Iris Murdoch’s character Jake Donaghue tells us, “There are some parts of London which are necessary and others which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earl’s Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency” (1979[1954]: 24). Mount Pleasant is one of those contingent places north of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, constantly open to redefinition. Gabriella Gahlia Modan’s book is part of a growing literature that looks at how people bound and label the places they live, in their discourse and other everyday practices, instead of taking the place as given, a basis for sociolinguistic comparisons. Unlike Jake, Professor Modan likes contingency.
The book is the first work in the series “New Directions in Ethnography,” which is supposed to be accessible both to specialists and nonspecialists. One way it does this is by foregrounding the “ethnographic narrative” and leaving “basic intellectual genealogy” for afterward (those terms are from the blurb for the series at the front of the book). In Turf wars, the narratives concern meetings about sexual harassment, plans for a public toilet, letting people into the front door of a coop or condo, taking a familiar bus, or going to the shop around the corner. Most of all, they concern just walking up and down the street at the center of the neighborhood, watching the people, listening to the music, smelling the bakery, and sometimes stopping to chat. It is with just such a typical Saturday morning urban scene that the book starts.
Modan bravely takes on widely disparate materials: published histories, informal talk between friends, a grant proposal, a public performance, semi-structured and oral history-style interviews. I think that the heterogeneity in general works well. But the results are, perhaps inevitably, uneven. Some voices are analyzed or juxtaposed in ways that lead to new insights and connections, while others are presented with hardly any commentary at all, as if their meaning were obvious.
Chapter 3 (“The moral geography of Mount Pleasant”), starts with the rhetorical predicament of a Latina woman who can say, “I just want to walk down the street without being yelled at” (p. 89), but who can also resist what could be an implied criticism of Latino men by saying, “White women don’t understand those comments” (88). That anecdote, which Modan circles around through the chapter, makes us aware of how speakers use such divisions (urban/suburban, Latino/Anglo, gay/straight) rhetorically. Chapter 6 (“Keeping it in the family”) analyzes residents’ histories of a single coop/condo building, often coming back to assertions of kinship in both literal and figurative terms (the same families live in the building across generations, and the metaphor of family is used to evoke one kind of belonging, in contrast to other kinds of belonging). Chapter 6 (“La Loca vs. the cultural vampires”) is mostly just an account of a poet/performer giving a one-person show that portrays various local characters; it rather neatly shows the nesting of identities within identities.
Not all chapters have that analytical or moral complexity. In chapter 4 (“The politics of filth”), the writers of a proposal for new public toilets are criticized for associating the practice of urinating in the streets with Latino and immigrant men. But the analysis doesn’t take into account that it was a grant proposal, written to meet the criteria of a foundation that funds projects that “strengthen intergroup collaboration.” That immediate rhetorical context, not some underlying association of ethnic diversity with filth, seems to be the reason for the references to ethnic diversity. And where the grant proposal doesn’t actually refer to Latinos, the analysis can make the link by inference; if they don’t slip into racism, she is willing to give them a shove. Chapter 7 (“Home ties, winds of change”), a postscript in which she gives “stories and updates of my neighbors in their own voices,” has the opposite problem. Nice people just talk about things, without much comment or analysis. I find these long narratives problematic: Why should the interview situations be treated as transparent, and why should they not be subject to the challenges made and contradictions drawn out earlier in the book?
As I have said, Modan is good at identifying the explicit or implicit use of contrasts between two places. She is good at identifying metaphors, the building as family, the gentrified neighborhood as frontier. She is good at showing how categories (gender, ethnicity, class) can be indexed without explicit references. But I sometimes feel a gap between her account of the broad sweep of history and social change (gentrification, immigration) on one hand, and the anecdotes and voices (a tense encounter, a personal narrative) on the other. I admit that this might be just my taste (as a discourse analyst reading an ethnography), but I think that more consideration of who is talking to whom, and why, would help link the levels of history and anecdote.
The last two chapters present the theoretical background that in most monographs would be in an earlier literature review chapter. The review of discourse (chapter 8) seemed to be addressed to readers unfamiliar with the field; for instance, there is a distinction, drawing on James Gee’s term “big D discourse,” as “ways that people represent the social world” (274) and “little d discourse” as “structure and organisation of discourse” and then “language above the utterance level” (275). I would also flag another sense of discourse, “language as social practice,” as used in Critical Discourse Analysis (e.g., Fairclough Reference Fairclough1992), which might fit better with the kind of analysis I think the book needs. But Modan gets across the main point, that any reader unfamiliar with the field needs to know that the term “discourse analysis” is used in very different, perhaps contradictory ways in different approaches.
The review of studies of place (chapter 9) is rather more a list than a synthesis. But I’ll settle for that, because it brings together a wide range of work on the construction of place, including some I knew about but thought no other linguists had found, and some I didn’t know about but should have, while staying grounded in the rich seam of work on place in linguistic ethnography. As a sort of annotated bibliography, a tour of the author’s shelves, it will make a good introduction for readers entering this area. And I am convinced by the example that this is a good place for theoretical overviews – at the end. I will commend the publishers (if it is their idea) for the concept of the series, while also scolding them for a misprint on p. 27 that must have made the author cringe, and a missed line on p. 35.
I like the tone of the book. One of the things that makes Gina (in chapter 7) want to move out of Mount Pleasant is “the incredible sense of entitlement” in the way some people talked at meetings (255). I think I can imagine what bothered her; people can be smug, whingeing, and exclusive when talking about the place they live, whether it is an urban neighborhood, a suburb, or a village. It is annoying when they say or imply that being born here (or not), speaking English (or Spanish), having a mortgage (or paying rent, or not paying rent), entitles them to opt out of the conflicts described here, and trumps all other identities. Modan, who lived in Mount Pleasant with the liminal and temporary identity of the graduate student, could have written a book that insisted more on her own belonging. But she avoids the smugness of entitlement, and instead shows the contested terrain in a book that will serve as a starting point for future researchers on discourse and place.
