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Mobility in Immigrant New York

When we think about popular entertainment as ethnic amusement in immigrant New York City, we read geographically, entwining culture in the social production of space. At its best, scholarship on amusement in turn-of-the-century New York has been exemplary materialist history, situating diverse performance forms in leisure practices, built environments, and market conditions. At the same time, entertainments like vaudeville were not just in the city, they were also “the voice of the city,” in Robert Snyder’s words: “as loud, brassy, and quintessentially New York as the sound of a subway train roaring into Times Square” (xiv). This tension between the city as material place and as concept cuts through the so-called spatial turn in social theory. For Edward Soja, postmodern geography redresses “an overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life” and its “implicit subordination of space to time” by theorizing “social being actively emplaced in space and time” (136, 140). This desire to coordinate a “simultaneously historical and geographical materialism” (137) informs two recent books about ethnic performance in immigrant New York, Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924 (2008) by Esther Romeyn and The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (2008) by Sabine Haenni. In many ways, our understanding of the 40 years that define both books has been dominated by metaphors of time—developments, transformations, a turn of the century—so that specific encounters with modernization have been most meaningful when they clarify the emergence of something like modern America. Shifting these familiar narratives toward a horizontal axis, where identity formation or cultural production signifies primarily in