of American consumer capitalism. Indeed, it produced the class-bounded, racially-homogenous consumer playground that my sisters and I would unthinkingly enjoy a century later. 

I can no longer visit State Street without reflecting on its fraught history, on the opportunities and disparities produced by its development. I am also keenly aware that its landscape is still evolving. Many of the spaces I visited as a girl have since shuttered. State Street, like countless other urban retail districts across the country, has been struggling for decades to attract customers and retain businesses. These problems have only intensified as more and more commerce shifts to the digital realm. A century ago, Chicago civic and business leaders debated how—and whether—to accommodate the growing stream of downtown shoppers. Now, the concern is that this stream may someday dry up. Each moment conjures the same important question—what is a downtown for?

I pose this question not only in A Shoppers’ Paradise but on annual field trips to Chicago for my course on the history of consumer culture at the University of Notre Dame. After touring the Marshall Field building, I prompt my students to wander up and down State Street surveying the architecture and infrastructure. Our goal is to encounter the urban environment as a primary source, a clue to the past. The landscape opens up for my students new vistas for understanding power, inequality, and capitalist transformation. Standing with thirty undergraduates on a crowded street corner discussing the purpose, meaning, and uncertain future of America’s downtowns, I am reminded of the sheer dynamism of these spaces and, at least for a moment, can still find some truth in Petula Clark’s claim that there is “no finer place for sure.” 

Stop Blaming Feminists: The Feminist Movement We Should Remember

In Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family, a spirited defense of feminism, Kirsten Swinth argues that the lack of support for working mothers is less a failure of second-wave feminism than a rejection by reactionaries of the sweeping changes they campaigned for. Here, she dispels some common myths that plague the history of the feminist movement.

Feminism is cool in the age of Donald Trump. The movement is surging. #MeToo, women in Congress, and massive women’s marches are all signs of a new feminist moment. One would think we would be looking to feminist foremothers for inspiration. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Instead, pervasive, sometimes pernicious myths about the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s keep rearing their head.

For the feminist movement we need in the Trump era, these myths must be banished. Bad history blocks urgently needed gains. Today’s distorting myths systematically blame feminist foremothers, rather than their opponents or media misrepresentations, for the predicaments we face today. The facts tell a different story: of a diverse, progressive women’s movement, brimming with visionary solutions for the inequality women faced in workplaces as well as in intimate relationships. If we are to make progress on these issues, we need to hear their voices and take up the mantle of their struggles once again.

So let’s get the facts straight.

Fact #1: Feminists were horrified at the media invention of the liberated woman “having it all” by dint of efficient life management. In reality, feminists fought for changes in family and workplaces to make sure that having a family and having a job could be an option for every woman, just as it had been for men. They believed that society had to change the rules of the game in both workplace and family life in order for equality to truly exist. They demanded a national system of childcare and guaranteed incomes for mothers (especially poor mothers) to care for their children. They fought for equal childcare and housework with men, even writing “marriage contracts” to pin recalcitrant men down to their promises to share the load. Their vision was broad and deep—requiring society and systems to change as much as individuals.

Fact #2: Feminists of all stripes and backgrounds made universal, 24-hour, community-controlled childcare a rallying cry of the movement. The absence of a national childcare system today is often chalked up to feminists’ lack of interest in the issue. This is simply not true. In coalition with civil rights and labor groups, feminists nearly achieved a national childcare system in 1971, until conservatives persuaded Richard Nixon to veto legislation approved by Congress. Even then, that did not stop feminists. A grassroots do-it-yourself ethos spread across the country as feminists passed around tattered manuals on how to start your own daycare center, complete with designs for tot-sized furniture. Childcare centers grew by almost a third nationally between 1970 and 1976.

Fact #3: Feminists of color were leaders, indeed among the vanguard, on many feminist issues. African American feminists in the welfare-rights movement fought for a universal basic income so mothers could care for their children without being forced to work. Domestic workers, largely African American, led a feminist fight to recognize the value of household labor by demanding the minimum wage for nannies, house cleaners, and other household employees. Women of color were leaders in major national organizations like the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), as well as of the National Black Feminist Organization and the Third World Women’s Alliance. Shirley Chisholm and LaDonna Harris were, for example, among the founders of the NWPC which pledged to fight “sexism, racism, institutional violence and poverty” at its founding in 1971. Well-justified frustrations at the insensitivity of many white feminists to the needs of women of color should not erase the leadership and critical contributions of feminists of color to a rich, varied movement.

