EGMT 1530: The Slums

Poor neighbourhoods of the world’s great cities – New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Johannesburg, Paris, Los Angeles, Kinshasa, Hong Kong – have long been labeled ‘slums’: places of misery, hopelessness, despair, failure. Yet they have also been seen as transgressive, exciting, liberatory, innovative, and joyful. How can these two things exist side by side? In this class we will follow the rise of a global discourse of ‘the slums’, exploring how it evolved alongside capitalism, empire, mass migration, and, ultimately, modernity. We will see how designating different places as ‘slums’ has functioned as a powerful tool to mark certain people, their families, and their homes as different, deviant, and abnormal. Yet, even as we examine what gets called a slum, by whom, and why, we will see how the people who live in these spaces have resisted, reclaimed, and repurposed the term, and the spaces they live in, offering new ways to think about ‘the good life.’ Engaging with scholarly research, investigative journalism, fiction, photograph, and film, we will examine the rise of ‘the slum’ in industrial, capitalist, globalized society from the nineteenth century to today.