Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn's Sunset Park

Filip Stabrowski of LaGuardia Community College reviews Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, by Tarry Hum. This book deftly dismantles two visions of New York City — the city as a transnational capital and the city as a post-industrial version of the Chicago School’s mosaic “little worlds” — arguing that the literatures on global cities and on ethnic enclaves/economies are in fact two sides of the same coin. According to Hum, “global city” representations of New York City elide the contested, highly localized processes that produce the global on the ground and from below. At the same time, spatial metaphors such as “enclave,” “barrio,” “slum,” and “ghetto” deny the internal heterogeneity of urban socio-spatial formations and ignore the emergence of cross-racial alliances and movements that challenge dominant narratives of assimilation and individual upward mobility.

Read the book review at https://doi.org/10.1111/imre.12276