Fact #4: Feminist activists of the 1960s and 1970s led creative, vibrant campaigns to value housework and caring for children. Feminists saw firsthand the vulnerability of homemakers all around them, particularly with skyrocketing divorce rates in the 1970s. Anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly attacked them for being anti-family and hating housewives, but her charge was unfounded. Women’s rights activists proposed steps still touted today as essential. They calculated the value of household labor and argued that it should count in the gross national product. Feminist legislators and lawyers fought to ensure homemakers had basic rights, like the security of an independent social security account for retirement and a fair share of family property at divorce. The National Organization for Women issued a Homemakers Bill of Rights.

Fact #5: Feminists did not fail and leave us in the pickle we live with today. They were defeated. What they dreamed of achieving was visionary, and ahead of its time. Their opponents found the changes women’s rights activists proposed threatening. If enacted, family relationships and workplace hierarchies would all be upended. These opponents therefore mobilized and successfully countered many feminist proposals. Yet when we look at what feminists really fought for, we see a road map for our own time—a comprehensive vision for changing home and workplace, for involving society in supporting childcare and guaranteeing parental time with children, while accommodating workers with family responsibilities (that is, all of us).

We have foremothers to turn to for inspiration. Edith Barksdale Sloan led domestic workers in their fight for higher wages and better working conditions. Members of the New York Wages for Housework Committee taught us that housework has economic value. Ida Phillips of Florida took her case all the way to the Supreme Court to win the right for mothers not to be denied a job simply because they had children.

By promoting pernicious myths about feminism that have no basis in fact, we do conservatives’ work for them. It’s time to stop blaming feminists and instead to pick up where they left off.

The American Tradition of Torture

As expected, at this week’s Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 “interrogation program” and Haspel’s own role in the program and its aftermath took center stage. Haspel sought to cast the program and its brutal techniques—many of which have since been outlawed—as an aberrant episode in the agency’s history, and vowed that under her leadership “C.I.A. will not restart such a detention and interrogation program.” Just as Haspel aimed to position that use of torture as an outlier in the history of the C.I.A., so too did the hearings propagate an understanding of the brutality of those years as a brief deviation from the long history of moral leadership demonstrated by the United States. Indeed, the majority of Americans would likely share such sentiment: we do not torture.

And yet.

In Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition, forthcoming this fall, decorated American historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows that alongside the long American lineage of denouncing torture there’s an equally enduring culture of both embracing and excusing barbarism. Brundage revisits a series of moments and practices—from the initial contact of Europeans with North America, to the early American republic, to slavery, to the American imperial project, to local law enforcement’s embrace of “the third degree,” through the Cold War, and up to the present—to demonstrate that behavior considered to have been torturous in its own time has been far more prevalent in U.S. history than we acknowledge. By threading this past into a cohesive story of debate and dismissal, Brundage reveals the ways in which the mythos of American exceptionalism has underwritten the narrative so evident this week on Capitol Hill.

The passages below come from the introduction to Civilizing Torture.

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In April 1858 Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular American magazines of the day, published a gruesome article entitled “Torture and Homicide in an American State Prison.” Accompanied by graphic illustrations, the article dwelled on the so-called “water cure,” a punishment during which an inmate was stripped and seated in a stall with his feet and arms fastened in stocks and his head extended up into a tank that fit snugly around his neck. The prisoner’s head was drenched with freezing cold water that cascaded down from a height of a foot or more for several minutes at a time. The tank that encircled the prisoner’s neck emptied slowly, inducing a sensation of drowning while the prisoner struggled to keep his mouth and nose above the pool of draining water.

Thirty years later an investigation of practices at Elmira Reformatory, the most acclaimed American penal institution of the day, revealed that staff there continued to douse prisoners with cold water, in addition to confining them in darkened cells for weeks on end, shackling and hoisting them until their toes barely touched the floor, and “paddling” them with specially made boards. In 1899 American soldiers occupying the Philippines after the Spanish-American War sent home letters boasting of their routine application of a variant of the “water cure” to coerce information from Filipino guerrillas. To apply the “cure,” soldiers pinned their victim to the ground by his legs and arms and partially raised his head “so as to make pouring in the water an easier matter.” If he refused to keep his mouth open, his tormentors pinched his nose closed and used a rifle barrel or bamboo stick to pry his jaws apart. Then they poured water into his overextended mouth until he looked like “a pregnant woman.” According to witnesses, a few applications of the “water cure” usually elicited a flood of information.

