Description

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The expansion of the Black American middle class and the unprecedented increase in the number of Black immigrants since the 1960s have transformed the cultural landscape of New York.

In The New Noir, Orly Clerge explores the richly complex worlds of an extraordinary generation of Black middle class adults who have migrated from different corners of the African diaspora to suburbia. The Black middle class today consists of diverse groups whose ongoing cultural, political, and material ties to the American South and Global South shape their cultural interactions at work, in their suburban neighborhoods, and at their kitchen tables. Clerge compellingly analyzes the making of a new multinational Black middle class and how they create a spectrum of Black identities that help them carve out places of their own in a changing 21st-century global city.

Paying particular attention to the largest Black ethnic groups in the country, Black Americans, Jamaicans, and Haitians, Clerge’s ethnography draws on over 80 interviews with residents to examine the overlooked places where New York’s middle class resides in Queens and Long Island. This book reveals that region and nationality shape how the Black middle class negotiates the everyday politics of race and class.
 

About the Author

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Orly Clerge is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She is coeditor of Stories from the Front of the Room: How Higher Education Faculty Overcome Challenges and Thrive in the Academy.

Praise For…

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"Drawing on the black ethnographic tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, Clergé focuses on black middle-class residents of two New York City suburbs—Cascades, a majority black in-city suburb, and Great Park, a multiethnic, multiracial community in predominantly white Nassau County—to demonstrate the complexity of their lives. The book traces migrants from the US South, Haiti, and Jamaica, recounting their specific cultures, social classes, and experiences with slavery and white supremacy. . . . This well-researched and well-written book is an important study, accessible to general and academic audiences. Highly recommended."
— CHOICE

"The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia is a refreshingly novel approach to ethnography that offers much about race, class, culture, and urban community-building. The fact that it covers so much analytical terrain, and that it does so in a clear and coherent manner, makes this book a pleasure to read."

— Journal of Urban Affairs

 "The New Noir offers a clear contribution to sociological studies on middle class Black communities, but the focus on different nationalities makes the study much richer."
— American Journal of Sociology