Versing the Ghetto: African American Writers and the Urban Crisis

Literary Depictions of the Ghetto and the Urban Crisis in African American Literature;African-American Studies;American and Canadian Studies;English Language and Literature;Humanities (General);Humanities;English Language & Literature

Tariq, MalcolmParrish, Susan Scott ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Literary Depictions of the Ghetto and the Urban Crisis in African American Literature;    African-American Studies;    American and Canadian Studies;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities (General);    Humanities;    English Language & Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/145834/mhtariq_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In this dissertation, I investigate how African American writers respond to the post-World War II urban crisis through their literary representations of black urban space in the ghetto. While the urban crisis has generally been covered by historians, cultural critics, and social scientists, I argue that analyzing how the work of creative writers fits into these discourses uncovers the critical ways that black working class communities imagine their space and simultaneously critique systems that perpetuate socioeconomic and racial inequality. I add to existing African American literary and cultural criticism by discerning how writer Richard Wright, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, street lit novelist Donald Goines, and rapper Master P resist notions of social pathology, the study of societal problems such as poverty and crime that reinforce disorganization, that was used by social scientists to study black urban life in the early twentieth century. If solely pathology is used to assess black urban life, the urban crisis can only be discussed in terms of how African Americans bear the brunt of these conditions. I contend that a turn to writers working during the urban crisis offers a literary history that reveals how ghetto dwellers have consistently used their own knowledge production to contend with the realities of their social, economic, and political disenfranchisement. Lastly, I argue that like the urban crisis, literary representations of black urban space have rendered how the ghetto has transformed from a place to leave, to a nesting place of potential, to a space to defend against external manipulation, and finally as a culture. In charting a literary history of ghetto representations in twentieth century Africa American literature, Versing the Ghetto: African American Writers and the Urban Crisis debunks popular notions that the ghetto is simply an intellectually immobile space.