As a means of protest against Toronto’s
campaign to promote itself as a “world-class city” in 2005
in conjunction with the world premier of the film,
Lord of the Rings,
a tenants’ association set out to expose that city’s
“world-class slums” by luring tourists from Nathan Philips
Square to Parkdale, where spectators, members of the media,
and activists took a
Lord-of-the-Slums bus tour to parody Victorian slum
tours. In so doing, they appropriated the conventional
performance of urban spectatorship known as “slumming” and
turned it into an indictment against all levels of
government and uncaring slum landlords who draw profits from
the neglect of these neighborhoods. Each year now, they
publicize the winner of the “Golden Cockroach Award” for the
worst of the slum landlords and the “Golden Weasel Award”
for the most unresponsive public officers. In 2007, their
interactive website
http://www.torontoslumtourism.com/
declared itself to be the “official” site for slum tourism
and, in addition to the bus tour, the site also announces
Parkdale “adventure getaway tours” for $900 a month,
featuring “rat hunting in your own apartment, the Broken
Elevator Workout…” and so on. The discourse used to describe
the awards and the adventure tours shows that the activists
are cognizant of a long tradition of slumming in that they
exploit and invert the nightmare of descent in a
world-upside-down cosmology that satirizes above and below:
The Golden Cockroach is a tastefully decorated trophy much
coveted by slum landlords and art exhibits. Mounted on an
imitation marble and stainless steel stand, the illustration
below the mounting bracket subtly hints at a crumbling
apartment building, thus signifying the ever-present effort
by slumlords to run their buildings into the ground at high
rents. The stainless steel curves sweeping upwards towards
the sky symbolize the ever-increasing rents which know no
limit and the efforts by slumlords to charge sky-high rents.
Finally, at its pinnacle, there is the Golden Cockroach
itself, clad in all its gold and splendour, thus subtly
denoting the filth and health hazards which these landlords
aspire to create for their tenants. The gold also symbolizes
the huge profits which slum landlords are making at the
expense of their tenants.
Through
these counter-cultural performances, the tenants’
association (supported by community legal services and cross
listed on the Osgoode Hall web site for law students) goes
beyond a merely comic inversion of the subject/object
relation of traditional slumming whereby class tourists ogle
the poor; they appropriate and inhabit the spectacle of
slumming as a way of constructing radical ways of seeing and
knowing the Other in the city. By shaming those in power,
the tenants externalize blame and educate the media, the
general public, and their own neighbors about systemic
causes of poverty. In addition to the euphoria and catharsis
created through irony and the carnivalesque, the website
also passes on important information and ideas about
possible social action by reporting on news and facts about
the neighborhood through a history of past activism, a list
of what the city has done and should do, and advice to local
tenants, for example on how to
“report a bad landlord
… get your
building rated […] get help organizing your building.”
If the discourse of slumming can be so successfully read,
inverted, and redeployed by those who inhabit the city from
below, why have literary critics not paid more attention to
the ethics and epistemology of slumming when reading
literature about these urban spaces?
Writing the so-called “slums” is
a form of walking in the city, a tactic of knowing improper
and proper places and inhabiting them from below (De Certeau
1984). Textual practices of slumming may be as resistant as
those of the tenants’ association just discussed or as
hegemonic as those of early Victorian practices that
purported to rescue the poor while thrilling at the
lowliness of their being.
While slum novels and reportage are often ambivalent about
class politics, they are easier to read when we take into
account the tradition and discourse of slumming and its
cultural politics.
Penetrating city space to know the
“unknowable” space of slums, whether by insiders or
outsiders, has traditionally organized that space in terms
of class hierarchy even by the very naming of a poor
neighborhood as a “slum”. In some cases, the poor can be
seen appropriating the tropes and hierarchical discourse of
slumming to protest being fixed in this way as monstrous and
voiceless subjects from below. In others, poor subjects may
internalize and reproduce the ideology of difference and the
geography of exclusion by performing a "poor me" on the
margins of the cityscape (Rimstead 2001). Likewise,
contemporary reporters who venture into the slum to make
public what is ostensibly hidden may ironically recycle the
tropes and diction of Victorian slumming as a residual form
(Williams 1977), which is neither wholly hegemonic nor
resistant, but as ambivalent as our nineteenth-century
forerunners in terms of positioning the bourgeois self in
respect to the poor Other. The more we know about the
historical implications of slumming, the more we can
understand our contemporary attraction and repugnance
towards it, no matter how nuanced the cultural politics of
these representations may be.
