2023考研英語閱讀城市里的種族隔離

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2023考研英語閱讀城市里的種族隔離

　　Segregation in cities

　　城市里的種族隔離

　　Living in black and white

　　黑白時代

　　How different races inhabit cities

　　不同的種族如何共居于城市

　　Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. By Carl Nightingale.

　　《種族隔離：城市分裂的全球史》，卡爾南丁格爾著。

　　Carl Nightingale S history of segregation claims to be a detailed account of how cities were,for millennia, divided along racial lines. But it is really a history of how colonialism affectedthe construction, governance and policing of great urban areas.

　　卡爾南丁格爾的這本著作講述了種族隔離的歷史，并據稱詳細描繪了幾千年來，城市是如何在種族界限中分裂的。但事實上，它也是一段有關殖民主義如何影響大城市的建設、政府管治和政策制定的真實歷史。

　　For the past 500 years white Europeans have often used their economic and military powerto build and rebuild urban landscapes in order to grab the safest, healthiest and nicest partsfor themselves. Even in places where colonial rule is now a distant memory, many urbanenvironments cannot be understood without recalling their foundation as a fortified enclavefor Europeans bent on procuring commodities or opening markets. Calcutta was set up in 1690 by a member of Britain s East India Company, in defiance of the localMuslim overlord. It later vied with London as the biggest metropolis in the British empire.

　　在過去的500年，為便于強取豪奪最安全、最健康、最好的地區，歐洲白人殖民者往往動用經濟和軍事力量來建造或改建當地城市的風貌。甚至現在，某些地區的人們覺得殖民統治是一段遙遠的記憶。但是，如果要完全明白很多城市的環境，我們就不得不追溯至這些城市被創立的時期。滿腦子只想著采購商品、開拓市場的歐洲人將這些城市隔離為鞏固飛地。加爾各答，由不列顛東印度公司1690年創立，目的在于挑戰當地穆斯林霸主。隨后，加爾各答開始與倫敦競爭大英帝國的最大大都會的頭銜。

　　Both colonialism itself and the divided cities it spawned reached their zenith on the eve of thefirst world war. As Europeans migrated in large numbers to far-flung corners of theirexpanding empires, the need to keep them comfortable, both physically andpsychologically, meant that other groups were treated with ever greater ruthlessness. MrNightingale shows how the roots of apartheid in South Africa, for example, are to be foundmuch earlier than the 1948 election victory of the National Party; they lie in the colonialproject which led to the creation of Johannesburg half a century earlier with white and non-white areas. This was made much more explicit after 1948and this shocked a world whereracial ideologies and colonialism were being challenged and dismantled. But segregationistzeal did not flare in a vacuum; it built on an existing system of allocating space whichreflected the needs of an imperial elite.

　　第一次世界大戰前夕，殖民統治和割裂的城市均發展到鼎盛時期。當時，大批遷徙至版圖不斷擴大的大英帝國的偏遠地區的歐洲人，他們需要物質上和精神上都有舒服的狀態，這意味著他們變本加厲的無情對待其他種族。書中，南丁格爾先生道出為何人們認為南非種族隔離制度的起源比1948年國民黨大選成功得更早。其實，隔離制度早就存在于隔離計劃中。早在半個世紀以前，割裂為白人區和非白人區的約翰尼斯堡的創建，就是拜隔離制度所賜。1948年后，種族隔離制度更加毫不遮掩地暴露出來這讓世界為之震驚，因為當時的種族主義和殖民主義的觀點都受到挑戰，有的也被廢除。但是，人們對種族隔離的熱情并非空穴來風。隔離制度存在于空間已經被分配的現存體系中，而且反映著帝國精英的需求。

　　Those needs were complex and shifting. After their defeat of the Boers in 1902, the Britishmasters of South Africa wanted labour for the gold mines that had given birth toJohannesburg; but they also wanted to attract white, English-speaking immigrants, and topromise them a life in which other races featured only as house servants. Ever moreingenious forms of separation emerged, including the foundation of present-day Sowetobeside an urban sewage farm. In Cape Town, a new effort to divide, aimed at keepingEuropeans healthy, began after the arrival of bubonic plague at the start of the 20th century.The scourge had been spreading westward from China s ports; in many cities, infectiousdiseases were the catalysts for grand segregationist projects, and were underpinned by racistideologies.

