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Photo of Chinese New Year Dragon
Dance
Ethnic enclaves are products as well as sources of both
social and cultural capital. When immigrants alter the
territory allowed to them, they simultaneously become part
of the transformed urban landscape. The images they create
eventually come to represent them and in the process they
lose their autonomy. In some cases the enclave comes to
symbolize its imagined inhabitants and is also commodified.
For example for the delight of tourists, the expropriated
cultural capital of Chinese immigrants to this "Chinatown"
in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York has been turned into a
performance in an "Ethnic Theme Park" (Krase, 1997) not
unlike the West Indian Day Carnival Parade in Crown Heights,
and the Feast of San Gennaro in Manhattan's "Little Italy."
If we look closely we can see non-Chinese performing a
traditional dragon dance for the delight of Chinese
onlookers. Visual study can show how what I have termed
"Traces of Home" (1993) and Lefebvre's "material spatial
practices", are transformed via "representations of space"
into "spaces of
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