![]() ![]() Riding the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan, a young Robert Diggs (the future RZA) frequented old grindhouse movie theaters around Times Square to see kung fu movies-including “Shaolin and Wu Tang”-that came to dominate his imagination, along with that of his cousins and friends. Staten Islanders argue that the rest of the city is a bunch of parochial bellyachers who have not taken the time to get to know Staten Island. Most New Yorkers, if they can be bothered to have a view of Staten Island, contend that it’s a sleepy, insular borough that is so not worth the effort exploring-that when people get off the ferry-ride past the Statue of Liberty, they should just turn around, their backs to the borough. But perhaps nowhere has the Wu’s imagination and impact been so deeply felt as in their home borough-a place which you’d think is separated from the rest of New York City by far more than a bay, given how the two sides-and it does feel like only two sides-speak of each other. The storied troupe of rappers-cum-conceptual artists who emerged from the Stapleton and Park Hill housing projects in Staten Island, after “forming like Voltron” around their leader, RZA, in the early 1990s, has been a cultural force ever since. And it’s the basis for a map that charts New York’s least understood borough-Staten Island-through how Staten Island has been potently reimagined, even as it remains a place as well known as a home to cops than hip-hop, by its best-known modern cultural export: the Wu-Tang Clan. That’s one of the ideas guiding Nonstop Metropolis, the atlas of New York City that I co-edited with Rebecca Solnit. And this geography can be every bit as important to how we imagine a place, or form our myriad attachments to it, as its pavements or its air. The “geography” of a place, in this sense, is comprised of the maps we make of it, notably, but also of songs and stories that evoke it. The second is more meta-it refers to what’s suggested by the etymology of “geography” ( geo-graph-“to write the world”): it adheres less to earthly places than to how we represent them. The first sense is literal-the concrete roads and rivers or hills, the bits of location and soil, that comprise that spot on the earth’s skin. To speak of the geography of any place is to invoke at least two distinct senses of the word. The following appears in Nonstop Metropolis, by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. ![]()
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