At the turn of the twentieth century, electricity and mass transit turned New York into a 24-hour city. And as rigid social norms relaxed, New Yorkers of all classes, genders, and races began to gather in nightclubs, lofts, and warehouses to dance, drink, consort, and do the kinds of things that are impermissible in the light of day. From turn-of-the-century cabarets to the nightclubs of the Harlem Renaissance, from ballroom and drag culture to the downtown scenes of the 1970s and 80s and their 21st-century Brooklyn successors, institutions of the night have served as spaces of desire and transgression, safety and danger, for New Yorkers both prominent and marginal—fomenting, in the process, forms of music, dance, and fashion that have made New York City a global cultural capital. But why has New York City been such a formative site of club culture? What do the cultures of the night have to do with urbanization, technology, and socio-economics of industrial and post-industrial capitalist modernity?
In this course, we will trace the history of nightlife in New York from the turn of the century to the present day, trying to understand the social forces that create, destroy, and recreate it anew. In doing so, we will explore a series of questions. What makes night distinct from day? What acts and capacities might it enable? What does it mean to dance, to do it with lots of people, and to do it at night? What happens when we create spaces that suspend the values of the workaday world, creating the conditions, however temporarily, for new and potentially freer modes of living? How have such spaces, and the sounds that fill them, been imagined and realized? Why did dance music culture flourish in New York during the 1970s, when the emergence of underground clubs like The Loft, The Gallery, and the Paradise Garage helped create the template for what we now understand a “club” to be? What is the relationship of nightlife to politics, whether those of Black freedom, queer liberation, or myriad contemporary struggles? What forces—moral, political, or economic—undermine nightlife’s radical potential? What has been the effect of the city’s commitment to relentlessly rising property values—a phenomenon known colloquially as “gentrification”—on the possibilities for autonomous culture? Today, as nightlife experiences a moment of effervescence, how does club culture reflect and shape the social, political, and economic trends of this moment? Readings will likely include selections from works by Tim Lawrence, Jeremy Gilbert, Ewan Pearson, Sharon Zukin, Barbara Ehrenreich, John Protevi, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Madison Moore, Emily Witt, McKenzie Wark, Bryan Palmer, and others.
