The official end to communism in Eastern Europe marked the onset of major migratory movements. Perhaps the most abrupt of these population shifts was the displacement of more than two million people in Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. Much of the existing literature on refugee migration has focused on victimization and citizenship claims. Alternatively, I draw on ethnographic research among Bosnian refugee-immigrants in Chicago to examine how a group of adult women migrants used one commodity - coffee - to manage and evaluate their displacements. The kind of slow-coffee drinking described here is informed by an ethics of consumption developed under Yugoslav socialism, nostalgias for pre-Yugoslav Islam and pre-Ottoman Bosnia, and exposure to U.S. neoliberalism. Placing consumption at the center of analysis reveals the structural constraints of the postconflict period and brings to light refugees’ active navigations of everyday life and society in their postsocialist present, lived out as refugees in the United States.
In 2017, the City of New Orleans removed four segregation-era monuments celebrating the Southern Confederacy and valorizing white supremacist ideology. As in other cities, efforts to remove such monuments are not new, and historically have been connected to collective challenges to racialized inequality, and more recently to transnational postcolonial struggles. Given the longstanding activism in favor of removing such monuments I ask, Why now? In exploring this question, I examine the circulation of images, talk, and text about the monuments in relation to the city's post-2005 political economy and find that people's expressed sentiments regarding the statues illuminate the ongoing challenges faced by New Orleans' multiracial working-class and poor residents. I argue that the city administration's framing of the monuments as emblems of an unequal past decouples the monuments' removal from the urgent need to meaningfully address present inequalities. While clearing the cityscape of these four monuments makes neighborhoods more palatable to residents who oppose overt symbols of white supremacy, it may also paradoxically contribute to gentrified redevelopment that displaces predominantly non-white poor and working-class residents.
During 2010s, in response to new food truck operators, the city of New Orleans loosened regulations for food truck vending. At the same time the city turned its regulatory eye towards other forms of street vending and introduced a new second line vending ordinance. Using the New Orleans case, we argue that relaxing rather than revising regulations—and subsequently planning for ways to make street vending compatible with other activities—would be more effective and just. The authors participated in and observed 32 second line parades (parades organized and sponsored by African-American historic benevolent societies) during one season to understand how second line vending played out and the potential impacts of the new ordinance. This analysis demonstrates that compliance with the second line ordinance would have restricted vending without resolving identified concerns. New Orleans is an instructive case because the intent was to allow rather than eliminate vending. We argue that increasing compatibility between vending and other street activities makes food and goods available in the spaces were urban residents can most easily access them, and thereby establishes a more effective and just public space.
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