In the early stages of
industrialization, "descending" into the slums of the city
to see and know the inhabitants was a way to gain knowledge
about an emergent urbanized culture. The market for these
stories in daily newspapers and as best-selling books
indicated a popular hunger for knowing the urban Other and,
more specifically, for knowing the bourgeois self through
contact with the class Other. A public discourse on slumming
fixed the place of class subjects, the voyeur and the object
of the gaze, in terms of distance, a distance that would
preserve the privilege of one community and the abjectness
of the other. But there was also a discourse of proximity
attached to descent, one that was both overt and hidden. As
Seth Koven observes in Slumming: Sexual and Social
Politics in Victorian England (2004), the paradoxical
nature of "slumming," in terms of both class tourism and
anthropological pursuits, was that it ostensibly sent
journalists and do-gooders into the slum for the purpose of
witnessing social injustice and righting it. While very
often overtly an engaged form of class contact, in many
cases the “descent” itself also covertly signified a form of
freedom for these bourgeois subjects, who then used the
anonymity of the slum and the frequent practice of disguise
to gain proximity to the poor in order to explore their own
"deviant" or at least marginal, sexual appetites, often in
taboo and exploitative forms of contact. Koven documents how
the danger of this body knowledge in the context of
Victorian London constituted a type of adventure that led to
“frissons” or “thrills” that were communicated, even in the
form of socially-engaged reportage in the daily newspapers,
with coded reference to sexual adventure and scandal beneath
the surface discourse of philanthropy.
In particular, he documents how the repetition of
scenes of nocturnal bathing in homeless shelters as
represented in newspaper accounts of slumming provided a
voyeuristic function with homoerotic implications.
It could be argued, however, that Koven's
contemporary study of slumming itself markets the racier
side of seeing and theorizing the class subject from below
in the city. The subtitle of Slumming: Sexual and Social
Politics in Victorian England underscores sexuality, a
more alluring topic than poverty and social justice would
be, particularly in current times when the consensus for
social reform and social welfare is crumbling in North
America. Specialists in the field have also noted that
Koven’s evidence and strategies of decoding Victorian texts
are more retrospective than properly belonging to the period
(Gorham 2006). For our purposes here, however, Koven’s study
is enlightening since it charts both the ethical ambivalence
of slumming in its early stages and the complexity of the
knowledge and relationships it produced.
However diverse the discourses
on walking through city slums may be, fairly constant in
accounts of slumming is the image of descent into a space of
culture from below, which testifies to a persistent
hierarchization of the cityscape into those above and those
below, a class-driven social cosmology in the popular
imagination that compels us to consider
above and
below as well as
margin and
centre in the
reading of urban fiction and reportage.
It is not only contemporary
critics like Koven who have identified the murky politics of
slumming, but also very early observers of the urban sport
and of its literary counterpart, the writing of slum novels
or reportage.
As early as 1908, Gilbert K. Chesterton
sensed the ethical risk of slumming
and devoted a chapter titled “Slum Novelists and the Slums”
to the issue in
Heretics/Orthodoxy: “A
great many hard things have been said about religious
slumming and political or social slumming, but surely the
most despicable of all is artistic slumming (4).”
Castigating writers of slum fiction and
reportage for making monsters of the poor for the mere
thrill of sensation, Chesterton scowls at the
short-sightedness of unsympathetic writers who claim to know
slum dwellers from a distance: “The missionary comes to tell
the poor man that he is in the same condition with all men.
