by Micaela di Leonardo
about Micaela di Leonardo
Micaela di Leonardo is Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Among her works are Exotics at Home, The Gender/Sexuality Reader, and Black Radio/Black Resistance: The Life & Times of the Tom Joyner Morning Show.
City
Raymond Williams (1973) demonstrated the overarching significance of the keywords “city” and “country,” establishing the simultaneously positive and negative inflections of urbanity and rurality. For urbanity, on the positive side were the values of learning, light, progress, civilization, cosmopolitanism, tolerance and civil liberties, excitement, and sophistication; on the negative lay the countervalues of sin, darkness and noise, corruption and devolution, danger and violence, irreligion, mob rule, and anomie—in short, urban modernity and its discontents. As Williams noted, these city/country oppositions are always invoked in the service of political interests. Diverse social actors described European and, later, US urban life in ways that shifted and evolved with cities themselves. Troubadours, priests, ministers, and Romantic poets gave way to flaneurs and other urban observers, who then gave way to social statisticians, settlement-house workers, novelists, playwrights, journalists, photographers, and painters. The new social scientists and artists took cities and urban dwellers as their research objects, as problems to be solved, and as material to be dramatized. In this thrifty recycling of tropes, a set of symbolic associations arose linking the European and American urban poor to colonized others through their mutual need for instruction from their betters (di Leonardo 1998). The voluminous writings...
City
[**Read the full keyword essay on “City”**](/american-cultural-studies/essay/city/) Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the presidential election, along with the unprecedented January 6th Capitol insurrection and the COVID crisis, have even further shifted the meaning of “city” in a US context since I last updated [the essay on that keyword](/american-cultural-studies/essay/city/). Trump’s repeated racist dog whistle attacks against majority-minority “Democrat cities” – first meaning those declaring themselves refugee sanctuaries, but later as a condemnation of Black Lives Matter protestors – were amplified by [rightist media claims](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/andy-ngo-right-wing-troll-antifa-877914/) that “Antifa” was torching cities and attacking police while protesting police violence against people of color. Thus we saw a Trumpian reboot of underclass ideology, focused in particular on “Black and brown urban mobs” – that were assumed to be central to the “stolen” election. But as the Capitol insurrection and [scholarly studies](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/us/domestic-terrorist-groups.html?searchResultPosition=2) show, actual domestic terrorist threats have long arisen largely from the white supremacist right. It is not only progressive groups who now contest the “right to the city” that I discussed in my keyword essay, but also misogynists, violent racists, Nazis, and anti-mask and anti-vaccine protestors – such as those who disrupted the Dodger Stadium vaccination effort – all of whom may overlap. The...