A century later, the outlines of the “enhanced interrogation” methods adopted by the Central Intelligence Agency and military interrogators during the “War on Terror” became public. Americans learned that between 2003 and 2006 at least eighty-nine Middle Eastern detainees in CIA custody had been slapped, slammed against walls, deprived of sleep, stuffed into coffins, and threatened with violent death. The most severe method was “waterboarding,” a modern-day variant of the technique applied a century and a half earlier in American prisons. Waterboarding entailed pouring water over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized detainee, which produced an acute sensation of drowning. One detainee endured more than 180 waterboarding sessions.

Facebook Interruptus

In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt assays the deeply troubling implications of pervasive surveillance in our age of lives lived online, and the degree to which we willingly trade our privacy for the fleeting rewards of digital affirmation. To Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University and the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress last week was a pageant that will do nothing to address the perilous dynamic of our society of exposure. Meaningful reform will come only when we recognize the libidinal allure of today’s digital platforms, as Harcourt explains below.

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The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed.

In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but anxious digital distraction. The greatest paradox, perhaps, is how much personal data and digital exhaust we all emitted and how many digital traces we shed watching Zuckerberg and simultaneously fretting over our privacy.

If anything, the Facebook hearings confirm the dreadful bind in which we find ourselves: social media and the Internet companies have us all in the palms of their hands because the digital experience itself is so seductive, consuming, and self-gratifying. Their Faustian business model works because their platforms tap directly into our pleasure centers and trigger deep reward circuits. Seeing our selfies online, tracking our likes and shares, counting our followers and retweets—these stimuli are almost more reinforcing than food or sex. We find ourselves going from one digital platform or device to another, swiping and clicking, pressing the levers like a rat in Skinner’s box, desperately seeking more stimulus and gratification.

And unless and until we come to grips with the place of desire and of our libidinal and at times narcissistic urges in relation to these new digital technologies, we won’t make any progress, we won’t get anywhere. Yes, the #DropFacebook campaign just gained Susan Sarandon and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the vast majority of the users of Facebook—as well as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.—will stay put because these platforms satisfy their desires, provide the gratification, and remain the easiest way to enjoy social relations today, even when they do make us anxious about our privacy.

The fact is, power circulates differently in the digital age, and the social media powerhouses have tapped deep into our pleasure centers and egos. The dark analogies to George Orwell’s 1984 or to Foucault’s “panopticon” just do not capture the present moment, nor will they alone stop us from sharing and liking.   

Today, we are no longer being coerced to give up our privacy, as Winston and Julia were by Big Brother. We are no longer confined to a panoptic cell, naked before the all-seeing guard tower. There is no telescreen forcibly anchored into our apartment walls. Instead, today we share our personal information jubilantly, out of love and desire, and for self-affirmation. We post selfies on Instagram, status updates on Facebook, screeds on Twitter. We invite Echo into our homes. We build personal websites open to all. And it feels so good, it’s so pleasurable, that even when we are warned about how much of our private information the social media and Internet companies have, we cringe but go on.  

The Devil’s Playlist

Ministers denounced it from their pulpits. Sunday school teachers warned their classes of its demonic origins. Yet Christianity and rock ’n’ roll music were surprisingly intertwined from the time when the music first made national headlines in the mid-1950s, and have remained closely linked ever since. Historian Randall Stephens tells the tale of their relationship in The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll, new this month.

As Stephens shows, the long and complex affair between believers and pop culture has been a dynamic story of how the faithful encountered and reacted to the perceived moral chaos surrounding them. Here’s a bit from the book’s introduction:

Rock ’n’ roll’s exciting, unconventional mix of country, gospel, and rhythm and blues was first broadcast on the nation’s radio stations in the mid-1950s. What had seemed like an undeniable abomination would, after the 1960s countercultural revolution, appear less and less problematic. American Christians eventually made an uneasy peace with the pop music that they had once battled so relentlessly. With each passing decade, it had come to seem less and less threatening to the faithful. Pop genres would become key to American Christian identity and church growth, helping make evangelicalism the largest American religious tradition by 2008. As organs and pianos dominated religious music in earlier eras, guitars, drums, keyboards, and bongos were now typical in evangelical churches. Stripped-down praise choruses became the order of the day. Much of what animates evangelical churches in the twenty-first century comes directly from the unlikely fusion of pentecostal religion, conservative politics, and rock and pop music.