The journalist comes to tell other people how different the
poor man is from everybody else.” In particular, Chesterton
objected to authors attempting to capture the psychology of
the poor as a species apart --
-- and in a sensational way that rendered them frozen
in the moment, rather than showing them as part of the long
history of humankind.
“In
short, these books are not a record of the psychology of
poverty. They are a record of the psychology of wealth and
culture when brought in contact with poverty. They are not a
description of the state of the slums. They are only a very
dark and dreadful description of the state of the slummers”
(4). These
early musings about how knowing the urban Other may be as
revelatory of the bourgeois spectator as of the object
observed anticipate Raymond Williams’s observations over
sixty years later in
The Country and the City (1973) that literary attempts
to know the Other in the city were as much about what the
observer desires to know as they were about the knowable
communities themselves. Yet despite a long tradition of
savvy “slummers” in literature extending from the nineteenth
to the twenty-first century, from Charles Dickens’s
bildungsromans on street children to George Bernard Shaw’s
account of the elocutionary re-education of Eliza Doolittle;
from George Orwell’s
Down and Out in Paris
and London to other ambulatory works by Jack London,
Jean Baudrillard, and Jack Kerouac; our critical acumen has
lagged behind in recognizing the ideology of the various
forms of literary slumming.
The etymology of the term and its cultural history,
on the other hand, reveal the ambivalence of slumming as a
cultural practice.
The
Oxford English
Dictionary (1989 : 2874) defines slumming as “the
visitation of slums, esp. for charitable or philanthropic
purposes” -- noting the pejorative idiomatic use of the verb
“to slum” for perhaps “discreditable purposes” or “immoral
pursuits” as a voyeuristic pastime for adventure seekers and
class tourists, as early as its origins in the 1860s. Yet as
Koven discusses in his cultural history, the surface pretext
for slumming in Victorian times was very often social
reform. Slumming was originally linked to moral intervention
in a way that other closely related forms of walking in the
city were not: for example, the bourgeois walking tour and
the studied loitering of the flâneur. The bourgeois
walking-tour, of which slumming could be perceived a
subcategory, was set up to make of the cityscape both a
commodity for entertainment and a learning experience, but
walking tours on the whole were less interventionist than
slumming, since they included educational visits to
monuments, parks, and bourgeois neighborhoods as well as
socially precarious spaces like slums. Taking an even more
detached, if not ironic, stance toward walking in the city,
the flâneur according to Baudelaire and Benjamin was the
detached observer of the Paris arcades, so closely linked to
both consumerism and anti-consumerism, and involved in a
more solitary and maverick pursuit than organized walking
tours. Often as invested in spectacle and the gaze as class
tourists, the flâneur was also as involved in titillation
and intrigue as the subject bent on slumming. However,
neither walking tours nor the perambulations of the flâneur
were deemed a site of rescue and social reform like the more
engaged spectacle of slumming.
Although
these genres of urban peripatetic movement and posturing
emerged with industrialization and, not surprisingly, with
the growth of the city, they ambled into modernity along
different paths in respect to ethics and epistemology.
Walking tours were civic minded and bourgeois, but the
flaneur was a maverick with little pretense to engaging
socially,
invested instead in detachment and consumption of the
spectacle. And by the turn of the twenty-first century,
yuppie culture was using the term “slumming” to describe a
chic form of authentic experience of culture from below as
in frequenting diners, bargain basements, and other “dives”
as a reaction against the phoniness of upper-class culture
as reported by
Wikepedia in 2009.
Other recent colloquial uses of the word reported online
confirm both the denotation and the connotation of descent
in terms of frequenting places or people considered to be
“lower” than oneself, whether or not in respect to class
hierarchy, but often for sexual liaisons (Urban
Dictionary, 2008).
Koven’s first case study
of Victorian slumming is Dr. Barnardo’s forays into the
streets of Victorian London to rescue orphans and relocate
them eventually in foreign countries, Canada especially,
where they would be adopted into families, even though this
too often meant being used as cheap child labor on Canadian
farms.
