SOCIOLOGY

Slumming, Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife: By Chad Heap



Slumming, Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife: By Chad Heap

Summary

Heap provides a thorough history, genealogy, and geography of the term "slumming," tracing its earliest discursive appearance in connection with the rise of an identifiable urban middle class and growing segregation. Initially, slumming practices involved residents traveling from their well-appointed homes to observe immigrant and African American slum neighborhoods (www. rorotoko.com).

After about 1910, slumming became less associated with actual spatial slums and more often referred to nighttime ventures by whites hoping for sexual titillation in the speakeasies and cabarets of the village of Greenwich in New York, Times Square, and Harlem, and Chicago's Tower town and Bronzeville. Heap takes an admirably complex view of slumming practices. He offers substantial evidence of the way these cross-cultural journeys resulted in instances of sexual intimacy that challenged social norms, ultimately helping push American middle-class culture toward a more modern acceptance of sexual expression. At the same time, however, he argues that such excursions most often codified and reified class, racial, and sexual divides. Exposure to social "others" within the context of slumming provided thrill seekers with an explicit counterpoint to themselves, one chat generally strengthened their sense of social supremacy rather than led to question i.e. for scholars, however. Heap's painstaking analysis of the racial and sexual politics of these encounters provides abundant evidence of the socially constructed, shifting nature of the slummer's essentialist assumptions. In this regard, Heap's documentation and incorporation of the equally complex responses of slumming subjects is particularly valuable (www. books.google.com).

Heap's is one of several recent books to center on urban night life in Chicago as well as New York in the decades of 1920s and 1930s, most notably Burton Peretti's Nightclub City (2007), Shane Vogel's The Scene of the Harlem Cabaret {2009), and Scott Herring's Queering the Underworld (2007). Slumming and the latter two books build on the work of George Chauncey, whose seminal Gay New York (1995) ensured that sexual difference could no longer he ignored by any cultural historian worth his salt. Of these recent volumes, Heap's is the broadest in scope, offering a multi-decade history of slumming that weaves together ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and class politics. Slumming is also a gold mine of primary source material and fat footnotes, and Heap pays deserved attention to groups (Asians, lesbians, and ethnic "whites") often overlooked in night life studies. Heap's exhaustive coverage, however, can also be exhausting, and the book could have benefitted from tighter writing and editing. Heap also tries a little too hard to be inclusive by promoting a misleading equivalence between gay male and lesbian participation in an urban night life in which male "pansy" performers clearly dominated. Nevertheless, Slumming is juicy and often fascinating; beyond the sex-party details, I was surprised to learn that white female dancers tried to pass as black to get jobs in Harlem cabarets. There are many such gems buried in Heap's work, which will no ...