Rebuilding Shattered Worlds: Creating Community by Voicing the Past

Rebuilding Shattered Worlds explores the ways a demolished neighborhood in Easton, Pennsylvania, still resonates in the imaginations of displaced residents. Drawing on six years of ethnographic research, the authors highlight the intersecting languages of blight, race, and place as elderly interlocutors attempt to make sense of the world they lost when urban renewal initiatives razed “Syrian Town”—a densely packed neighborhood of Lebanese American, Italian American, and African American residents.

This ethnography of remembering shows how former residents engage collective memory-making through their shared place, language, and class position within the larger cityscape. Demonstrating the creative power of linguistic resources, material traces, and absent spaces, Rebuilding Shattered Worlds brings together insights from linguistic anthropology and material studies, foregrounding the role language plays in signaling “pastness.” 
            
 
 

Andrea L. Smith is a professor of anthropology at Lafayette College, the author of Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France, and the editor of Europe’s Invisible Migrants: Consequences of the Colonists’ Return. Anna Eisenstein is a doctoral candidate in the department of anthropology at the University of Virginia.