New York Public Library features THE NEW NOIR as reading material for the exhibit "Black Suburbia: From Levittown to Ferguson"
“Winner of the Mary C. Douglas Prize for Best Book in the American Sociological Association”
Cover Art by Nathalie Jolivert
The expansion of the Black American Middle Class and the unprecedented increase in the number of Black Immigrants since the 1960s has 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--Queens and Long Island. The New Noir reveals that region and nationality shape how the Black middle class negotiates race and class in everyday life.
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PRAISE for THE NEW NOIR
“In The New Noir, Orly Clerge skillfully documents the changing meaning of Blackness for today’s diasporic Black middle class. Combining ethnography, interviews; and insights from her own life experience, she draws a nuanced and insightful portrait that defies stereotypes and lays new theoretical grounds for exploring the intersections of class, ethnicity and race.”
—Philip Kasinitz, Presidential Professor of Sociology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
“Stuart Hall meets E. Franklin Frazier in the suburbs of New York. The New Noir is an illuminating and provocative ethnographic monograph that documents the rise of a new, multicultural black middle class. Clerge speaks to the dynamic nature of these spaces, backing up her observations with statistics. Urgent, timely, and well-written — a work of importance.”
—Elijah Anderson, Yale University, author of Code of the Street and The Cosmopolitan Canopy
“Orly Clerge’s The New Noir is an elegantly written, important, and startling account of the position of the diasporic Black and Caribbean American community in the middle-class suburban areas of New York City and Long Island. Using compelling culinary metaphors, Clerge demonstrates the struggles of Haitian and Jamaican professionals to gain a foothold in a pair of complex racial communities, negotiating their position with African Americans as well as the white middle and working classes. This is truly a new Noir and a surprising one for those unaware of the many changes that immigration has brought about in the 21st century. The New Noir will take its place with the best ethnographies of race.”
—Gary Alan Fine, Northwestern University, coauthor, Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America
“The New Noir is a new and important addition to research on race/ethnicity, mobility, migration, place making, and black middle class diasporas, as it examines the variations within the black middle class in a way that has not been done before.”
—Jody Agius Vallejo, Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California