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  • Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940
  • Matthew Pratt Guterl
Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940. By Chad Heap (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xii plus 420 pages. $35.00).

For a long time, historians of pleasure have focused quite narrowly on the richly Freudian 1920s, when the Jazz Age nightclubs of Harlem were "stormed" by whites hoping for a fleeting, cathartic release of their heavily constrained ids. For Lewis Ehrenberg, Ann Douglas, and many others, the American popularization of Freudian theories of human sexuality, when coupled with the Harlem Renaissance and Prohibition, offered the most powerful explanation for the phenomenon of the libidinous urban safari. By simply stepping back, and expanding the canvas, Chad Heap has already offered a different explanation, emphasizing [End Page 946] reform alongside troublesome play. And by using race and sexuality as roughly parallel analytics, he offers additional depth as well, including different sorts of slumming as equally interesting. The result is exciting and provocative.

Taking the dates of his study seriously, Heap zeroes in on two key features of this longer time frame: the moral reform of cityscapes, primarily by women, and participation in sporting culture, chiefly by men. "Slumming," he writes, "emerged from the consolidation of these two earlier traditions … combining the reform movement's engagement of respectable white middle-class women with the sporting-male culture's unabashed pursuit of pleasure."(5) Bringing elite white men and women together, slumming was one of many social practices aimed at making sense of the increasing diversity of the American public, an especially difficult task in the crowded and global cityscapes of Chicago and New York. Along the way, it offered this same set of actors a chance to better elevate themselves above the object of their attentions – above the foreign poor, the dark, and the perverse – and to define certain urban spaces as "container[s] for the degradation and immorality commonly associated with such racialized populations."(9)

The book's central chapters emphasize that there were "successive new slumming vogues," each textured by race, color, class, sexuality, and gender.(9) This reduces the much-studied obsession with Negro Harlem to one of many, and not just one of a kind, and it diversifies – in the simplest of ways – slumming. The result of Heap's expansion, more importantly, is an often brilliant and powerfully synthetic mélange, though the material in the individual chapters might seem familiar to experts in certain subfields. It is a little unclear, too, why these vogues must be labeled "successive," so that one must fall before another can rise. "With the waning of the Negro vogue in the late 1920s," Heap writes, "affluent white pleasure seekers increasingly turned their attention to the spectacle of homosexuality."(231). "Increasingly," I think, is a very difficult thing to measure. Writing the book around this notion of a somewhat orderly succession, Heap stresses the chronology of these "vogues," rather than the practice of slumming, and the consequence is to narrowly define slumming as purely experiential. As refined and beautifully written as these chapters are, they rely on that social experience – on the act of going there – when they might be even bigger and more powerful if they didn't. At the very least, if Heap employed the same broad-based notion of slumming he offers earlier, in his introduction, and later, in his epilogue, he wouldn't need to rely on basic chronology in the four middle chapters, and he could more expansively explore how slumming varied and changed within and around each vogue.

To be clearer, in his epilogue Heap asks: What happens to slumming? Why does it become less popular after World War II? And what are its legacies? His answers, offered cautiously, are just as worthy of further attention. "[T]o shore up their position atop American racial and sexual hierarchies," he suggests, "and to distance themselves from the dangers increasingly associated with postwar U.S. cities, middle- and upper-class whites redirected their leisure pursuits inward – toward their own increasingly subaltern, racially homogenous, heterosexually oriented communities and homes."(277) They also pushed their "slumming" interests abroad, finding reform...

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