Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924 (review)

Esther Romeyn grounds her erudite study, Street Scenes, in the concept of “the city as theater.” Her work focuses on the intersection of urban sociology and the “dramaturgy” of the construction of self and “other” in New York City during the transformative period of mass immigration, 1880–1924. During these four-and-a-half decades the city’s population grew from less than two million—mostly “native-stock,” Irish, and Germans—to over five-and-a-half million in 1920 and seven million in 1930, at which point its largest ethnic group was the 1,830,000 Jews who constituted 27 percent of its population. As New York became home to large communities of southern and eastern European immigrants of various shades of “whiteness,” the reigning social order and racial hierarchy, as well as cross-ethnic and cross-class encounters, needed to be negotiated and reformulated. Romeyn is interested in the spatial aspect of this process and especially in the role of spatial configurations in the formulation of identity.

New York’s demographic metamorphosis was tied in with the great economic and social changes unleashed by industrial capitalism. The latter, notes Romeyn, impacted all aspects of society and stimulated the advancement of a new concept of personhood that moved away from the old ideal of “character” and its development of moral “interiority” to one of “personality” with its emphasis on the presentation (or performance) of self. The construction of self relied heavily on externals such as clothes, manners, and poise, aspects associated with theatrical performers whose mimetic practice had historically been regarded as the antithesis of the authentic self.

Romeyn sees the cityscape as a spectatorial and performative topos and focuses on what she calls “‘inter’-pretations.” Her argument is best presented in her own words, the style indicative of the densely academic nature of the book. These “inter”-pretations, she explains in her introduction, are

haunted by the performativity of language and culture, by the fact that “acting” pervaded American culture, and by the realization that the grounds for establishing authentic, “organic” identity were slippery, especially in a modern, cultural borderland such as New York, where the production of identity inevitably was infused by desire, ruptured by processes of immigration and social mobility, caught up in the system of commodity exchange of an emerging consumer society, and taking place in “the border crossings and transactions between Self and Other, in dialogic moments of intercultural ‘lending’ and ‘borrowing’”

(xiii–xiv).

The book is composed of two parts of more or less equal length. It includes eight chapters, each constructed around a particular phenomenon, cultural product, or performer that serves as exemplar or case study for a rich and elaborate theoretical analysis of a specific concept.

The first part of the book, “The City as Theater: Performativity and Urban Space,” opens with a discussion of the epistemology of the city as revealed in period guidebooks that represented New York City as a space of contrasting binaries of light and darkness. The latter was associated with racialized immigrant enclaves that were construed as exotic zones of misery, danger, risqué adventure, and titillating entertainment. Romeyn analyzes the commodification of these alien spaces for white middle-class consumption. She pays particular attention to slumming tours, the sensationalization of Chinatown, the mediation of the “ghetto,” and the various “narratives of exposure” that became part of public leisure consumption. In conjunction with her discussion of such topics as the construction of the immigrant enclave as racial and dangerous, self-transformation and “authentic” racial identity, and the frantic fear of imposture, Romeyn explores Yiddish and Italian versions of the “mystery and misery” novel, the detective novel, the notorious murder case of Elsie Sigel, and Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David Levinsky. She also offers a finely-tuned discussion of the mediating role of such urban experts as slumming tour operators, journalists, and writers of popular fiction.

From a purely Jewish perspective, the most...