　　這些需求復雜且變化不定。繼1902年大敗波爾人后，英國南非的統治者希望為金礦的發展增加開發過約翰尼斯堡的勞動力，但他們也想吸引講英語的白色人種移民前來。所以統治者承諾移民能過上一種把其他種族當做家仆來使喚的尊貴生活。不同隔離形式推陳出新的出現，比如現今的索維托就建在城市污水處理廠旁。二十世紀初黑死病肆虐開普敦后，為了讓歐洲人保持健康，人們開始采用一項新的隔離方法。這場瘟疫爆發始于中國港口，并不斷擴散;在很多城市，傳染病成為龐大種族隔離運動的催化劑，并淪為種族主義者的合法工具。

　　Mr Nightingale, a professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo, makes a fair casefor studying the emergence of colonial cities as a single phenomenon. More contentiousis his argument that modern Chicago presents a comparable example of rich white peopleforcing racial minorities, especially blacks, to live separately and badly.

　　居住在布法羅的紐約州立大學教授南丁格爾先生，為了保證公平，把殖民城市的出現當做一個簡單的現象來研究。更容易引起爭論的是，他認為現代的芝加哥市提供了一個可比案例富裕的白色人種逼迫少數人種，尤其是黑人，住在環境惡劣的隔離地區里。

　　Even when black people were enfranchised and began asserting their civil rights in the 1960s,politics in Chicago was manipulated in ways whose end-result was not so different fromapartheid, he argues. One early factor was the emergence of a property market that wasdistorted by covenants which specified the race of the purchaser. The Supreme Courtallowed the practice in 1926, but struck it down in 1948. Later, so-called urban-renewalprojects were used to move black communities to less desirable locations, Mr Nightingalesays. Poor areas were cleared to build highways that would enable rich commuters to travelmore easily between offices and their suburban homes.

　　他認為，甚至在20世紀60年代黑人得到解放時，他們開始強烈要求擁有自己的民主權利，但芝加哥的政治卻被人們以不同方式操控，最終黑人得到的結果也與種族隔離制度相差無幾。其中，一個早期的因素是房地產市場的興起。當時有條款詳細規定購房者的種族，房產市場因此被扭曲。最高法院在1926年允許這種做法，直到1948年才廢除它。南丁格爾先生說，之后的所謂城區重建項目成為把黑人社區搬遷至更糟糕地區的借口。貧民區被拆除只是為了建高速公路，以便讓富有的上班族可以更方便地乘車往返于辦公室和鄉村的住房。

　　Mr Nightingale is right to point out that segregation can exist without a formal regime. But hesurely underestimates the difference between a country like the United States, where thedisadvantaged have legal and political tools at their disposal, and apartheid South Africawhere no such tools were available. So powerful is his belief in a handful of masternarratives that he sometimes shoehorns facts to fit his theories. The demons which haunthis universe are imperial elites, property markets and racial ideologies. All of these factors, he believes,operate in a top-down and often co-ordinated way to advance the interests of the powerfuland marginalise weaker groups.

　　南丁格爾先生提出一個好的觀點，即把殖民城市的出現當作一個獨立的現象來研究。不過顯而易見的是，他低估了國與國的不同，比如美國，弱勢群體有自主的法律和政治工具，但在種族隔離嚴重的南非，沒有這樣的工具。南丁格爾先生對少數主人公視角的故事深信不疑，以至于在某些情況下，他試圖用部分事實牽強附會地證明自創的理論。讓他著魔的是帝國精英、房地產市場和激進的意識形態。他堅信，這些因素，一起創造了一個自上而下、協調一致的途徑，以提高權勢群體利益或削減弱勢群體的利益。

　　But not everything can be explained in those terms. For example, the violence whicherupted on the streets of Northern Ireland in 1969, and entrenched segregation, may havehad its roots in imperial policy, but it clearly had a local momentum of its own. It isnonsense to suggest, as he does, that the Protestant mobs that attacked Catholic areas in theearly days of the troubles were cheered on by right-wing British politicians in London.

