Concept: Ghetto
Definition: (noun) a part of a city, especially a slum area, occupied by a minority group or groups. (verb) put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated area or group.
Related Terms: tenement, slum, banlieu, ethnic neighborhood, shantytown
Description: The ghetto has been the subject of countless songs, films, literary works, and advocacy campaigns, and conjures up mournful or divisive images of social malaise. Occasionally it has also served as a source of identity for a disenfranchised group. This tension in the way the ghetto is understood and represented contributes to some of the difficulties informing public debate and discussion of the phenomenon.
The association of the ghetto with migration goes back to the beginnings of its known history. In the medieval ghettos of Europe, Jews were restricted to special quarters since they were considered outsiders who did not belong in mainstream society. In subsequent centuries, the segregation, terrorization, and murder of Jews continued, most notably in Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century and during the Nazi period in the twentieth. Many Jews who emigrated from eastern Europe came to the United States in the early years of the twentieth century and lived in ghettos in New York’s lower East Side. Photographer Jacob Riis, himself a Danish immigrant, took it upon himself to document the poverty, misery, and harsh conditions of ghetto life at this time. Immigrant Jewish writers like Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska, on the other hand, sought to deflect negative attention by portraying the American assimilation ideal of the era. Hollywood established the ghetto film genre, in which Anglo conformity, melting pot and cultural pluralism narrative scenarios are melded together.
More recently, urban and suburban ghettos in the world’s major cities have often been in the news as places that breed violence because of overcrowding, economic deprivation, and hopelessness. The latter half of the twentieth century has seen the rise of ethnic enclaves in many European cities with large immigrant populations. Of these, France’s banlieus and the U.K.’s minority areas have come under increasing critical and media scrutiny from immigrant writers themselves and from broadcast media and film. In the aftermath of terrorist acts by some disaffected and radicalized Muslim youth, migrant ghettos are increasingly under suspicion. The European refugee ‘crisis’ of 2015-16 has brought about yet another iteration of the human concentration of non-natives that the ghetto has symbolized. The migrant ghetto of today is often a refugee camp, an enclosure with barbed wire in which migrants are confined, and other temporary living spaces.
S.C. 2016