In
addition to the Barnardo orphans, Koven also discusses the
social idealism of the slum sisters, the Salvation Army,
reporters, and slum “settlements”, all social experiments of
the period that made of slumming a site of urban rescue
while simultaneously exploiting the lowliness of the class
Other and the notion of descent into culture-from-below for
purposes of sensationalism and titillation.
When the Barnardo scandal aired,
it called into question the practice of slumming for
philanthropy by charging the philanthropist with hidden
forms of contact behind the public script of rescue: the
misappropriation of funds, the hiring of sexually deviant
assistants, the mistreatment of boys in his care, his own
moral waywardness in the hiring of prostitutes, and
Barnardo’s fraudulent staging of “before-and-after” photos
of the found boys, were all cited as evidence of his
perverse interest in boys. The ragged clothes in which they
were posed as if found this way in the street were later
discovered to be provided by Barnardo’s assistants when the
boys’s original clothing was not suitably ragged. In this
way, Barnardo solicited public money based on pretence, but
he also captured the “ragamuffins” as the iconic poor, while
claiming to discover them as they actually were. Note the
title of the photograph reprinted on Koven’s 2004 study of
slumming, “The Raw Material as We Find It” (Koven 2004,
107), which paralleled the title of a contemporary novel
about Barnardo orphans going to Canada,
Dusty
Diamonds: Cut and Polished:
A Tale of City-Arab Life and Adventure.
Both titles evoke the notion of found material from the
slums, knowledge and lives that could be found, mined, and
controlled by the state and turned into value, especially
labour power.
I would like to suggest that
decoding the cultural politics of textual representations of
the slums, on the level of production, representation, and
consumption, is largely dependent on how much we know about
the history of slumming as a cultural practice and how we
apply it to the reception of the these accounts as well as
to the point of view or focalization within the texts
themselves.
With brief reference to two very different representations
of poverty in the city, the Depression novel
Cabbagetown by
Hugh Garner (1950, 1968) and a recent series of newspaper
articles by Jan Wong, called
Maid for a Month,
about working for a maid service in Toronto (2006), I want
to explore how urban fiction and reportage are alternative
spaces through which we seek to know and remember, if not
monumentalize and forget, the poor Other in the city.
In 2002, a web-mounted press
release from McGraw Hill-Ryerson claimed it was an ideal
time to reissue the Depression novel
Cabbagetown some
fifty years after its first appearance
because “an entire generation of Canadians are unaware of
this classic.”
In actual fact the book was
always, in both censured and full-length forms, a popular
bestseller. Yet the publisher’s self-acclaimed recovery of
the book, like the repeated ‘discovery” of poverty itself,
makes it seem as if Cabbagetown suddenly appeared on the
literary scene, implying that this “reborn Canadian
classic” is a natural phenomenon and effectively forgetting
its neglect and silencing.
The publisher begins by claiming this slum novel as part of
a burgeoning national literature, without mentioning
its years of marginalization by the literati
in Canada or the author’s difficulty finding a publisher.
Garner had to consent to radical cuts and changes to
have a publisher finally accept the book at half its length
in 1950, until it could, after good sales, be published in
its full-length form in 1968.
For example, he had to omit a scene where a volunteer
worker, a Big Brother, makes sexual advances toward the
young male protagonist and his first publisher
asked for an ending in crime, a barroom brawl and
stabbing vs. the exit of the protagonist to fight in the
Spanish Civil War. The original cover art on the paperback
emphasizes the thrill and the seedier side of culture from
below by featuring a smokey bar-room scene. These days,
however, the novel is most often marketed as “social
document” with a front cover that features the long-gone
streets of brick row-houses in Cabbagetown to selectively
invoke and remember by-gone days in Toronto, or as
McGraw-Hill Ryerson puts it to respond to “a growth
of interest in Canadian local history […] indicative in
historical walking tours and community festivals across the
country”.
