| In the 1980s, two parallel debates crystallized in the United States and France around the intersection of poverty, "race" (or immigration) and urban decline as persistent joblessness, social deprivation, and ethnoracial tensions rose in unison in cities on both sides of the Atlantic.;The first part of this work ("Remaking the Ghetto in Postfordist America") focuses on the nexus of color, class, and state in the degraded racial enclaves of the U.S. metropolis. It breaks with the trope of "disorganization" and the exoticizing bias of conventional poverty research by putting forth an institutionalist conception of the ghetto as a historically determinate, spatially-based concatenation of mechanisms of ethnoracial closure and control. It depicts and analyzes the historic shift from the communal ghetto of mid-century, this compact and sharply defined sociospatial formation in which blacks of all classes were consigned and bound together by a broad complement of place- and race-specific institutions, to the fin-de-siecle hyperghetto, a new, decentered, territorial and organizational configuration characterized by conjugated segregation on the basis of race and class in the context of the twofold retrenchment of market and state from the urban core.;The second part of this thesis ("Red Belt, Black Belt") develops a comparison of the structure, lived experience, and political-economic foundations of urban marginality in America and France.;The balance sheet of similarities and differences between "new poverty" in France's banlieue and its structural counterpart in the United States highlights the specifically racial dimension of urban exclusion in the American metropolis and confirms that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the differential "stitching together" of color, class, and place on both sides of the Atlantic and thus in the genesis and trajectory of advanced marginality in each country. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).;This thesis addresses and joins these two debates through a study of the articulation of color, class, and place in the American metropolis and the French urban periphery. |
