Selling EthniCity

Bringing together a multidisciplinary team of scholars, this book explores the importance of ethnicity and cultural economy in the post-Fordist city in the Americas. The work argues that cultural, political and economic elites make use of cultural and ethnic elements in city planning and architecture in order to construct a unique image of a particular city. It also shows how, simultaneously, ethnic communities can benefit from ethnic labelling of cultural production.

Selling EthniCity: Urban Cultural Politics in the Americas from the Conquest to Contemporary Consumer Societies; I: The Spectacular City and the Performance of Ethnicity; Introduction to Part 1 The Spectacular city and the Performance of Ethnicity; 1: Carnival Redux: Hurricane Katrina, Mardi Gras and Contemporary United States Experience of an Enduring Festival Form; 2: "What Did I Do to Be so Global and Blue?"-Blues as Commodity: Tourism, Politics of Authenticity, and Blues Clubs in Chicago Today; 3: Insurrection and Symbolic Work: Graffiti in Oaxaca (Mexico) 2006/2007 as Subversion and Artistic Politics; 4: Black Day in the White Racism and Violence in City: Sucre; II: The Use of Ethnicity in the Imagineering of Urban Landscapes; Introduction to Part II The Use of Ethnicity in the Imagineering of Urban Landscapes; 5: Urban Landscapes of Mall-ticulturality: (Retro-)Coloniality, Consumption, and Identity Politics: The Case of the San Luis Shopping Center in Quito; 6: Religion and Culture Set in Stone: A Case Study of the Jewish Community Center of Metro Detroit; 7: "Ambiguously Ethnic" in Sherman Alexie's Seattle: Re-Imagining Indigenous Identities in the Twenty-First Century; 8: Against the "Erasure of Memory" in Los Angeles City Planning: Strategies of Re-Ethnicizing LA in Digital Fiction; III: Ethnic Heritage and/or Cultural Commodification in the City; Introduction to Part III Ethnic heritage and/or cultural Commodification in the City; 9: Quito's Historic Center: Heritage of Humanity or of the Market?; 10: "Economically, We Sit on a Cultural Gold Mine": Commodified Multiculturalism and Identity Politics in New Orleans; 11: Mobilizing Ethnicity: Yucatecan Maya Professionals in Mérida and their Participation in the Cultural and Political Fields; 12: A City of Newcomers: Narratives of Ethnic Diversity in Vancouver; IV: Gentrification and the Politics of Authenticity; Introduction to Part IV Gentrification and the Politics of Authenticity; 13: (Re-)Constructing the Ethnic Neighborhood: Gentrification in the United States and the Longing for a Unique Identity 1; 14: No-Go Areas and Chic Places: Socio-Spatial Segregation and Stigma in Guadalajara; 15: Spaces of Alterity and Temporal Permanence: The Case of San Francisco's and New York's Chinatowns