Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore (Texas Film and Media Studies) by Stanley Corkin

Author:Stanley Corkin [Corkin, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2017-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

Season 4, episode 5, “Not special dead, just dead.”

The world that Simon portrays calls out for some historical context, since his ghetto locale has hardened and calcified, exhibiting its own ecology and seeming to offer few ways of escaping from it. By dramatizing this spatial system of constrained lives and economic opportunity, Simon rebuts the concept that the twenty-first century marks the onset of the postracial era. Indeed, the history and fact of economic and spatial segregation—and now, in the neoliberal era of hypersegregation—shows that the legacy of race has a life that extends far beyond its apparent legal dismantling. Since urban education remains a vexed and infinitely discussed issue of this era, The Wire’s complex dramatization of it provides a trenchant further commentary.6

THE ECOLOGY OF THE GHETTO

How you expect to run with the wolves come night when you spend all day sporting wit’ the puppies?

OMAR

The production and reproduction of knowledge tends to be place-specific, however far-flung that space. A central discourse of globalized commerce is that of cosmopolitanism, a vision of knowledge that distends its spatial application. Cosmopolitanism’s other is a kind of narrow tribalism, a vision of knowing that is far more geographically circumscribed. Such notions of circumscribed space bring to mind earlier versions of capitalism, a system of commerce that was narrowly bound by the technological limits of travel and communication, although even nineteenth-century commerce had a vision of international circulation. That earlier model was primarily focused on the national and subnational production and circulation of commodities and the accumulation of wealth. Arguably, it was at the point when commerce began to look more resolutely beyond the local or regional, in the late nineteenth century, that ideologies of extreme nationalism and localism developed their particular hold on a general public. Visions of nation and affiliation were necessarily derived from a need to reaffirm the local and affirm affiliation within a distinct geography just as that sense of the inviolability of borders was beginning to be contested. Simon shows this process as recursive within The Wire. We see in this season the need to affirm the smallness and self-contained nature of specific places: the west side of Baltimore over the east, or Baltimore over New York, for example.

As an effect of this sense of space and affiliation, as well as through the limits of wealth, class, and opportunity, The Wire delineates the terms of ghetto life in Baltimore, showing us in dramatic detail a self-contained sector of that city. In doing so, it develops a detailed sociological view of a region working in relative isolation. In season 2 we saw the waterfront defined as an island that projects into the world beyond, but remains a discrete space with its own specific social definitions. In season 3 we saw Colvin defining a region within the region. In season 4 we see the pervasive effects of the world as a closed system. In such a self-contained space, which is to some degree constrained from without and to some degree—and ideologically—constrained

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