THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME: DOMESTIC DOMAINS AND URBAN IMAGINARIES IN NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

In this article, I attempt to adumbrate shifting race, class, and gender politics in the United States through a “world in a grain of sand” focus on one American city and through the fulcrum of what Marx labeled the “historical and moral element” that must always be considered in gauging class formation and capitalist development: the gendered construction, across class and race, of the workings of the “proper home.” In so doing, I both document ethnographically the counter-empirical nature of much public–cultural representation of American race/class/gender lived realities and demonstrate the ways in which we can and should consider “the political” both in terms of our older understandings of politics and political organizations and in the newer sense of cultural politics—but without succumbing to the etiolated idealism of political economy-less postmodernism.

Key Words:

• urban United States
• gender
• race
• political economy

Notes

1. Portions of the following essay are reprinted, with permission, from Micaela di Leonardo, “Gender, Race and Class,” in David Nugent and Joan Vincent, eds., A Companion to an Anthropology of Politics, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, pp. 135–151. I thank David Nugent and Joan Vincent, and also Roger Lancaster, for his careful reading of this article.

2. For a full description, contextualization, and critique of Wilson's model, see di Leonardo (1998: 112–120).

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