A book about music will of course arouse the ears, so Stephens pulled together a playlist of songs and artists that he considers in The Devil’s Music. Have a listen via the player below.

And, from Stephens’s own archive comes the following string of endorsements from some of the book’s key figures.

Jerry Falwell:

Jimmy Swaggart:

And the Beatles themselves:

A Turn to King

In the last months of 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a series of five lectures that stand as his final testament on racism, poverty, and war. Later published as The Trumpet of Conscience, the lectures included King’s urgent call for a global movement for justice:

But we do not have much time. The revolutionary spirit is already world-wide. If the anger of the peoples of the world at the injustice of things is to be channeled into a revolution of love and creativity, we must begin now to work, urgently, with all the peoples, to shape a new world.

That impassioned plea serves now as the epigraph to To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., a new collection edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry, and featuring over a dozen original essays from the likes of Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Cornel West.

The book is an effort to present a full analysis of King’s thinking from the perspectives of political philosophy, political theory, and the history of political thought, fields that have thus far largely failed to recognize King’s contributions. Indeed, though King stands as one of America’s most revered political figures, he has been generously honored but not adequately studied, for a variety of reasons that Shelby and Terry consider in their introduction to the volume. The hope they share with their contributors—who represent different approaches to the history of political thought and political theorizing, and who present differing interpretations of King—is to help readers recognize in King not just a leader to be revered but also an important and challenging thinker whose ideas remain relevant and have surprising implications for public political debate.

Given the crises of our own political and intellectual moment, the volume is imbued with the very sense of urgency that King expressed in those lectures of 1967. Here are Shelby and Terry, who allude to James Baldwin’s 1961 Harper’s piece on “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King” in assessing our own path forward:

Not even a decade after the first African American president of the United States installed a bust of King in the Oval Office, our landscape has been dominated by insurgent social movements and urban riots, racist invective and ethno-nationalism, intractable inequality and civic distrust, and a loss of faith in political institutions and, possibly, in democracy itself. In a way reminiscent and resonant with the later years of King’s life, we find ourselves and our students more frequently asking difficult and unsettling questions about what political morality and justice demand of us. On campus, battles over how or whether to forge community, and over the stance we should take toward those persons and ideas with which we have profound disagreements, are waged with passion and often contempt. So, too, are those controversies regarding the role of philosophical reflection on and in politics, and the place of academics and intellectuals within the muck and mire of public debate. Our suggestion is that now, perhaps especially, with all that is at stake, a turn to King and his efforts in public philosophy can provide us with a more robust ethical vocabulary, a smarter set of judgments, a more expansive political imagination, and a richer set of traditions to help navigate our own “dangerous road.”

In this year of the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination, we still and again face the need to shape a new world.

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Brandon Terry edited a forthcoming Boston Review forum, Fifty Years Since MLK, featuring contributions from Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Andrew Douglas, Jeanne Theoharis, Elizabeth Hinton, and Bernard E. Harcourt; read Terry’s introductory essay on the intellectual and political significance of King here.

Stuart Hall’s Fateful Triangle

The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, and Nation, new this month, is the first publication of the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures delivered by Stuart Hall in 1994. Hall, a Jamaican-born theorist and a founding father of the field of cultural studies, said that his aim in the lectures was to update Du Bois’s formulation of the problem of the color line by viewing the question of ethnicity’s unresolved relationship to race, on the one hand, and to nation, on the other in a way that radically unsettles all three terms. “Posing the question in this way,” said Hall, “presents us with what I see as the problem of the twenty-first century—the problem of living with difference—in a manner that is not only analogous to the problem of the ‘color line’ that W. E. B Du Bois pointed to more than a hundred years ago but also a historically specific transformation of it.” As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. remarks in his Foreword to The Fateful Triangle, Hall “wanted to show both the fallacy of relying on the old categories, laced as they were with power, and the risk of courting fundamentalism in defending them, a warning that seems remarkably prophetic today.” A passage from Gates’s Foreword is below.