Garner’s
novel represents contested urban space in its marketing
history as well as its testimony to life “in the largest
Anglo-Saxon slum in North America” largely because of its
ability to recall scenes of the neighborhood that predated
its almost complete destruction through an experiment in
urban renewal. Roughly ten years after the Depression in
which the novel was set, from 1948 to 1958, was the first
and largest Canadian social experiment in public housing;
the working-class and poor inhabitants of Cabbagetown were
dispersed and relocated, their homes and streets razed, to
make room for large-scale public housing in impersonal high
rises, a dehumanizing built environment to replace
working-class attached brick houses and neighborhood culture
that would be called Regent Park. Today, websites devoted to
urban activism in Regent Park, whose highrise low-cost
housing now faces full destruction itself and another
relocation of its inhabitants, invoke Garner’s social
realism as proof of a culture and a community that has
already been lost once before since the strategy of slum
clearance is actually more one of dispersal rather than
improved housing for residents. Only 148 families of the
original 638 in Cabbagetown were rehoused in Regent Park,
and currently some 370 families are being relocated for a
period of up to fifteen years to “regenerate” Regent Park as
an eco-friendly, mixed condo-public housing space (Warden).
Note that the publisher’s ad for the novel not only
naturalizes the notion of the division between the rich and
the poor in the
claim that “every
city has had its own Cabbagetown,”
it also brushes over the class conflict in the history of
urban renewal:
http://mcgraw-hillryerson.com/tpm/press+box/press+releases/_published/0070915520.php
.
The publisher’s promotion co-opts the
politics of slum organizing that have protested the
dislocation and exile of the inhabitants of whom Garner
wrote and their descendents through the image of community
festivals and a thriving market in nostalgia for the bygone
days, noting that the old neighbourhood is now doubly
invoked in this novel as “social document” since several
black and white pictures of the “bleak period” have been
added in the latest addition, implying that slums belonged
to the past and
glossing over ongoing class conflict in the politics of
urban renewal and gentrification that led to the razing of
most of the working-class houses in Cabbagetown
between
Gerrard Street/the Don River/Parliament Street/and Queen
Street.
Thus the novel is made to function hegemonically as a
textual site for visiting slums as part of the past, not the
present, the novel being equated with “historical walking
tours” (as opposed to politically incorrect “slumming”),
a conventional and hegemonic positioning of the poor that
locates them as part of the distant past rather than the
continuous present (Bromley 1988, Williams 1973, Rimstead
2001).
However, the memory of Cabbagetown, the lived space, is as
contentious as the function of the novel as cultural memory
since the current city space is still highly contested even
though it is also celebrated as a heterogeneous space where
wealthy homeowners mix with people from subsidized housing
or street people in public spaces.
The politics of this so-called mixing is clear,
however; the gentrified Victorian houses rise in value,
which further empowers wealthy homeowners, while the
working-class and the poor renting space in low-cost
high-rises are threatened with another forced eviction and
displacement of their homes and neighbours. To add insult to
injury, the high-end neighborhood homeowners’ associations
currently use a shabby chic Cabbagetown flag (green pop-art
cabbage on black background between green borders that
replaces the red on white maple leaf and borders of the
Canadian flag) to market their $600,000 to $700,000
“authentic” Victorian homes. Ironically, the flag in
question features the icon of the cabbage, once grown on the
front lawns by the working-class inhabitants as part of
their economic struggle to eat rather than to beautify their
urban space with mere adornment. This practice of
flag-waving could just as easily signify class warfare since
it symbolizes a struggle for local identity between a
gentrified, but historically “authentic” restored
architectural space sprouting a yuppyish community of
homeowners and their powerful homeowners’ association and
the state against that of a disposable, still vulnerable
population of “wasted lives,’ a ghost of a community. The
homeowners association of the gentrified houses underline
their connectedness to the past by appropriating the icon of
the cabbage for arty and nostalgic purposes, but also to
show how their investment in restoring historical homes to
city code at great personal cost preserves the past and
builds a new sense of community, that is desirable vs.
undesirable community. They conduct their own walking tours
oriented towards architecture to emphasize the cultural
capital of their homes and to emphasize their contribution
to the new, remade neighbourhood of Cabbagetown and its
ghostly past. Those in public housing refer to their
development as Regent Park, not Cabbagetown, and are able to
reunite under the flag of the cabbage (since they no longer
have yards) only virtually on websites or at highschool
reunions…or through the reading experience of a novel such
as Cabbagetown,
which is quoted copiously in their communications, reaching
out to past tenants and occupants before they all die out.
