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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Description: Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when âurbanâ and âruralâ indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jeffersonâs anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election yearâcenturies or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities âsimilarly polyglot and cosmopolitanâresist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts...