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Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 360 pp.
Building on her earlier book on three cities, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (U. Minnesota Press, 1999), Professor Abu-Lughod goes one step further in the review here by examining the riots that have occurred in these cities. First a brief word about the author's background. Janet L. Abu-Lughod is professor emerita of sociology at Northwestern University and the Graduate School of the New School for Social Research. She has distinguished herself as a major urbanist for several decades. In this new book, she neatly balances the historical facts of each of these cities with a deeply informed interpretation that clearly advances our knowledge of how both large and small riots unfold.
Abu-Lughod starts off by citing the Kerner report (U.S. Riot Commission Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder) of 1968 which included this famous statement about the widespread riots: "This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal" (Kerner Report 1968:1). For the remainder of the book, Professor Abu-Lughod goes on to document how this assessment, now forty years old, is still a nagging source of most of our nation's urban disturbances, thus the key words in the title, "Race" and "Space." In many ways, it's the same old, same old even in the suggested policies to curb uprisings. In addition to addressing this larger issue, Abu- Lughod carefully dissects the historical trajectories of the three cities, outlining two riots for each city, making six in all. She does this by underscoring that these riots were "megariots or (almost) major riots" as opposed to minor uprisings. Race relations figure prominently in most of these cases, and the author takes care to define race as a social construct. She also clarifies where other factors enter the analysis, such as the tensions over living space in certain cities. Hers is a welcome interdisciplinary perspective on the subject of "race riots," adding nuances and wrinkles heretofore missed by other observers.
The discussion on the three cities is a...