The contested area of the neighborhood, or rather its ghost,
and the novel converge around the reading of the novel to
invoke cultural memory, but for different performances of
nostalgia: the book publishers and homeowners look to the
novel to monumentalize the slum as part of a distant past
that can be called up as part of the local history and charm
(and value) of the present space while activist groups and
survivors of relocation look to the novel to see the ghost
of times past and a neighborhood lost. Two very different
kinds of nostalgia.
Since emergent groups of tenants rights in Regent Park are
more focussed on the impending destruction of their high
rise homes and a new project of dispersal and relocation to
be implemented by city planners, much of the local history
on these activist websites are devoted to a history of
forgetting, if not mourning. For example, there are a number
of chilling testimonies to what the destruction of the old
Cabbagetown was like from the sounds of the bulldozers to
the loss of friends, street culture, and a sense of home.
The cultural politics of dispersing populations of the poor
and workers in order to prevent organizing and resistance
should by now be transparent to North American audiences. In
short, it is in the interests of economic elites to
construct poor neighborhoods as slums which need to be
eradicated or erased, as a sign of progress, and remembered
only selectively through nostalgia (black and white photos)
rather than historically as spaces that need to be
understood or remembered in their lived complexity.
As David Harvey and others have
observed about North American cities, the do-nut shape of
the dying inner city slum surrounded by richer suburbs has
been replaced by the checkerboard model as the wealthy move
back into these areas and construct walled cities and safe
houses so that they can co-exist in so-called mixed
environments, while the excess poor and working-class are
dispersed to less valuable land sites in the now aging
suburbs. In keeping with this pattern of urban settlement
that has dismantled slums in contemporary times, my next
illustration of slumming takes place throughout the city
with no built-environment as such associated with the poor
Other. Instead, it is the job landscape of the working poor
that constitutes the urban space to which a reporter goes
slumming.
A series of
feature
articles by Jan Won,
which ran over several issues of the
Globe & Mail (Canada’s
most prestigious English daily newspaper) in spring 2006,
was
on dressing up poor
to investigate the life of domestic
cleaners in Toronto. Using disguise and a discourse that
re-inscribes the subject/object relation between the
bourgeois writer and the poor and silent subjects, Wong
reproduces many of the conventions of slum writing while
failing to interrogate the hegemonic politics of ogling the
class Other from a distance. The series brings Victorian
practices into the context of yuppie culture, exposing
little social evolution of attitudes, apart from a desire to
command the facts and statistics of poor lives. From the
outset, this tour into the underworld of domestic cleaners
as a hidden strata of the city, not centered in any slum
area, but mobile and dispersed, cultivates ironic distance
and yet still poses as self-reflexive. This makes it hard
for many to fault the journalist on her classist attitudes
since she seems not to take her own attitudes seriously, but
adopts instead a self-mocking tone during her descent into
manual labour and poverty.
The use of disguise, unquestioned derogatory
discourse, and ample doses of yuppy irony and distanciation
(a “here-but-not-here” form of detachment[1])
positions the slum reportage in a self-knowing rhetoric that
attempts to mediate class distance, not through solidarity,
but through irony towards the descent.
What Chesterton pointed out about slum fiction at the
turn of the century holds true for Wong’s reportage, that it
is less about the psychology of the poor than about “the
psychology
of wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty,”
less about “a
description of the state of the slums” than “the state of
the slummers.”
How does Wong get away with such a thin
veneer of social caring and why does the
Globe & Mail
expect people to consume these rather self-centered reports
from below as informative visits to the poor?
What does this rather uncritical reception of
slumming suggest about the way we consume slum novels and
reportage in general in the here and now?
Wong decides to take her
sons along with her as an educational experience and they
begin their education by referring to their low-cost
apartment as “the hovel”.
