Markets and Players: Plotting Poverty and Citizenship in Matthew Desmond's Evicted

This essay examines the narrative and representational tactics of Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). Rather than read this book solely in terms of its findings, this essay argues that Desmond attempts to stylistically embody the relationship between market culture, eviction, and the political delegitimation of the poor. Evicted also reworks the sociological “community study” by refashioning literary templates from writers such as Jacob Riis, Charles Dickens, Jane Jacobs, and Hannah Arendt. By fusing such debts together, Evicted powerfully connects its account of eviction's toll on the broader but too often overlooked relationship between poverty and citizenship.

PROYECTO RIIS: UN HAPPENING PARA LA VIDA SOCIAL

Cuando el espacio público se vacía de usos y se le priva a la gente que lo haga suyo, el espacio muere. Esta situación mueve a la arquitectura a iniciar su revitalización. La plaza-parque Jacob Riis (1966) de Nueva York, obra del arquitecto del paisaje M. Paul Friedberg, nos alecciona en este sentido. Su proyecto arquitectónico tiene la condición de laboratorio de la forma urbana para redefinir la arquitectura del espacio común. El proyecto Riis muestra una manera diferente de transformar los espacios en desuso en áreas marginales residenciales. En concreto, el parque de juegos infantil es la expresión de una forma provisional de espacio público condensador de vida social. Visto desde el presente, rompió con los modelos precedentes, comenzó nuevos caminos disciplinares en la arquitectura del paisaje, codificó conocimientos previos y vaticinó su propio desarrollo a través de las variaciones de su forma. El proyecto Riis acumula arquitecturas específicas en un campo expandido, es un entorno de juego total, un happening en el que la vida social vuelve a recuperar el espacio del que había sido expulsada. El proyecto Riis nos muestra la capacidad de la arquitectura para transformar el espacio común y determinar el valor del proyecto arquitectónico como vehículo para la reforma social.

The Comic Sensibility

In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis sentimentalized the urban poor, a familiar rhetorical and representational strategy used to elicit righteous outrage that would propel social reform. Others took a different approach. Based in bodily forms of humor in all its crass vulgarity, the comic sensibility cultivated camaraderie and solidarity among members of the Other Half, rather than uniting the elite on their behalf. The multivalent, public laughter effected by the comic sensibility enabled its audience to laugh on their own terms, and thus become co-creators of meaning. As we see in examples including Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids comic strip and the story “Ingratitude of Rosenfeld” by Bruno Lessing, illustrated by William Glackens, the comic sensibility provided an alternative to realist approaches like that used by Riis, which depicted the Other Half as sentimentalized objects of pity, as faceless hordes, or both.

How the Other Half Laughs

In the popular press of the early twentieth century, immigrant masses and the tenement districts were frequently portrayed as occasions for laughter rather than as objects of pity or problems to be solved. This distinctly comic sensibility, most visible in the form of the comic strip, merged the grotesque with the urbane and the whimsical with the cynical, representing the world of what Jacob Riis called the “Other Half” with a jaundiced, yet sympathetic, eye. Various forms of the comic sensibility emerged from a competitive, collaborative environment fostered at newspapers and magazines published by figures including William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and S. S. McClure. Characterized by a breezy, irreverent style and packaged in eye-catching typography, vibrant color, and dynamic page design, the comic sensibility combined the performative aspects of vaudeville and the variety of stage, the verbal improvisations of dialect fiction, and a multivalent approach to caricature that originated in nineteenth-century comic weeklies, such as Puck and Judge. Though it was firmly rooted in ethnic humor, the comic sensibility did not simply denigrate or dehumanize ethnic and racial minorities. Stereotype and caricature was used not just to make fun of the Other Half, but also to engage in pointed sociopolitical critique. Sometimes grotesque, sometimes shocking, at other times sweetly humorous or gently mocking, the comic sensibility ultimately enabled group identification and attracted a huge working-class audience.

Immigrant Families in Urban America, 1880–1920

Chapter 7 follows a young Jewish immigrant, Minnie Goldstein, and her family as they make their way from Warsaw, Poland, to New York City’s Lower East Side in 1894. Based on her personal and autobiographic account of her life story in America, the chapter juxtaposes the girl’s memories of her family life in America and of the Jewish diaspora in general with the derogatory depiction of life in the Lower East Side tenements by progressive reformers such as Jacob Riis. The chapter also discusses how perceptions of ethnically and religiously diverse family concepts served to make the so-called “new immigrants” an exotic and pathological other in a culture and politics increasingly focusing on the idea of “racial purity.” Thus, the chapter argues that modern concepts and practices of ethnicity and race were closely related to specific understandings of family life.

Yelling the Yellows

The 1890s were the heyday of America’s newsboys. The nation’s newspapers rose in number and circulation and its cities swelled with poor immigrant families in need of extra income. African Americans also gravitated to the news trade but encountered much opposition due to Jim Crow segregation. Jacob Riis introduced photography as a tool of reform. Newsgirls came under special scrutiny due to their sexual vulnerability. As ubiquitous in popular culture as they were on city streets, newsies became versatile symbols of enterprise and exploitation in songs, stories, and the sassy color comic strip that gave “yellow journalism” its name. Newsboys’ cries stoked the jingoism that sparked America’s “splendid little war” abroad and rekindled the acrimony that fueled labor unrest at home. They expressed their own discontent in dozens of strikes, climaxing in 1899 with a two-week tussle with those two “great octopuses” of New York journalism, Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World and William Randolph Hearst’s Evening Journal, all of which helped to remake and reawaken the American working class.

American Realism and Photography

This chapter explores the relationship between realist literature and photography since their emergence in the mid-nineteenth century. Both media responded to the challenges of modernity by contriving new means of representing reality. Whereas photography became the standard for objective reproduction following the pictorial turn, realist authors including Henry James and Paul Laurence Dunbar honed literature’s capacity to focus on inner realities, such as subjective experience and memory, impossible to capture in a photograph. Jacob Riis, in turn, adopted the aesthetic of the urban picturesque for How the Other Half Lives, a photo-textual record of immigrant life in New York serving as a precursor for the documentary books of the Great Depression, which advocated national relief programs to alleviate the distress of rural Americans. Countering such facile approaches to complex realities, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, finally, presents a fundamental critique of representation itself.