Synopses & Reviews
2009 Association of American University Presses Award for Jacket DesignIn the 1990s, improving the quality of life became a primary focus and a popular catchphrase of the governments of New York and many other American cities. Faced with high levels of homelessness and other disorders associated with a growing disenfranchised population, then mayor Rudolph Giuliani led New York's zero tolerance campaign against what was perceived to be an increase in disorder that directly threatened social and economic stability. In a traditionally liberal city, the focus had shifted dramatically from improving the lives of the needy to protecting the welfare of the middle and upper classesa decidedly neoconservative move.
In City of Disorder, Alex S. Vitale analyzes this drive to restore moral order which resulted in an overhaul of the way New York views such social problems as prostitution, graffiti, homelessness, and panhandling. Through several fascinating case studies of New York neighborhoods and an in-depth look at the dynamics of the NYPD and of the city's administration itself, Vitale explains why Republicans have won the last four New York mayoral elections and what the long-term impact Giuliani's zero tolerance method has been on a city historically known for its liberalism.
Review
"In
City of Disorder, Vitale provides a wise and balanced analysis of the preoccupation with social order in New York City that flowered under Giuliani's watch. On the one side, neoliberal housing and employment markets were increasing the numbers of people who were displaced and homeless. The failure of government on all levels to regulate the market forces driving this development, or to intervene to provide alternatives for the people affected, meant that people coped as they always have, by camping on the streets and panhandling, and by turning to drugs and drink. These behaviors in turn created popular political support for the coercive social controls that came to characterize city policy in the nineties. But neither the homeless nor the public were responsible for the limited alternatives which drove this mean result."
- Frances Fox Piven, author of The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism
Review
"Vitale presents an important critical analysis of "quality of life" and "zero tolerance" policing that have serious civil rights and civil liberties implications and are too often accepted, without careful scrutiny, as the solution to urban problems."
- Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union
Review
City of Disorder offers something bracing for liberal policy-makers in New York: a blueprint for the realization of their humanistic values through an array of more muscular, activist policies. They should study it and learn from it. - Robert Neuwirth, City Limits WEEKLY
Review
"City of Disorder has added enormously to our understanding of the context in which the crime declines of the 1980s and 90s took place. Future discussions of what happened in New York City must take this book into account. A great read and a real contribution to our understanding of the era."
"Vitale makes a powerful, and likely irrefutable, case that New York City mayors could have made major inroads in reducing homelessness had they adopted more progressive land use policies. This part of the book alone is a major contribution to the ongoing debate about homelessness. Readers across the nation will benefit from what is now clearly one of the best books ever written about urban homelessness."
"In City of Disorder, Vitale provides a wise and balanced analysis of the preoccupation with social order in New York City that flowered under Giuliani's watch. On the one side, neoliberal housing and employment markets were increasing the numbers of people who were displaced and homeless. The failure of government on all levels to regulate the market forces driving this development, or to intervene to provide alternatives for the people affected, meant that people coped as they always have, by camping on the streets and panhandling, and by turning to drugs and drink. These behaviors in turn created popular political support for the coercive social controls that came to characterize city policy in the nineties. But neither the homeless nor the public were responsible for the limited alternatives which drove this mean result."
"Vitale presents an important critical analysis of "quality of life" and "zero tolerance" policing that have serious civil rights and civil liberties implications and are too often accepted, without careful scrutiny, as the solution to urban problems."
City of Disorder offers something bracing for liberal policy-makers in New York: a blueprint for the realization of their humanistic values through an array of more muscular, activist policies. They should study it and learn from it.
Review
"In addition to providing a strong sense of the focal cases, Wong evinces a rare willingness to consider the ways these cases were reappropriated in larger antebellum legal processes and print culture. Wong's wonderfully relentless interdisciplinarity pushes her repeatedly to analyze not simply events, but the language and rhetoric surrounding them. Her command of published sources is impressive: she deftly weaves together scholarship on law, legal history, literary criticism, political history, social history, gender theory, and ethnic studies, and she rightly insists that her subjects cannot be fully understood without recovering a richer range of voices and texts. Perhaps most importantly, Wong's book joins calls to reconsider generic definitions of slave narratives and race literature and so begins to embody the potential for broader senses of black texts and black history." -The Journal of American History,
Review
"Each of the chapters is organized around a landmark legal case, but the author complements this information with valuable information from pamphlets, magazines, casebooks, and newspaper articles, a "loose genre of antislavery literature" (p.7) that sought to discuss the implications of territorialized freedom.The study of this literature also allows the author to recover the voices and experiences of slaves otherwise absent from historical records... Neither Fugitive nor Free makes important contributions to several bodies of scholarship, notably to legal studies of slavery in an Atlantic context. Scholars of legal history, slavery, travel, and abolitionism in the Atlantic will profit from this volume."-American Historical Review,
Review
#8220;Expands the contours of African American writing and identity through meticulous reconstruction of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century freedom suits”-American Quarterly,
Review
“An original, powerful interdisciplinary approach to the political and legal struggles against slavery in the antebellum period. Wong's transatlantic focus on the travel of enslaved persons, as fugitives or nominally free, goes far beyond well known slave narratives and gets to the heart of the contradictions of slavery in a liberal republic.”
-Amy Kaplan,author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture
Review
"Neither Fugitive nor Free's interdiciplinary and transatlantic approach usefully draws from literary criticism, critical race theory, legal history, and gender studies to provide sophisticated and revealing insights into Anglo-American understandings of and narratives about freedom and slavery."-Brian Schoen,Common-Place
Synopsis
In the 1990s, improving the quality of life became a primary focus and a popular catchphrase of the governments of New York and many other American cities. Faced with high levels of homelessness and other disorders associated with a growing disenfranchised population, then mayor Rudolph Giuliani led New York's zero tolerance campaign against what was perceived to be an increase in disorder that directly threatened social and economic stability. In a traditionally liberal city, the focus had shifted dramatically from improving the lives of the needy to protecting the welfare of the middle and upper classes-a decidedly neoconservative move. In City of Disorder, Alex S. Vitale analyzes this drive to restore moral order which resulted in an overhaul of the way New York views such social problems as prostitution, graffiti, homelessness, and panhandling. Through several fascinating case studies of New York neighborhoods and an in-depth look at the dynamics of the NYPD and of the city's administration itself, Vitale explains why Republicans have won the last four New York mayoral elections and what the long-term impact Giuliani's zero tolerance method has been on a city historically known for its liberalism. Alex S. Vitale is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
Synopsis
Neither Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits involved those enslaved valets, nurses, and maids who accompanied slaveholders onto free soil. Once brought into a free jurisdiction, these attendants became informally free, even if they were taken back to a slave jurisdiction—at least according to abolitionists and the enslaved themselves. In order to secure their freedom formally, slave attendants or others on their behalf had to bring suit in a court of law.
Edlie Wong critically recuperates these cases in an effort to reexamine and redefine the legal construction of freedom, will, and consent. This study places such historically central anti-slavery figures as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and William Lloyd Garrison alongside such lesser-known slave plaintiffs as Lucy Ann Delaney, Grace, Catharine Linda, Med, and Harriet Robinson Scott. Situated at the confluence of literary criticism, feminism, and legal history, Neither Fugitive nor Free presents the freedom suit as a "new" genre to African American and American literary studies.
About the Author
Alex S. Vitale is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He has also worked for the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness and the New York Civil Liberties Union.