ABSTRACT
The Ghetto in Global History explores the stubborn tenacity of ‘the ghetto’ over time. As a concept, policy, and experience, the ghetto has served to maintain social, religious, and racial hierarchies over the past five centuries. Transnational in scope, this book allows readers to draw thought-provoking comparisons across time and space among ghettos that are not usually studied alongside one another.
The volume is structured around four main case studies, covering the first ghettos created for Jews in early modern Europe, the Nazis' use of ghettos, the enclosure of African Americans in segregated areas in the United States, and the extreme segregation of blacks in South Africa. The contributors explore issues of discourse, power, and control; examine the internal structures of authority that prevailed; and document the lived experiences of ghetto inhabitants. By discussing ghettos as both tools of control and as sites of resistance, this book offers an unprecedented and fascinating range of interpretations of the meanings of the "ghetto" throughout history. It allows us to trace the circulation of the idea and practice over time and across continents, revealing new linkages between widely disparate settings.
Geographically and chronologically wide-ranging, The Ghetto in Global History will prove indispensable reading for all those interested in the history of spatial segregation, power dynamics, and racial and religious relations across the globe.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |70 pages
The early modern Jewish ghetto
chapter |17 pages
Venice: A culture of enclosure, a culture of control
part |95 pages
Nazi ghettos
chapter |17 pages
“There was no work, we only worked for the Germans”
chapter |21 pages
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
chapter |17 pages
When (and why) is a ghetto not a “ghetto”?
part |88 pages
U.S. and African American ghettos
chapter |17 pages
Shifting “ghettos”
chapter |17 pages
“Is a Negro district, in the midst of our fairest cities, to become connotative of the ghetto … ?”
chapter |16 pages
Constrained but Not Contained
chapter |17 pages
The American ghetto as an international human rights crisis
chapter |19 pages
Unmaking the ghetto
part |66 pages
Urban locations, apartheid, and the ghetto in South Africa