Abstract
The central problem for the sociologist of the city is to discover the forms of social action and organization that typically emerge in relatively permanent, compact settlements of large numbers of heterogeneous individuals. (Wirth, 1938: 9)
That Reuben A. Buford May’s Urban Nightlife is reminiscent of urbanists such as Wirth is no coincidence – May sets out, successfully, to provide an urban ethnography in the tradition of the Chicago School. His starting question in Urban Nightlife is that which Wirth describes above – what forms of social action and organisation can be found in the city, and how is this shaped by the heterogeneity of the population? Specifically, May seeks to account for the social actions and, perhaps most importantly, interactions that he observed and experienced in the nightlife of ‘Northeast’, a college town in the Deep South of America. What May reveals, through his nuanced and accessible ethnographic prose, is the troubling persistence of what he calls ‘integrated segregation’. Integrated segregation is, for May, the persistence of segregation – primarily but not solely by race – in this nightlife, despite the absence of racially-oriented discourses or, in most instances, explicit practices of segregation. This segregation instead operates via a series of behaviours and interpretations of behaviour which combine to segregate groups along racial lines. It is, May summarises, ‘as if there is a generation of racial antagonists who do not know why they are antagonistic’ (p. 162) present on these city streets at night. The vision that is presented might be understood as a sort of ‘post-political’ racial segregation, in which debate, discussion and the symbolic manifestations of racial tension are replaced by a series of written and unwritten codes, norms and behaviours that culminate in a racially divided timespace. This racial segregation intersects with a series of other social and cultural divisions – May focuses in particular on gender and class – which are also played out in Northeast’s nightlife. Such segregation, May shows, most frequently results in black or working class men and women experiencing various forms of exclusion, oppression or demonisation in contrast to white, educated and middle class men and women.
May’s ethnographic writing is rich and engaging. He offers a detailed picture both of his own position in the urban night, and his interactions with other participants of Northeast’s nightlife, drawing out insights into integrated segregation from this. It is worth illustrating at length – a section on verbal and physical confrontations offers one example:
As the streetlight changed to green and we were about to begin walking the crosswalk, we all stopped when two cars made right turns … A sedan with glistening black paint and shiny silver rims followed the first car. I couldn’t determine the exact make or model of the second car because it also had been ‘pimped out’. It looked like a car from the 1980s. Both the passenger side and driver side windows were tinted, but three-fourths of the way. The driver was a dark-skinned African American man with a cigar propped on the side of his mouth … The black car turned the corner in front of the [White] intoxicated guy who was just about eight steps in front of us. He was startled by the turning vehicle and shouted to the driver, ‘Hey, watch the fucking light you asshole.’ The White male continued across the street as the driver of the car finished his turn, hit the brakes suddenly and shifted the car gear into the park position … All I could see was the woman’s two slender arms wrapped around the driver’s right forearm as he started to exit the car … Seeming to yield to his female companion’s resistance, the driver sat back down in the car, pulled his foot back into the car, slammed the door shut, eased the car into gear and pulled off. The intoxicated patron had stopped on the other side of the street to take a photograph for a group of people he didn’t seem to know and was none the wiser that the woman on the passengers’ side of the car had intervened in a potential fight. (p. 96)
May explores the drinking-oriented nightlife of the White man in the quote above, complete with the confidence in accessing public space that his drunkenness, open indication of youth, casual clothes and sociable demeanour suggests. He contrasts this with the vehicle-based ‘cruising’ of the Black man in the car, excluded from and peripheral to the nightlife itself, with personal affront treated as an invitation to aggression. May suggests that, without the intervention of the female passenger, a confrontation exacerbated by the ‘race, class and cultural differences [which] heighten tensions between these two men, even if only in their individual interpretations of the meanings of their interchange’ (p. 98), would have been likely. Without explicit practices and discourses of segregation, small everyday interactions nonetheless create and reinforce a variety of social and cultural differences.
May illustrates a series of other practices which combine to produce this integrated segregation. Routines and rhythms of the night-out, styles and forms of dress, sexual desire, rituals of flirtation, bar and club dress codes and occasional moments of violent schismogenic release all combine to perpetuate integrated segregation. May’s argument convincingly suggests that by ‘making distinctions based on visual cues given off by strangers on the public street, nightlife participants are able to determine and who should and who should not be engaged in an interaction’ (p. 7). The result is a superficially integrated but highly segregated nightlife, particularly along lines of race and class. May’s work thus provides a counter-narrative to the often vague hopefulness that is placed upon notions of ‘encounter’, ‘rubbing-along’ and other forms of multicultural urban interaction (see e.g. Amin, 2013). His work, as I read it, offers most to scholarship in this vein, with core questions of race and everyday practice being explored in nuanced ways.
Beyond the richness of the ethnographic prose, May’s work has slightly less to offer directly to researchers interested in urban nightlife or alcohol consumption. Here, the book perhaps misses an opportunity to engage with what might be labelled ‘night-time economy studies’: the often ethnographic explorations by geographers, sociologists, criminologists, historians, anthropologists and others into forms of governance and sociability in the urban night that has emerged as a distinct field of research over recent decades. While researchers in this area have perhaps emphasised divisions of gender and class over issues of race in the urban night, May’s work would speak productively to, for example, Deborah Talbot’s (2007) research into the governance of race in the night-time economy, or Caluya’s (2008) exploration of intersections between race and sexuality in the clubs of Sydney. Specifically, then, May offers little reflection as to whether the integrated segregation that he observed is enhanced or exacerbated by its occurrence in the night-time economy. Would he have found similar trends through ethnographic work in daytime consumption spaces? Does the presence of alcohol enhance or mitigate the social divisions that May identifies? At times, the focus on the night feels almost coincidental – an interesting case study for May, but not an area worthy of exploration in and of itself. Here, there is perhaps a missed opportunity for May; however, the insightful nature of his observations and richness of his ethnographic work generates an interesting challenge for other scholars of the urban night to integrate this into their own work in future.