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Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Engagement, and the Color Line

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Abstract

For more than a century, social reformers and scholars have examined urban impoverishment and inequalities along the color line and linked “slum life” to African America. An engaged archaeology provides a powerful mechanism to assess how urban-renewal and tenement-reform discourses were used to reproduce color and class inequalities. Such an archaeology should illuminate how comparable ideological distortions are wielded in the contemporary world to reproduce longstanding inequalities. A 20th-century neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana, is examined to probe how various contemporary constituencies borrow from, negotiate, and refute long-established urban impoverishment and racial discourses and stake claims to diverse present-day forms of community heritage.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, Cavanaugh Hall 413B, Indianapolis, IN, 46202, USA

    Paul R. Mullins

  2. Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, 701 E. Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Lewis C. Jones

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  1. Paul R. Mullins
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  2. Lewis C. Jones
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Mullins, P.R., Jones, L.C. Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Engagement, and the Color Line. Hist Arch 45, 33–50 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376819

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