The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila, by Marco Garrido. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780226643144; 288 pp. $30 paper.

Abstract

There are so many layers and facets to The New Noir that it’s hard to believe it fits within the covers of just one book. Clergé recounts history from the colonial era to the present, charts the migrations of Jamaicans, Haitians, and Black Southerners, does a multi-sited ethnography, and conducts 60 interviews with residents of neighborhoods in Queens and Long Island, New York. The New Noir is a work of urban sociology, and also of migration studies, Black Studies, comparative ethnic studies, and the sociology of culture. The book packs a powerful sociological punch, and it is also appetizingly readable. Clergé keeps the reader’smouth watering with each chapter title: Fish Soup, Callalloo, Children of the Yam, and Vanilla Black. These titles are not just empty flourishes. The chapter entitled “Blood Pudding,” for example, recounts not only the house bombings and racial terror that Black people endured when they moved to Queens and Long Island in large numbers in the mid-20th century, but also the erasure of Native Americans, and the 17th and 18th Century presence of 1,300 enslaved Black people in Queens, and 1,000 enslaved Black people in Nassau County. The food references offer rich cultural metaphors for the complex social process that Clergé analyzes in the book. A primary argument of The New Noir is that local places cannot be understood without adopting a global lens. Hence, although the book is about the “Black diasporic suburb”— as illustrated by a section of Queens pseudonymously called Cascades, and a section of Long Island called Great Park—the story reaches far beyond New York. As Clergé writes: “The racial caste system of Charleston, the uneven industrialization of Kingston, and the dictatorship politics of Port au Prince are interrelated global processes that have shaped Black migrant experiences and perspectives” (13). Of course Clergé could have also added sending cities and villages in Ghana, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia, but the book is already impressively comparative. The insight gained from integrating these groups and histories is a clear understanding of the contours of racial capitalism and its effects on traveling systems of stratification. For example, Clergé uses the label of the “brown middle class” to highlight similarities in skin tone stratification in Jamaica, Haiti, and the United States, but also to show how this bodily currency lost much of its power in the trip to the United States, especially for Haitians. Formerly upper class Haitians—driven out by the Duvalier regime—soon found themselves in the same