CARL H. NIGHTINGALE. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities

Abstract

In this ambitious, sprawling global history of urban segregation, Carl H. Nightingale takes the reader on a journey from the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia to the hillside favelas of modern-day Rio de Janeiro in an effort to explain the intertwined histories of colonial power, urban planning, and “city-splitting” by racial categorization. The result offers both what is most promising and most frustrating about current trends to write global histories of phenomena usually considered only in a comparative context. In this case, Nightingale moves far beyond a standard history that might merely compare racial segregation in, say, Chicago and Johannesburg or Algiers and Calcutta, and thus opens up some challenging new ideas about the confluence of international factors that resulted in the “archsegregation” of twentieth-century South Africa and the urban United States. At the same time, by traversing such a wide range of examples across time and space and by introducing such a multiplicity of variables, Nightingale's Segregation runs the risk of diluting the clarity of a more focused explanatory model. Nightingale's work can be read in conjunction with Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds's Drawing the Global Color Line (2009), which similarly brings together linked developments in the United States, South Africa, and the Pacific world into a transnational history of empire, racial policy, and immigration restriction but does so in a far more disciplined fashion. Whereas Lake and Reynolds consider only a few crucial decades around the turn of the twentieth century, Nightingale presumes to encapsulate “seventy centuries of city-splitting”(p. 19).