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What we might think of as “Hall’s Dilemma”—the challenge of keeping people from investing meaning into “race” as a category of biological difference, based on superficial differences visible to the eye—is as old as some of the earliest European encounters with “the other” in Africa and the New World in the modern period (beginning five hundred years ago), when differences of culture and phenotype soon fused with economic desire and exploitation to produce “the African” as a new and mostly negative signifier. And for centuries, this toxic compound has played into our very human instinct for defining ourselves through some of our most obvious, often “measurable” differences, such as skin color, cranial size, width of nose, and other body parts, all haphazardly gathered under the category of “race,” which itself at various times could either be an amalgam of ethnicity, religion, and nationality, or be separate from each of these.

Through what Hall described as a loose but lethal “chain of equivalences” (a concept he borrowed from the Argentinean political philosopher Ernesto Laclau) drawn between what the eyes could see and what the mind could perceive, hierarchical scaffolding of one kind or another has been erected, with those in power seizing the authority to produce knowledge about what those differences, arbitrarily elevated over others in importance, signified, and then to act on those differences, or that chain of differences, with devastating real-world consequences.

What also intrigued Hall was how oppressed groups themselves, in acts of seeming self-liberation, inverted these categories without discarding them, instead championing racial or ethnic pride as if they believed that after surviving the lethal effects of essentialization, the most efficacious way to defeat, say, anti-black or anti-brown racism or colonialism was to flip the script, embrace physical differences, and essentialize themselves. And so the boundaries of nations-within-nations were drawn, with those at the center and those on the periphery locked in a struggle over power rather than a struggle over the discursive terms expressive or reflective of that power. In other words, in a messy world of mixing and migrations, he observes, the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nationality somehow maintained their distinctiveness—a development that not only offended Hall’s cosmopolitan sensibilities but troubled him as he searched for a better, more just, more reliable signifier of cultural difference.

Giving Hall’s quest its urgency was the fact that the world in the mid-1990s was rapidly shrinking, with one century giving way to another at a time of increasing technological change, economic interdependence, and mass migration, accompanied by a rise in fundamentalism along racial, ethnic, national, and religious lines. Hall saw pockets of hope in the creative yearnings of marginalized groups laying claim to new “identifications” and “positionalities,” and fashioning out of shared historical experience “signifiers of a new kind of ethnicized modernity, close to the cutting edge of a new iconography and a new semiotics that [was] redefining ‘the modern’ itself”—a theme Hall had explored in his seminal essay “New Ethnicities,” first delivered as a conference paper at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1988.

At the same time, however, he saw that there was cause for grave concern that the world could pull apart along the old, worn-out seams just as it had begun to come together, with rigid categories of racial, ethnic, and national differences only hardening in the face of the prospect—or threat—of meaningful change. Hall “advocated for a different, postcolonial understanding of multiculturalism,” the historian James Vernon writes. “It was one that both acknowledged and celebrated the hybrid and mongrelized nature of cultures that slavery and colonialism had both produced and displaced. Colonial history ensured that it was no longer possible to conceive of specific communities or traditions whose boundaries and identities were settled and fixed.”

Realist though Stuart Hall was when it came to the potency and indisputable resiliency of racial, ethnic, and national schemes, he did not come to Harvard in April 1994 to replay broken records. Instead, he came, as he said in his first lecture, “to complicate and unsettle” society’s persistently held notions of race, ethnicity, and nation—what he referred to in the title of the lecture series as a “fateful triangle”—and to open up new possibilities for defining our twenty-first-century selves. Not only did he teach that those old categories of difference failed to capture the blurriness of human existence, the myriad intersections of identities, pasts, and backgrounds; he also made plain that, in pretending to represent anything close to pure boundaries between groups, those old categories carried with them histories of oppression, perpetuating dangerous group-think while reinforcing hierarchical notions of cultural difference. The slate needed to be wiped clean, and Stuart was holding the eraser.