She does not correct them on the insensitivity of
these remarks, but takes up the slum slogan herself to
describe their basement apartment in Scarborough, a suburb
of Toronto. Her few concessions to their bourgeois past are
to make sure her sons do not miss cello and hockey practices
or miss private school while they are playing poor, and to
go home herself every weekend to
“[her] silk rugs and [her] potted orchid and the sun
streaming through [her] windows” to play Handel and Mozart
for two hours with friends
(April 15, 2006). Another important context to Wong’s
journalistic quest is that it comes out just five years
after Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling work on the same
theme, Nickled and
Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which the
author found manual work and the struggles of the poor
arduous and degrading. One of the main differences between
their works is that Ehrenreich’s focus is actually talking
to fellow workers and recording their lived experience while
Wong divides her focus between her own culture shock
(devoting much space to her dislike for slovenly and haughty
clients) and a largely statistical overview or detailed and
mundane reporting of the lives of the other maids. Some of
Wong’s remarks about the other maids are unabashedly
condescending: “I
think of my fellow maids. Poverty is also the absence of
beauty. What is it like, when there's nothing in your life
to look forward to except Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
?” (April 15, 2006). Maggie, her cleaning partner, is
viewed from up close and with a modicum of empathy. But once
again, in keeping with what Chesterton observed so long ago,
“The
journalist comes to tell other people how different the poor
man is from everybody else,” Wong stresses that the other
maids do not know how to drive or fill out government forms
rather than more empathic material on their everyday lives.
On
the surface, this series of articles about dressing up poor
inserts itself within an engaged form of journalism that,
like George Orwell’s descents into Paris and London, will
garner knowledge and social criticism against the system, as
well as knowledge about what it feels like to be positioned
among the urban poor. Wong herself makes these connections
between Dickens, Orwell, and Ehrenreich, and her own
writerly vision, but she concludes that bringing her
children along changes the equation since she must worry
about feeding others, implying her lot is more difficult. In
the course of critiquing this series, I have heard spirited
defenses from acquaintances that Wong’s series actually
exposes how horrible it is to clean for the rich in Toronto.
But Wong’s focus is not critiquing the system or empathizing
with the poor who rarely speak about their feelings in her
seven-part series, but rather describing the vertigo caused
when people as cultured and knowledegable as her and her
sons end up dislocated on an adventure to live on minimum
wage. From the titles, we can see that some of the
installments are focussed almost entirely on her and her
sons’ experiences: “Sam’s Story,” “Ben’s Story,” and “Cinder
Sam and Benderella” and overall she gives more space to her
own feelings, their diet, and their culture shock than to
the voices of the maids.
For reasons that now escape me, I thought the best way to
tell the story […] was to work
-
and live
-
at the bottom of the food chain. I would find a low-paying
job, a low-rent apartment and, single-mom-like, take my boys
with me for the month and see how we survived. […..] "Cool,
what are we going to eat? KD?" said Sam, 12, who prizes
Kraft Dinner because he's sick of triple crème
French brie. His brother, Ben, 15, was the embodiment of
teen irony. "So I'll have a urine-soaked mattress?" he said.
"Is the floor going to be, like, concrete?”
In order to articulate more
engaged strategies of reading slums in both lived and
textual space, we need to reframe slumming as a historical
discourse on class encounter in our cities and reframe the
questions we ask of city space as represented in fiction and
journalism. Instead of merely fixing difference and distance
between class tourists and ragged subjects and reading slums
as landscape, radical reading strategies would interrogate
and historicize the links and overlaps between class Other
and urban tourist, novelist, or investigative journalist,
including the ethical and epistemological dimensions of
these imbrications. For example, such reading strategies
might use raggedness, dirt, need, class anger, and the
critique of capitalism (examples of lived experience and
knowledge from below) to question the cultural hegemony of a
society that seeks simultaneously to erase and ogle the
poor.
Works Cited
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Seeing the Urban Other:
Notes on the Ethics and Epistemology of Slumming