　　但這些規則并不能解釋所有的事情。比如，1969年北愛爾蘭大街上爆發的暴力事件和人們心中根深蒂固的隔離制度等發生的根源，也許在帝國政策中能找到，但毫無疑問的是，隔離制度肯定會受到當地勢力的扶持。南丁格爾先生認為，在新教暴民襲擊天主教區這樣的麻煩事發生的早期，倫敦的右翼政治家本應該在旁煽風點火。這完全是廢話。

　　Another gripe is that the book promises an account of 70 centuries of city-splitting but failsto deliver on that, despite a perfunctory opening chapter which looks, among other things,at sacred space in prehistoric and pre-modern times. To state the obvious, Westernimperialists were not the only dividers of cities. In traditional empiresOttoman or tsarist,for examplecities were split because society itself was rigidly divided, although not alwaysphysically, into ethnically or religiously based communities where the individual s everydaylife was controlled by the leader of his or her group, who in turn delivered the group sloyalty to the sultan or emperor. The elites of each group had a stake in enforcingseparation. A comprehensive look at urban segregation would have teased out thedifference between traditional and modern separation.

　　讓我不滿的另一點是，此書承諾要描述出城市分裂的70個世紀，卻沒有對此進一步闡述，除了看起來敷衍了事的開篇章節：講述的是在史前時期和前現代時期，發生在神圣空間里的其他事情。而顯而易見的是西方帝國主義者并非分裂城市的罪魁禍首。傳統意義上的帝國比如土耳其帝國與俄羅斯帝國，遭遇城市分裂的原因在于它們的社會已經界限分明。盡管這種分裂并不總是表現在物質上，而是表現在個體參加以種族和宗教為區分基礎的群體，他的日常生活被所在群體的領導者所控制，該領導者進而把這種忠誠度延伸到蘇丹或國家統治者身上。這些群體的精英階層都是隔離政策實施的既得利益者。如果全面看待城市種族隔離，我們本應能理清傳統式隔離和現代式隔離間的不同。

　　Mr Nightingale s view of how power works makes his own task harder. He struggles to dealwith the fact that the white elite in both Britain and South Africa were willing to maketactical concessions to non-whites when it suited them; the white workers who went onstrike to stop black workersbeing promoted in the mines in the early 1920s were brutally suppressed.

　　此外，南丁格爾先生對權力如何運作的觀點讓他的寫作任務變得難上加難。他無法處理這樣的事實當情況有利時，英國和南非的白人精英都愿意對非白人做出策略性的讓步;20世紀20年代初，為了阻止黑人工人升職，一些罷工抗議的白人勞工也受到了殘忍的打壓。

　　In the present day, too, a top-down view of power has limits. Take Northern Ireland, whereover 90% of a vast public housing stock is segregated by religion. Government officials inLondon and Belfast would love to change that, but it seems beyond their capacity tochallenge the forces that keep most streets pure. Urban division in this case is a measureof government weakness, not ruthless strength. Segregation is not always somethingimposed by those who hold political power over the weak and vulnerable.

　　即使在當今，自上而下的權力觀也有局限性。以北愛爾蘭為例， 90%以上的龐大公共住房資源以宗教為界限隔離。倫敦和貝爾法斯特的官員很希望改變它，但他們似乎無法挑戰各種希望保持街道純正的勢力。在這一點上，城市的隔離體現出政府的脆弱性，而不是表現鐵腕政治。隔離制度并不總是握有權力的強者對弱者的壓迫。