‘Witness to my times’: Sarah Schulman and the Lower East Side

Abstract

New York has fifty-nine ‘district communities’ and hundreds of ‘neighbourhoods’ whose physical areas are geographically, socially and ethnically but not legally defined, and which historically may or may not have been experienced as ‘communities’. For all the ambiguity of this term we may say that it signifies a sense of shared subculture and social-psychological belongingness for local people or those using a given urban area (see Krieger, 1982). Even so, such subcultural communities may overlap, coexist in harmony, mutual indifference, or tension, and be internally perceived in different ways