Synopses & Reviews
Stroll through any public park in Brooklyn on a weekday afternoon and you will see black women with white children at every turn. Many of these women are of Caribbean descent, and they have long been a crucial component of New York's economy, providing childcare for white middle- and upper-middleclass families.
Raising Brooklyn offers an in-depth look at the daily lives of these childcare providers, examining the important roles they play in the families whose children they help to raise. Tamara Mose Brown spent three years immersed in these Brooklyn communities: in public parks, public libraries, and living as a fellow resident among their employers, and her intimate tour of the public spaces of gentrified Brooklyn deepens our understanding of how these women use their collective lives to combat the isolation felt during the workday as a domestic worker.
Though at first glance these childcare providers appear isolated and exploited—and this is the case for many—Mose Brown shows that their daily interactions in the social spaces they create allow their collective lives and cultural identities to flourish. Raising Brooklyn demonstrates how these daily interactions form a continuous expression of cultural preservation as a weapon against difficult working conditions, examining how this process unfolds through the use of cell phones, food sharing, and informal economic systems. Ultimately, Raising Brooklyn places the organization of domestic workers within the framework of a social justice movement, creating a dialogue between workers who don't believe their exploitative work conditions will change and an organization whose members believe change can come about through public displays of solidarity.
Review
“Brown has done a masterful job--as a participant observer--of reflecting the everyday world of female domestic laborers. While she, herself, straddles two worlds--belonging to an Afro Caribbean community that is victimized by racism while simultaneously having the financial resources to hire a part-time nanny to care for her two children--her ethnic identity allowed her access to an insular community. The result is both fascinating and compelling.” "In
Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, asn Caribbeans Creating Community, Tamara Mose Brown gives a public voice to the concerns, hopes, and fears of West Indian child-care workers of Brooklyn, a tight-knit community of first-generation women who tend thousands of the city's children each day in its public parks." "Despite economic and cultural marginalization, the West Indian child-care providers profiled in this ethnography carve out strong identities. Congregating in public spaces, such as parks, in majority-white, gentrified Brooklyn, the nannies assert themselves as integral members of their neighborhoods."
“A sensitive and nuanced glimpse into the lives of the women who raise so many of Brooklyn’s—and America’s—children. Mose Brown has given us a deeply compelling and timely ethnography.”
“[An] engrossing look at the Caribbean community of child care workers in Brooklyn, NY”
Review
“[An] engrossing look at the Caribbean community of child care workers in Brooklyn, NY” -Library Journal,
Review
“Mose Brown has entered the hidden realm of West Indian childcare workers and produced a remarkable picture of urban life. This is fine grained, careful ethnography that reveals the taken for granted intimacies and politics of everyday experience.” -Mitchell Duneier,author of Sidewalk
Review
“Vividly written…Mose Brown's own voice is especially poignant; her reflexivity about her relationships to others as a researcher, fellow New Yorker and mother is a model for contemporary ethnography.”-Joanna Dreby,author of Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children
Review
&8220;Outsiders can only wonder what West Indian caregivers say to each other as they sit on park benches watching their charges. Mose Brown gives us the answer, in an insightful and fascinating account of how these women create their own social worlds in public spaces. A revealing sociological portrait of women whose work and struggles command respect.”-Julia Wrigley,author of Education and Gender Equity
Review
“A sensitive and nuanced glimpse into the lives of the women who raise so many of Brooklyns—and Americas—children. Mose Brown has given us a deeply compelling and timely ethnography.”
-Philip Kasinitz,co-author of Inheriting the City
Synopsis
Dioramas and panoramas, freaks and magicians, waxworks and menageries, obscure relics and stuffed animals--a dazzling assortment of curiosities attracted the gaze of the nineteenth-century spectator at the dime museum. This distinctly American phenomenon was unprecedented in both the diversity of its amusements and in its democratic appeal, with audiences traversing the boundaries of ethnicity, gender, and class. Andrea Stulman Dennett's
Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America recaptures this ephemeral and scarcely documented institution of American culture from the margins of history.
Weird and Wonderful chronicles the evolution of the dime museum from its eighteenth-century inception as a "cabinet of curiosities" to its death at the hands of new amusement technologies in the early twentieth century. From big theaters which accommodated audiences of three thousand to meager converted storefronts exhibiting petrified wood and living anomalies, this study vividly reanimates the array of museums, exhibits, and performances that make up this entertainment institution. Tracing the scattered legacy of the dime museum from vaudeville theater to Ripley's museum to the talk show spectacles of today, Dennett makes a significant contribution to the history of American popular entertainment.
About the Author
A teacher, actor, and director, Andrea Stulman Dennett received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. She has written on many aspects of popular entertainment from television talk shows to disaster spectacles at the turn of the century.