How Muslim Women Dress

Can a modest and religious woman also be fashionable and stylish? One’s immediate response to such a question can reveal quite a bit about their position in and perspective on the world. As Elizabeth Bucar shows in Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress, there’s no inherent incompatibility between modesty and beauty, and modest fashion represents much more than social control or religious orthodoxy. Bucar’s ethnographic work in the stores and streets of Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul reveals the locally-determined moral and aesthetic values exemplified by Islamic dress, and the comparative design of the project serves to deepen our understanding of Islamic politics. Ramin Raza, a Northeastern University student who interned with us at HUP this summer, spoke with Bucar about the book and its conclusions; their conversation is below.

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Q: For many non-Muslims living in the West, the major source of exposure to Islam and to Muslim dress is through media outlets that depict women’s attire from a Western or even Orientalist perspective. From your time in three Muslim countries, how did your experience of “pious fashion” challenge these notions and highlight the varying expressions of piety through dress?

It’s a good question to begin with since I suspect many non-Muslims and Muslims alike view pious fashion—and a headscarf—as a sign of Muslim women’s oppression, that they don’t make their own decisions, that they are controlled by patriarchy in some way that is radically different from other women. That is just too simplistic a view. All women feel the effects of gender ideologies and this affects how we present ourselves in public—including our dress. But within these pressures and constraints we still have some degree of choice. Even in Tehran, where hijab is required, a woman has to decide every morning what to wear to abide by those regulations—and the options are endless.

Q: In Pious Fashion, you illustrate how a nation’s cultural and sociopolitical ideology materializes in women’s fashion, and consequently, falls on the woman’s body to reflect and uphold. Briefly, how do Muslim women in Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul navigate these structural forces and assert agency through pious fashion?

The three locations studied in my book are case studies to explore the specifics of how women’s dress can be seen as a response to and even critique of these ideologies. But I don’t think I can summarize each location in a pithy sentence. In fact that is part of the reason I wrote this book. Clothing everywhere can be read, and in our own culture we do it all the time. I might note how my student’s T-shirt, my colleague’s suit, or the height of my friend’s boots convey social privilege, gender norms, or power. But when we try to read clothing in other cultures, we often make mistakes because we base our interpretations on our own aesthetic and moral assumptions. So it is only by thinking about a particular trend or clothing item within a web of moral and aesthetic values that we can see how Muslim women can use pious fashion to express their individual taste, identity, cosmopolitanism, and even politics.

Q: You explain in the book that piety and fashion do not challenge each other, but rather inform one another to bring nuance and broader meaning to Muslim women’s dress. How, then, does pious fashion communicate in a way that is both Islamic and secular?  

We think there is a hard line between what is religious and what is secular. But in everyday life, that line is blurred. The same scarf I might buy in a hijab store in Tehran—which I must wear by law in that country as part of a governmental effort to make the public space more Islamic—I might buy in Urban Outfitters in Boston as part of my own effort to add some hipster vibe to my casual weekend outfit. The actual material items are not as invested with special meaning as we might think. And this winter we saw Shepard Fairey’s image of a woman in an American flag headscarf adopted as one of the most prominent symbols of the Women’s March in DC. Influence goes both ways. Secular trends effect pious fashion, but religious clothing makes piety fashionable in mainstream culture as well.

Chuck Berry and the Racial Imagination of Rock

Rock and roll superstar Chuck Berry, whose early work did so much to define the genre, died at 90 on March 18th. Some of the appreciations published in the days since his passing have noted Berry’s prickly relationship to a rock establishment that championed white musicians who, as Jon Caramanica writes, “had been studying him, and were building up a version of rock ’n’ roll that no longer required Mr. Berry, nor his blackness.” The messy transition from Chuck Berry’s rock and roll to that new “version” is the subject of Jack Hamilton’s Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, which we published last year—the book’s cover depicts Berry sharing a moment with Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, whose bandmate Keith Richards Berry would later punch in the face for helping himself to Berry’s guitar. Hamilton’s opening pages are below.

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In January of 1973—the same month that the Rolling Stones were banned from touring Japan due to prior drug convictions, the same month that a band called Kiss (or KISS) played its first gig in Queens, and the same month that a young New Jerseyan named Bruce Springsteen released his debut album on Columbia Records—Harper’s magazine published an essay by future Pulitzer Prize–winner Margo Jefferson entitled “Ripping Off Black Music.” The piece was partly a broad historical overview of white appropriations of black musical forms, from blackface minstrel pioneer T. D. Rice through the current day, and partly a more personal lament over what Jefferson, an African American critic, had come to see as an incorrigible and endless cycle of cultural plunder. The article’s most striking moment arrived in its penultimate paragraph:

The night Jimi died I dreamed this was the latest step in a plot being designed to eliminate blacks from rock music so that it may be recorded in history as a creation of whites. Future generations, my dream ran, will be taught that while rock may have had its beginnings among blacks, it had its true flowering among whites. The best black artists will thus be studied as remarkable primitives who unconsciously foreshadowed future developments.

