scholarly journals Teju Cole's Nigeria and the open cities of New York and Brussels

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Igor Maver

The novel Open City (2011) by the Nigerian-born and raised author Teju Cole isset in New York City, where he has lived since 1992. The narrator and protagonist of the book, the young Nigerian doctor Julius in is a veritable flâneur in the Big Apple, who is observing the rapidly changing multiethnic character of the city and meditating on (his) history and culture, identity and solitude, and the world beyond the United States, with which it is interconnected through the global history of violence and pain. He is juxtaposing the past and the present, the seemingly borderless open city of New York, Nigeria, and the various European locales, particularly Brussels.Thenovel, although set in the United States, is constantly interspersed with his recollections of his past experiences conditioned by hiscomplex hybrid Nigerian-European-American identity.

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11 (109)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Vladimir Pechatnov

Based on previously unearthed documents from the Russia’s State Historical Archive and the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire the article explores the history of the first Russian Orthodox parish in New York City and construction of Saint-Nickolas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the city. It was a protracted and complicated interagency process that involved Russian Orthodox mission in the United States, Russia’s Foreign Ministry and its missions in the United States, the Holy Governing Synod, Russia’s Ministry of Finance and the State Council. The principal actors were the bishops Nicholas (Ziorov) and especially Tikhon (Bellavin), Ober-Prosecutor of the Holy Governing Synod Konstantine Pobedonostsev and Reverend Alexander Khotovitsky. This case study of the Cathedral history reveals an interaction of ecclesiastical and civil authorities in which private and civic initiative was combined with strict bureaucratic rules and procedures.


Author(s):  
Llana Barber

Chapter Seven traces Lawrence's transition to a Latino-majority city with the 2000 census, including the tremendous increase in immigration during the 1980s that led Lawrence to become home to the largest concentration of Dominicans in the United States outside of New York City. The city's Latino population came to define Lawrence's public culture in this period, and the long push for Latino political power in the city was ultimately successful in many ways. This chapter discusses the transnational activities that brought new vitality to Lawrence's economy and its public spaces, yet larger structural forces continued to create obstacles to Latinos finding in Lawrence the better life they pursued.


2019 ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
Leo Huberman

This reprise of "The Debs Way"—the text of an address Huberman delivered at the Debs Centennial Meeting held at the Fraternal Clubhouse in New York City on November 28, 1955—not only reminds us of the importance of Eugene Debs to the history of socialism in the United States, but also brings out some of the core beliefs of Huberman's own approach to socialism. Today's conditions are of course vastly different from when Huberman wrote this, more than sixty years ago. There is now a resurgence of the left in the United States, but the basic principles that Huberman derived from Debs remain relevant.


Author(s):  
Andras Z. Szeri

Experts estimate that in 1978 alone over 4.22 × 1018 joule of energy were lost in the United States due to simple friction and wear — enough energy to supply New York City for the entire year. Energy loss through friction in tribo-elements is a major factor in limits on energy efficiency [1]. The two major approaches that have been pursued in the past for reducing frictional losses in tribological contacts were surface modification techniques such as laser texturing and modification of lubricant properties. Here we advocate yet another option, modification of the structural character of the lubricant film. The Composite-Film bearing (CFB) is investigating this third possibility.


Author(s):  
Judith Hamera

This chapter argues for Detroit as an image and an actual place that spatializes and racializes the affective fallout of deindustrialization using three plays whose 2013 New York runs coincided with both the city’s impending bankruptcy and the United States’ anemic recovery from the Great Recession: Detroit by Lisa D’Amour, Detroit’67 by Dominique Morisseau, and Motown the Musical by Berry Gordy. Each play uses Detroit to explore the interpersonal consequences of opportunities and crises in racialized capitalism. Each offers audiences intimate visions of the Fordist bargain in its seeming heyday, particularly compelling in a period of lackluster economic recovery. In this chapter I introduce the formulations “re-siting” and “re-citing” to analyze the ways elements of Detroit’s incendiary history of interracial confrontations are redeployed to support images of a capitalist work ethic transcending or succumbing to racist violence, and to link the city to a seemingly race-neutral contemporary precarity.


Author(s):  
Stacy D. Fahrenthold

This chapter focuses on Syrian migrant activists who lobbied for American intervention and a US Mandate in Syria after the 1918 armistice. Calling themselves the “New Syrian” parties, activists in New York City, Boston, Buenos Aires, and Cairo petitioned for the United States to take guardianship of Syria as a bulwark against French colonialism in the region. The New Syrians were rejected by the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which led them to promote their ideas through petitioning and mass meetings held in the mahjar. Examining a history of the Wilsonian moment from beyond the Paris petitions, the chapter argues that the conference engaged in the construction of a legal fiction: that the Syrian mahjar favored the French Mandate. Far from partners in empire, the diaspora Syrians and Lebanese presented the French with the difficult task of pacifying an extraterritorial subject population that could not be controlled through blunt military suppression.


Author(s):  
Inge F. Goldstein ◽  
Martin Goldstein

One night in early October 1997, Felipe G., a nine-year-old child of Dominican immigrants to New York City living in East Harlem, woke up struggling for breath. Felipe had had asthma attacks before, and his parents knew, or thought they knew, what to do: they called for an ambulance, which rushed him to the emergency room of Harlem Hospital nearby. But this time he stopped breathing on the way to the hospital, and could not be revived there. His younger sister Ana also has asthma, but so far has never had to go to the emergency room. The tenement building in which Felipe’s family lives is three blocks from the Harlem River Drive, a highway on which thousands of cars travel each workday, emitting, in spite of their catalytic converters, large quantities of oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and incompletely combusted gasoline. Several blocks north is a parking garage for the diesel trucks of the New York City Department of Sanitation. The drivers of the trucks that use the lot often keep their motors idling, so that great quantities of diesel exhaust particles are emitted to the surrounding area. The Harlem district of New York City, inhabited mainly by African-Americans and Hispanics, is shielded to a large extent from the prevailing west winds by higher areas on the west side of Manhattan. Hence, air pollution produced within Harlem—for example, by cars, diesel trucks, and buses, and by an electric power generating plant located there—tends to remain longer than in other areas of the city. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection operated a network of air monitoring stations from the 1940s to the 1970s, during which time Harlem was consistently found to be the most polluted area in the city. It had then, and still has, one of the highest rates of hospitalization for asthma in the city. In most countries, asthma is more common among children of higher social class. In the United States this pattern is reversed: people living in the inner cities of the United States, mostly low-income minorities, have higher rates of asthma than other Americans.


2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard R. John

The antimonopoly critique of big business that flourished in the United States during the 1880s is a neglected chapter in the history of American reform. In this essay, a revised version of Richard R. John's 2011 Business History Conference presidential address, John shows how this critique found expression in a gallery of influential cartoons that ran in the New York City–based satirical magazines Puck and Judge. Among the topics that the cartoonists featured was the manipulation of the nation's financial markets by financier Jay Gould.


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