WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR TAYARI JONES “How can a novel’s social criticism be so unflinching and clear, yet its plot moves like a house on fire? I am tempted to describe Petry as a magician for the many ways that The Street amazes, but this description cheapens her talent . . . Petry is a gifted artist.” — Tayari Jones, from the Introduction The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.
From one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century—an extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies that powerfully speaks to contemporary conversations around racism. “It contains truth that cannot be denied.” —The Atlantic Monthly In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.
Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.
Detroit in the 1960s was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin Luther King, Jr., dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas, and facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA. As Suzanne Smith traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas. Smith shows how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign. Against a background of events on the national scene--featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X--Dancing in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively and vital history. It's peopled with a host of major and minor figures in black politics, culture, and the arts, and full of the passions of a momentous era. It offers a critical new perspective on the role of popular culture in the process of political change.
Party in the Street explores the interaction between political parties and social movements in the United States. Examining the collapse of the post-9/11 antiwar movement against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book focuses on activism and protest in the United States. It argues that the electoral success of the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama, as well as antipathy toward President George W. Bush, played a greater role in this collapse than did changes in foreign policy. It shows that how people identify with social movements and political parties matters a great deal, and it considers the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as comparison cases.
The overall goal of the research in this book was to understand gang phenomenon in the United States. In order to accomplish this goal, the author investigated gangs in different cities in order to understand what was similar in the way all gangs behaved and what was idiosyncratic to certain gangs. The research for this book took place over ten years and five months from 1978 to 1989 and will give the reader a comprehensive overview of gang behavior in the United States in that time period.
Can a song change a nation? In 1964, Marvin Gaye, record producer William “Mickey” Stevenson, and Motown songwriter Ivy Jo Hunter wrote “Dancing in the Street.” The song was recorded at Motown’s Hitsville USA Studio by Martha and the Vandellas, with lead singer Martha Reeves arranging her own vocals. Released on July 31, the song was supposed to be an upbeat dance recording—a precursor to disco, and a song about the joyousness of dance. But events overtook it, and the song became one of the icons of American pop culture. The Beatles had landed in the U.S. in early 1964. By the summer, the sixties were in full swing. The summer of 1964 was the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the beginning of the Vietnam War, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the lead-up to a dramatic election. As the country grew more radicalized in those few months, “Dancing in the Street” gained currency as an activist anthem. The song took on new meanings, multiple meanings, for many different groups that were all changing as the country changed. Told by the writer who is legendary for finding the big story in unlikely places, Ready for a Brand New Beat chronicles that extraordinary summer of 1964 and showcases the momentous role that a simple song about dancing played in history.
For more than three decades, Bruce Springsteen’s ability to express in words and music the deepest hopes, fears, loves, and sorrows of average Americans has made him a hero to his millions of devoted fans. Racing in the Street is the first comprehensive collection of writings about Springsteen, featuring the most insightful, revealing, famous, and infamous articles, interviews, reviews, and other writings. This nostalgic journey through the career of a rock-’n’-roll legend chronicles every album and each stage of Springsteen’s career. It’s all here—Dave Marsh’s Rolling Stone review of Springsteen’s ten sold-out Bottom Line shows in 1975 in New York City, Jay Cocks’s and Maureen Orth’s dueling Time and Newsweek cover stories, George Will’s gross misinterpretation of Springsteen’s message on his Born in the USA tour, and Will Percy’s 1999 interview for Double Take, plus much, much more.
If there is one thing that people agree about concerning the massive, leaderless, spontaneous protests that have spread across the globe over the past decade, it's that they were failures. The protesters, many claim, simply could not organize; nor could they formulate clear demands. As a result, they failed to bring about long-lasting change. In the Street challenges this seemingly forgone conclusion. It argues that when analyses of such events are confined to a framework of success and failure, they lose sight of the on-the-ground efforts of political actors who demonstrate, if for a fleeting moment, that another way of being together is possible. The conception of democratic action developed here helps us see that events like Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi uprising, or the weeks-long protests that took place all around the US after George Floyd's killing by the police are best understood as democratic enactments created in and through "intermediating practices," which include contestation, deliberation, judging, negotiation, artistic production, and common use. Through these intermediating practices, people become "political friends"; they act in ways other than expected of them to reach out to others unlike themselves, establish relations with strangers, and constitute a common amidst disagreements. These democratic enactments are fleeting, but what remains in their aftermath are new political actors and innovative practices. The book demonstrates that the current obsession with the "failure" of spontaneous protests is the outcome of a commonly accepted way of thinking about democratic action, which casts organization as a technical matter that precedes politics and moments of spontaneous popular action as sudden explosions. The origins of this widely shared understanding lie in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conception of popular sovereignty, shaped by his rejection of theatricality and idealization of immediacy. Insofar as contemporary thinkers see democratic moments as the unmediated expressions of people's will and/or instantaneous eruptions, they, like Rousseau, reduce spontaneity to immediacy and erase the rich and creative practices of political actors. In the Street counters this Rousseauian influence by appropriating Aristotle's notion of "political friendship," and developing an alternative conceptualization of democratic action through a close reading of Antonio Negri, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière and the global protests of 1968 that inspired these thinkers and their work.
"Displacement, relocation, dissociation: each of these terms elicits images of mass migration, homelessness, statelessness, or outsiderness of many kinds, too numerous to name. This book aims to create opportunities for scholars, practitioners, and silenced voices to share theories and stories of progressive and transgressive music pedagogies that challenge the ways music educators and learners think about and practice their arts relative to displacement. Displacement is defined as encompassing all those who have been forced away from their locations by political, social, economic, climate, and resource change, injustice, and insecurity. This includes: - refugees and internally displaced persons; - forced migrants; - indigenous communities who have been forced off their traditional lands; - people who have fled homes because of their gender identity and sexual orientation; - imprisoned individuals; - persons who seek refuge for reasons of domestic and social violence; - homeless persons and others who live in transient spaces; - the disabled, who are relocated involuntarily; and - the culturally dispossessed, whose languages and heritage have been taken away from them. In the context of the first ever book on displacement and music education, the authors connect displacement to what music might become to those peoples who find themselves between spaces, parted from the familiar and the familial. Through, in, and because of a variety of musical participations, they contend that displaced peoples might find comfort, inclusion, and welcome of some kinds either in making new music or remembering and reconfiguring past musical experiences. Contributors are: #4459, Efi Averof Michailidou, Kat Bawden, Rachel Beckles Willson, Marie Bejstam, Rhoda Bernard, Michele Cantoni, Mary L. Cohen, Wayland "X" Coleman, Samantha Dieckmann, Irene (Peace) Ebhohon, Con Fullam, Erin Guinup, Micah Hendler, Hala Jaber, Shaylene Johnson, Arsène Kapikian, Tou SaiKo Lee, Sarah Mandie, David Nnadi, Marcia Ostashewski, Ulrike Präger, Q, Kate Richards Geller, Charlotte Rider, Matt Sakakeeny, Tim Seelig, Katherine Seybert, Brian Sullivan, Mathilde Vittu, Derrick Washington, Henriette Weber, Mai Yang Xiong, Keng Chris Yang, and Nelli Yurina"--