That Jefferson’s “dream” came true is so obvious it seems self-evident. According to anthropologist Maureen Mahon, by the mid-1970s young black musicians who wanted to play songs by Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad recalled being ridiculed by white and black peers. In July of 1979 thousands of white rock fans rioted at Chicago’s Comiskey Park at the now mythic “Disco Demolition Night,” burning disco records in what many since have described as an antiblack, antigay, antiwoman, reactionary uprising. In 1985, the Hollywood blockbuster Back to the Future featured a climactic sequence in which history is altered so that Chuck Berry’s “sound” is retroactively invented by a Van Halen–obsessed white teenager. By 2011, when a popular New York “Classic Rock” radio station held a listener poll to determine the “Top 1,043” songs of all time, only twenty-two—roughly 2 percent—were recordings by African American artists, and sixteen of those twenty-two were by the late Jimi Hendrix (the “Jimi” of Jefferson’s dream), the lone black performer whose place in rock music hagiography is entirely secure.

Jefferson’s words above were accurate, and it’s tempting to call them prophetic, but they weren’t: Jefferson’s nightmare had in fact come true before she wrote her article, even before “the night Jimi died.” When Hendrix passed away in 1970, one prominent obituary pointedly described him as “a black man in the alien world of rock,” and throughout Hendrix’s tragically brief stardom the guitarist’s race had been an incessant topic of fascination among fans of the music that had once been known as “rock and roll.” Even in the late 1960s, the hypervisibility of Hendrix’s race confirmed a racial imagination of rock music that was quickly rendering blackness invisible, so much so that at the time of his death the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was literally remarkable—“alien”—in a way that would have been inconceivable for Chuck Berry only a short while earlier.

This is a book about how this happened, how rock and roll music—a genre rooted in African American traditions, and many of whose earliest stars were black—came to be understood as the natural province of whites. Moreover, this is a book about how and why this happened during a decade generally understood to be marked by unprecedented levels of interracial aesthetic exchange, musical collaboration, and commercial crossover more broadly. Many of the most famous moments of 1960s music are marked by interracial fluidity: a young Bob Dylan’s transformation of a nineteenth-century antislavery anthem, “No More Auction Block for Me,” into the basis for a song that would become one of the most indelible musical works of the American civil rights era; or the revolution of Motown Records, in which a black American entrepreneur actually bet against the racism of white America and won, and in doing so created the most successful African American-owned business in the country. Or the previously unimaginable inundation of groups from England, most notably a quartet from Liverpool called the Beatles and a quintet from London called the Rolling Stones, both of whom were tireless evangelists for black American music and would soon hear their own songs performed, frequently, by the very musicians they once idolized. And of course there was Aretha Franklin, the Memphis-born and Detroit-raised daughter of one of America’s most famous black preachers, who linked up with a band of white southerners and transformed R&B music; and Jimi Hendrix himself, a black man from Seattle who’d joined up with a couple of white Englishmen in London, and transformed the possibilities of the electric guitar.

If, then, by the time of Hendrix’s death, rock and roll music had in fact “become white,” how did this happen, and why? And perhaps most importantly, if rock and roll music did “become white,” what does it even mean to say such a thing? What ideological forces and cultural logics conspire to elide the audible imaginary of music with the visual imaginary of race? These are questions that we often assume we know the answers to—after all, to describe a singer as “sounding black” or “sounding white” is to gesture toward entire universes of ill-defined but widely understood aesthetic criteria—and yet we rarely take the time to really ask them, to peel back everything that makes such descriptions both nonsensical and strangely commonsense. If we fix our eyes and ears and step back far enough, the repeated disruptions and reconstitutions of this elision of race and sound begin to resemble something like the history of American music itself.

