The New Noir (e-book) (used book) | Orly Clerge | bookbook.eu

Description

The expansion of the black middle class and the unprecedented increase in the number of immigrants among them since the 1960s has transformed the black cultural geography of New York. In The New Noir, urban sociologist Orly Clerge uncovers the complex social worlds of an extraordinary generation of black middle class adults from different corners of the African Diaspora. Clerge demonstrates that the black middle class’ ongoing ties with the American and Global South has influenced the local businesses, organizations, and kitchen tables of their suburbs. With particular attention to the largest black ethnic groups in the U.S.—Black Americans, Jamaicans, and Haitians—Clerge takes us on a journey into the hidden places on Queens and Long Island and reveals the ways in which region and nationality shape how the black middle class negotiates diasporic encounters, the politics of blackness, and class mobility. In their social interactions with one another and in everyday life, they stir up local social hierarchies and cultivate a spectrum of black identities, which help them cultivate belonging in a changing 21st global city. As the first ethnographic work on the multiethnic black middle class, The New Noir is a groundbreaking exploration of race, place, and immigrant experience today.