There's No Place Like Home: Domestic Domains and Urban Imaginaries in New Haven, Connecticut

Abstract

In this article, I attempt to adumbrate shifting race, class, and gender politics in the United States through a "world in a grain of sand" focus on one American city and through the fulcrum of what Marx labeled the "historical and moral element" that must always be considered in gauging class formation and capitalist development: the gendered construction, across class and race, of the workings of the "proper home." In so doing, I both document ethnographically the counter-empirical nature of much public-cultural representation of American race/class/gender lived realities and demonstrate the ways in which we can and should consider "the political" both in terms of our older understandings of politics and political organizations and in the newer sense of cultural politics-but without succumbing to the etiolated idealism of political economy-less postmodernism.

Spatial regionalization as optimal data compression

“…We see that these clusters trend towards higher percentages of Hispanics relative to Non-Hispanic Blacks, which is consistent with the high influx of Latinos to the area between 1990 and 2000 [36]. The spatial extent of these Black/Hispanic clusters increases over time, reaching out into the less dense region of the metro that was predominantly White in 1980, which is consistent with 'White flight' during deindustrialization as well as the expanding influence of Yale University in the south [37]. In 2010, we see a slightly different configuration of clusters, with the northern Black/Hispanic clusters remaining largely in tact, but the southern-most cluster splitting into a largely Black/Hispanic cluster and one relatively mixed cluster.…”

The Homeland Archipelago

“…In this regard home is a set of material social relations more collective -and less liberal -than individuality, and more private -and far less hospitable to ideas about social justice and change -than society (cf. di Leonardo, 2004Leonardo, , 2006.…”