Dominique Kalifa (1957–2020)

In The Belle Epoque Dominique Kalifa not only illuminates the period itself but does so through the ways in which how the period was remembered and promoted. This readily accessible book, thanks in large part to a wonderful translation by Susan Emanuel, will appeal to both the academic and the reader with an interest in the period and/or French history.

As the subtitle states this is a cultural history, so texts and their reception are as important as simply recalling dates and events. In fact, the book becomes ever more interesting as it moves further away from the period itself and shows how the idea of the period becomes both a salve and a tool for surviving tough times. Then it becomes representative of something that expands from Paris to rural France and to other nations and their equivalent periods (Victorian England, Gilded Age in the US).

This should appeal to a wide readership with an interest in cultural history in general and French history in particular. The writing is clear and easily accessible to most readers with such an interest.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (meer)

Vice, Crime, and Poverty: How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld from Dominique Kalifa uses a wide range of sources in illustrating how bas-fonds or lower depths combined some reality with imagination to create what is almost universally understood when talking about underworld or lower depths.

These areas in most cities started out literally lower, prone to flooding or marshy, so not a great place to live. Yet those were the only areas available to the poor and marginalized so they settled there. The combination of poverty and unhealthy living conditions contributed to the cycle of poverty, helped by the class systems prevalent even in countries pretending they are without distinct classes. In many cities in the United States there is an area referred to as "the bottoms" which reflects exactly what Kalifa talks about. It doesn't take a big leap of imagination to associate lower depths to the bottoms, so the research and presentation is applicable in the US and the terminology used is perfectly fine.

The examples, largely from the decades after what he considers to be a major turning point (~1840), are drawn from many types of writing. Literature, newspaper accounts, social science texts, governmental/policy papers. In other words, the loss of distinction between an area (the lower depths) and people living there (underclass) is not purely the work of fiction writers writing for effect but part of how the rest of society established their hierarchy.

My brief discussion does not do the work justice. The writing is accessible, the ideas fascinating, and the works cited give each one a new appearance for us. I highly recommend this for anyone interested in how societies structure itself as well as the ways in which we still feed a mostly false imaginary when we use such terms.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (meer)

An exploration into the historical imaginary of the "underworld" of the poor neighborhoods of major cities of the Western world.

The author does not focus as much on the actual lived experience of life in poor neighborhoods in major urban areas in Western Europe and the United States as the stories which were written about such areas. The author begins with a history of the conception of people in poor areas of towns, from medieval concerns about vagabonds to the development of the view of a seedy "underworld" orchestrated into its own sub-cultural state as promulgated in books and papers in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. The author explores the morbid fascination of the upper middle class and the elites in society regarding how the "underworld" lived: how they consumed books and articles on the subjects of life and crime in poor areas, would participate in guided tours of such neighborhoods, yet all the while maintaining their distance and finding sufficient reasons for moral approbation. The author chronicled the societal changes in attitudes about the poor and how the whole "underworld" concept would eventually shift considerably in the 20th century away from being a neighborhood dependent thing into associations which were centered in far "nicer" areas.

Much more is made of Paris than London or New York, as befits the author's primary focus. Yet the author does well to demonstrate the validity of his thesis that the "underworld" of poor people reveling in and saturated with vice and crime was mostly an imagined construct. Yes, there was vice and crime in poor areas, and it perhaps was more pervasive than in other realms; nevertheless, the wealthier were generally more interested in profiting from it, exploiting it, and justifying themselves and their distance from it than being honest about it or doing much to help the situation. Creating the imaginary of the highly orchestrated underworld in seedy neighborhoods did its work to establish effective distance and justify moral approbation towards the poor and feelings of superiority among those who were not.

Thus, most of what we think about the experience of urban slums is not historically accurate. A sobering read indeed.

**--galley received as part of early review program… (meer)