Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910

by Joseph Ben Prestel

Overview

Emotional Cities offers an innovative account of the history of cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Analyzing debates about emotions and urban change, it questions the assumed dissimilarity of the history of European and Middle Eastern cities during this period. The author shows that between 1860 and 1910, contemporaries in both Berlin and Cairo began to negotiate the transformation of the urban realm in terms of emotions. Looking at the ways in which a variety of urban dwellers, from psychologists to bar maids, framed recent changes in terms of their effect on love, honor, or disgust, the book reveals striking parallels between the histories of the two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, Prestel proposes a new perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192518170
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	09/07/2017
Series:	Emotions in History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Joseph Ben Prestel is a historian of Europe and the Middle East at Freie Universität Berlin. He received his PhD in history from FU Berlin in 2015. Before joining FU's history department, he held a position at the research center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He has also held fellowships at Cambridge University and the American University in Cairo.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1: What is Love? Morality and "French Stimulation" in Berlin
• 2: Who is Rational? Feelings between Hearts and Hymens in Cairo
• 3: Streets of Excitement: Emotions on Friedrichstraße
• 4: Neighborhood of Passion: Losing Rationality in Azbakiyya
• 5: Precarious Calm: Berlin's Emotional Reform
• 6: Haunted Happiness: Cairo's Suburbs and Sports
• Conclusion: Towards a Global History of Urban Change in the Nineteenth Century
• Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"Joseph Prestel is one of the first scholars to deploy the approaches of the recent emotional turn in historiography for the benefit of modern urban history... In a scholarly field in which so much of our knowledge still harks back to the history of a handful of Western metropolises, one can only hope that the approach Prestel proposes in this book inspires many to follow." — Anneleen Arnout, Journal of Modern History

"Prestel has written an innovative work that complements the classic studies of nineteenth-century urbanization, like those by Frederick Engels and Charles Booth which laid out in meticulous detail the terrible conditions of housing, sanitation, and diet endured by the urban poor. In joining the two cities he challenges urban historians and perhaps even city-dwellers to divest themselves of their myopic focus on their own cities as unique and on European cities, in general, as defining the global norm." — Diana Wylie, Boston University, H-Africa

"In this study of Berlin and Cairo, Joseph Ben Prestel offers an approach to comparative urban history that avoids normative Eurocentric assumptions about urbanization and modernity. Rather than examining the cities themselves, he instead focuses on the emotional experiences of those who lived in cities... Theoretically informed but accessibly written, this work will prove as useful to the advanced undergraduate student as for the specialized researcher" — Sace Elder, German History

"Providing an outstanding theoretical framework, [this book] can be seen as a piece of pioneer work in recent cultural history concerning the combination of urbanization and history of emotions....Based on a broad range of sources and literature from various disciplines, the study represents a transdisciplinary work par excellence."—Jan Wietschorke, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

"Joseph Ben Prestel demonstrates that foregrounding emotions eschews stagist models of comparison (such as 'Cairo in 1900 was as modernised as Berlin in 1870'). An emotions approach thus globalises one of the last bastions of non-globalised history—urban history. This is an excellent book with a forceful narrative and scintillating stories drawn from prodigious primary research in Arabic, German, French, and English."—Jan Plamper, Goldsmiths, University of London

"This is a highly interesting project, promising to fill a number of gaps in existing scholarship through its dual focus on urban history and the history of emotions. It is conceptually fresh and innovative, well researched, and elegantly written."—Lucie Ryzova, University of Birmingham

From the Publisher