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For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which travelled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European "ghettos", which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America "the ghetto" has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world.
In this Very Short Introduction Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over five hundred years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial, and colonial ghettos have appeared, and who they contain. Exploring their various identities, he shows how different ghettos interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in the same place.
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List of contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of illustrations
- 1: Why ghetto?
- 2: The age of the ghetto
- 3: Ghettos of the Imagination
- 4: Nazism and the ghetto
- 5: The americanization of the ghetto
- 6: Global ghettos
- References
- Further reading
- Publishers acknowledgements
About the author
Bryan Cheyette is Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading, and a Fellow of the English Association. He has authored or edited eleven books and is a Series Editor for Bloomsbury (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing). He has lectured widely throughout the United States and Europe and has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds fellowships at the universities of Leeds, Southampton and Birkbeck College, London. He reviews fiction for several British newspapers, and has published nearly one hundred reviews on film, history, and fiction for the Times Literary Supplement.
Summary
'Ghetto' is an extraordinarily complex word that encompasses Jewish history, black experiences in northern America, and our contemporary sense of cities and countries segregated by race and class. Exploring the various identities and uses of ghettos, Bryan Cheyette shows how different instances of ghettoization interrelate across time and space.
Additional text
Revealing new details and insights on almost every page.
Report
This overview of the changing meaning of the ghetto across the globe and through time is highly recommended for readers new to the subject, as well as for those who wish to deepen their knowledge through its excellent bibliography. Laura Vaughan, LSE Review of Books
