Chapter 10 - American Vertigo

Summary

Due to the confluence of diverse factors such as urban expansion, the unprecedented influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, new transportation and communication systems, the electrification of city streets, and the rise of skyscrapers, assembly-line factories and global markets, the American metropolis in particular witnessed an anthropological shift in human life at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although elusive, the energies enforcing this shift may best be condensed in the biopolitical metaphor of vertigo, which uniquely captures the multiple facets of metropolitan dwelling. Both bewildered immigrants and avant-garde artists and writers were ideally positioned to record the qualitative changes brought about by life in the big city. In the cultural sphere, these transformations are reflected in technological and technical revolutions ranging from the moving pictures to amusement parks such as Coney Island, with imagist poetry and Dadaist happenings in between.