Author: Eric Klinenberg File Type: azw On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index, which measures how the temperature actually feels on the body, would hit 126 degrees by the time the day was over. Meteorologists had been warning residents about a two-day heat wave, but these temperatures did not end that soon. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled the records for electrical use were shattered and power grids had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. And by July 20, over seven hundred people had perished-more than twice the number that died in the Chicago Fire of 1871, twenty times the number of those struck by Hurricane Andrew in 1992in the great Chicago heat wave, one of the deadliest in American history. Heat waves in the United States kill more people during a typical year than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources of the citys vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a social autopsy, examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been. Starting with the question of why so many people died at home alone, Klinenberg investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how the city government responded to the crisis, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported on and explained these events. Through a combination of years of fieldwork, extensive interviews, and archival research, Klinenberg uncovers how a number of surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdownincluding the literal and social isolation of seniors, the institutional abandonment of poor neighborhoods, and the retrenchment of public assistance programscontributed to the high fatality rates. The human catastrophe, he argues, cannot simply be blamed on the failures of any particular individuals or organizations. For when hundreds of people die behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community groups, and public agencies, everyone is implicated in their demise. As Klinenberg demonstrates in this incisive and gripping account of the contemporary urban condition, the widening cracks in the social foundations of American cities that the 1995 Chicago heat wave made visible have by no means subsided as the temperatures returned to normal. The forces that affected Chicago so disastrously remain in play in Americas cities, and we ignore them at our peril.

Author: Gaia Giuliani File Type: pdf This book explores intersectional constructions of race and whiteness in modern and contemporary Italy. It contributes to transnational and interdisciplinary reflections on these issues through an analysis of political debates and social practices, focusing in particular on visual materials from the unification of Italy (1861) to the present day. Giuliani draws attention to rearticulations of the transnationally constructed Italian colonial archive in Italian racialised identity-politics and cultural racisms across processes of nation building, emigration, colonial expansion, and the construction of the first post-fascist Italian society. The author considers the figures of race peopling the Italian colonial archive as composing past and present ideas and representations of (white) Italianness and racialisedgendered Otherness. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Italian studies, political philosophy, sociology, history, visual and cultural studies, race and whiteness studies and gender studies, will find this book of interest. **Review Thisis an important and incisive volume on the unmarked hegemony of white heteronormativity in the making of modern Italy, producing a cultural and political register that is soubiquitous as to appear invisible. The merit of this richly researched work is to bring to light from the archive the multiple modalities in which race and gender areconsistently expunged from the narration of the nation. Giuliani provides innovative interdisciplinary critical perspectives for all of us who are thinking,unpackingandcontestingthevisualeconomy of the racialised cultural consensus that has become the question of our time. (Iain Chambers, University of Naples, Italy) An indispensable book. Gaia Giulianis acute analytical intelligence dissects the grammar of the gendering and racializing practices that have pervaded visual representations in modern Italian history from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Her analysis of a host of films, documentaries, and televisions shows reveal troubling continuities as well as telling discontinuities in the affirmation of the somatic norm of the Italian imagined community. If we want to understand some of the roots of the racism that pervades Italian society today, we need to read this book. (Silvana Patriarca, Fordham University, USA) Gaia Guliani belongs to a generation of scholars that have powerfully challenged and transformed the approach to the study of race and racism in Italian history and present. Introducing the critical angle of whiteness, in particular, she has opened new avenues for the investigation of the Italian imagined communitys constitutive relations with its multiple others. Working through an amazing amount of textual and visual materials, Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy traces the multiple, heterogeneous, and uncanny mutations of the colonial archive from the Fascist age up to our present. In times of violence, war, and migration this is a book that deserves to be read well beyond the academia. (Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna, Italy) Drawing upon a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, Giulianis Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy offers substantive, critical insights into the construction and circulation of racial ideologies in contemporary Italy. Giuliani mines Italys colonial archive, both local and transnational, to reveal the historical production of racialized Others and its contribution to the reproduction of Italy as a homogeneously white country. This nuanced study moves beyond traditional racial dichotomies to explore how race is inscribed within culture and becomes a relational construct used to create modes of inclusiveness that nevertheless mark immigrants and Muslims as outside the national fold. In a moment of reactionary politics within Italy and greater Western Europe, Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy is a significant and timely contribution to Italian cultural and postcolonial studies. (Shelleen Greene, University of California, Los Angeles, USA) From the Back Cover This book explores intersectional constructions of race and whiteness in modern and contemporary Italy. It contributes to transnational and interdisciplinary reflections on these issues through an analysis of political debates and social practices, focusing in particular on visual materials from the unification of Italy (1861) to the present day. Giuliani draws attention to rearticulations of the transnationally constructed Italian colonial archive in Italian racialised identity-politics and cultural racisms across processes of nation building, emigration, colonial expansion, and the construction of the first post-fascist Italian society. The author considers the figures of race peopling the Italian colonial archive as composing past and present ideas and representations of (white) Italianness and racialisedgendered Otherness. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Italian studies, political philosophy, sociology, history, visual and cultural studies, race and whiteness studies and gender studies, will find this book of interest.