A Cultural History of Modern Urban Poverty

FAIN: FEL-272888-21

David L. Pike
American University (Washington, DC 20016-8200)

Research and writing leading to a book on the taxonomy of the term "slum" and the representations of global urban poverty in the modern period.  

The slum imaginary—the meanings, emotions, and associations surrounding the spaces of urban poverty—was formed in the poor and undeveloped districts of the 19th-century imperial capitals London and Paris and rapidly industrializing newer cities such as Manchester or Liverpool. Soon, it was circulating the globe as colonial cities across the global South were redeveloped into ‘native’ slums and ‘modern’ administrative zones. “Slum Lore” traces the history of the word and concept of the slum, the urban spaces they describe, the lives they affect, the uses to which they have been put, and the images, fears and desires they have mobilized over the past two hundred years. Reckoning with the cultural work of the slum imaginary can help to disentangle actionable facts about the dwelling-places of the poor from the myriad other associations that continue to be affectively interwoven with those facts in the imagination of urban poverty.

Associated Products

A Portrait of the Artist in Black and White: Euzhan Palcy’s Rue Cases-Nègres (1983) and François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) (Article)
Title: A Portrait of the Artist in Black and White: Euzhan Palcy’s Rue Cases-Nègres (1983) and François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959)
Author: David Pike
Abstract: What does it mean to live and to make art both within and outside of the colonial system, and what does Euzhan Palcy's film 'Rue Cases-Nègres' have to tell us about the legacy of colonialism and the paths of liberation available in, through, or against that legacy? How, if at all, can we disentangle critiques from what to others felt like a radical and timely film that, according to its director in 2010, remains “unwrinkled” by time despite its already historical “pastness” when released in 1983? There are many ways to approach this question; in this essay, I discuss a pivotal feature of Palcy’s adaptation of Zobel’s novel and one of the primary ways, I argue, that the film addresses its moment in the 1980s in contradistinction to the years around 1950 when the novel was published and to the 1930s in which it (and the film) are set: the multifaceted ways the film uses education as a theme, deploys it as a plot thread, and understands it as an unequal system of opportunity and oppression.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://brightlightsfilm.com/a-portrait-of-the-artist-in-black-and-white-euzhan-palcys-rue-cases-negres-1983-and-francois-truffauts-les-quatre-cents-coups-1959/
Primary URL Description: Online film journal
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Bright Lights Film Journal
Publisher: Bright Lights Film Journal

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