On the question
at the core of the week’s series, and two ways to start answering it.
A few years back,
the New England American Studies Association conference (held at the amazing Boott Cotton
Mills Museum in the Lowell
National Historical Park) focused on the theme of the “Post-American
City.” It’s a provocative and challenging idea, drawn from the title of Fareed
Zakaria’s The Post-American World (2008), but it also has the potential
(if misdirected, I’d argue) to elide the simple but crucial question of where
America’s cities go from here. My grad
school home of Philadelphia, with its neighborhoods of “blight” but also
its downtown and Old City resurgences, often exemplifies these uncertain and
evolving urban arcs, as I wrote in that linked post. But in its own ways, as I
hope this week’s series has demonstrated, Harrisburg and its histories,
stories, communities, and present realities, are just as much at the heart of
this question.
I’m not going to
pretend that I have the answer; but I would argue that one of the greatest
cultural works of the last couple decades, the TV
series The Wire, would be a
really good place to start. On one level, that’s because the show confronts the
realities of 21st century American cities far more directly and
unflinchingly and thoroughly than any other text I know. But on another, The Wire offers one seemingly simple but
generally overlooked way to consider those cities’ futures: by engaging with all of their communities and
populations, including the African American communities that tend to be either
left out of our narratives or included in incredibly simplistic and
stereotypical ways. By focusing in large part (at least initially) on the drug
trade in West Baltimore, The Wire
might be superficially read as reinforcing such stereotypes—but it very quickly
moved well beyond those narratives, and by the time we met the four
middle school boys at the center of Season Four, I would argue the show was
presenting a side of 21st century African American life we had never
seen on American television before.
So that’d be one
way for us to start answering my post’s titular question—to engage more fully
with all those communities who comprise our 21st century cities. A
second, and related, way would be to stop thinking about cities as so
completely distinct from (and even opposed to) other American places and
communities. Obviously our cities have their own identities and histories,
individually and then collectively, that differentiate them from small towns or
rural communities or any other social space. But just as obviously (to anyone
who cares to think about it, at least) they’re full of Americans struggling
with the same 21st century issues we all are: jobs and housing,
education and health care, addictions and crime, communal conflicts and
connections, hope and despair. And like all of us, they can do so better if
they recognize a couple things: the continuing role and meaning of their
histories, including the kinds I’ve highlighted in this series; and the way in
which those histories, like so much else, are unifying links that all Americans
share, a part of the legacies that make us who we are and that we carry with us
into our collective future—whatever we make it.
Special weekend
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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