Publisher's Synopsis
Working imperial New York as an archaeological/archival site, the essays gathered here offer a wide range of theories and practices of reading the city in terms of its endlessly heterotopic disposition. In doing so, they also cover a series of dynamic constellations and novel juxtapositions of public space and private lives in New York from 1890 to 1929 and apply such indispensable city codes as race, gender, class and citizenship. These essays are exemplary not only for the centrality of their themes, which restore to us an amazingly nuanced and kaleidoscopic city, but also for the innovative approaches they use to illuminate them.