Homesteading in Harlem

Harlem—America’s most famous neighborhood—transformed in the late twentieth century from the epitome of urban crisis to the most vivid embodiment of urban revival. Yet while observers point to Harlem as a dramatic exemplar of gentrification, historian Brian Goldstein locates the genesis of Harlem’s remarkable change in an unexpected place—the radical social movements of the 1960s, which sought to give Harlemites control over a built environment that officials had long shaped from the top down. In movements for community control, Harlemites demanded the right to plan their own redevelopment, founding an array of new community-based organizations to pursue that goal. In the following decades, those grassroots organizations became the crucibles in which residents debated competing conceptions of what Harlem should look like and who should live there. 1960s activists envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African-American residents. The new millennium saw, instead, a neighborhood with an increasingly expensive price of admission. In The Roots of Urban Renaissance, Goldstein charts the connection between these events and, in the process, offers an alternative to accounts that explain gentrification as something that happened to neighborhoods like Harlem. Indeed, the Harlem of the new century was not simply imposed on an unwitting community by affluent outsiders but grew from its grassroots, producing a legacy that both helped and harmed longtime residents.

In the excerpt below, Goldstein tells of the homesteading movement that took root in 1970s Harlem, where low-income residents came to see the rehabilitation of abandoned buildings as a means to learn construction skills and gain much-needed jobs in addition to housing.

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Groups coalesced rapidly in the early 1970s, representing both the interests of single buildings and the collective interests of like-minded groups. The Renigades were one of many small grassroots organizations to promote self-help rehabilitation. Though a self-described “street gang,” its members had turned the group toward neighborhood improvement, with involvement in activities like voter registration and exposure of drug dealers. Indeed, despite claiming criminal records, the Renigades were in many ways typical of homesteaders in general. Homesteaders were mostly young—a majority were under thirty years old—with income below the poverty line. The former squatters of Operation Move-In were among the Renigades’ contemporaries. Operation Move-In had taken ownership of an abandoned building just south of Harlem at 948 Columbus Avenue in October 1973, a transaction arranged by sympathetic city employees. In 1974, members of the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood began a rehab project in two long-abandoned adjacent Central Harlem tenements, at 55 St. Nicholas Avenue and 132 West 113th Street. The next year, in the spring of 1975, seven low-income Harlem families formed an organization called United Harlem Growth. The families all lived in abandoned housing, public housing, or apartments soon to come out of rent control, and saw in homesteading a chance to own stable, affordable homes. By 1976, United Harlem Growth—led by David Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s son, and with an expanded membership of fifteen families—had purchased five city-owned abandoned brownstones on 136th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues with plans to renovate them into low-income cooperative housing. In a parallel effort, tenants in single buildings across Harlem pursued conversion to cooperative status, to gain control of apartments that negligent landlords had effectively abandoned and to pool rents toward needed repairs.

Organizations with close ties in and near Harlem formed to unite these disparate but likeminded efforts. In 1974, the leaders of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, located just across Morningside Park from Harlem, formed the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), in response to nearby squatters who questioned the church’s commitment to its neighbors. The new organization assisted participants in the incipient movement; for instance, UHAB helped the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood locate the buildings that members would rehabilitate. Similarly, a collection of community-based organizations came together in 1974 to form the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers (ANHD), a resource intended to amass collective experience and technical expertise. Members included groups from the Bronx, the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn, as well as West Harlem Group Assistance, UHAB, and the West Harlem Community Organization (WHCO), the long-standing force that had played a central role in opposing disruptive urban renewal.

Such efforts emerged as part of a broader citywide network, whose proponents believed that through their own sweat they could provide decent housing for low-income residents. Philip St. Georges, a homesteading advocate who claimed partial responsibility for inventing the term “sweat equity,” became the Zelig of self-help housing, working at times with Msgr. Fox, the city, the Renigades, and UHAB. He explained the potential of abandoned buildings, which for many appeared as only a problem to be excised. “While many abandoned buildings may be structurally sound, and capable of being rehabilitated, they represent an overwhelming public nuisance in the eyes of City policy makers. They are a liability. And increasingly, they are simply demolished,” St. Georges wrote in 1973. However, for many groups of low-income tenants who suddenly see an opportunity to own their own homes, take control over their own lives, and improve the condition of their neighborhood, these vacant and abandoned structures are anything but a liability. They are a true resource. And indeed, they may be the last resource.”