Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Simpson, Tyrone R.

Titel

Introduction: Mapping the Racial Partition

Ist Teil von

• Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature, p.1-18

Ort / Verlag

New York: Palgrave Macmillan US

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Within months of the completion of this book’s first draft, The New York Times published two articles only days apart that underscored why a sustained analysis of the literature of ghettoization in the twentieth century might be useful to those interested in issues of race and urban life. The prolific black writer, John Edgar Wideman, produced the first. In the editorial, “The Seat Not Taken,” Wideman reports on the results of “a casual sociological experiment”1 that he has conducted over the last four years of traveling by train from his home in New York City to his teaching job in Providence, Rhode Island. According to the writer, he often travels alone in a doubleseat. The affluent, well-educated, northeastern travelers who share the train seldom elect to sit next to him. The persistence of this behavior has moved Wideman to conclude that his blackness is the reason that the seat next to him invariably remains unoccupied during his trips. Though he enjoys the extra elbow room the open seat affords, he identifies the recurring emptiness next to him as something “quite sad and quite dangerous, also, if left unexamined.” It is not novelty that makes Wideman’s experience remarkable, but rather it is the aching familiarity among those of us who are black and male and who have ventured into the public spaces or transport systems of American cities.2