Captive City Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South

Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when "urban" and "rural" indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year―centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities ―similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan―resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.
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