Writing the Urban Dwelling: Street, Text, Representation

Abstract

This work investigates differences and similarities between generations of African American street novelists since the Chicago Black Renaissance in terms of how they interrogate semiotic strategies meant to deal with the problematics of representing street life, and the ways that urban spatiality impacts the construction of their aesthetic. After an introduction that theorizes and reviews the stakes of such an investigation, the three parts of the body describe and analyze the dynamics of the genre’s cultural work along the axes of 1) content, 2) style, and 3) ethics. “Street” is an analysis of how street literature has evolved both in form and context, aiming to address sociocultural and political questions related to its development and cultural impact. “Text” utilizes (post)structural analysis to explore the genre's aesthetic and linguistic strategies, which have emerged in response to urban planning tactics. The final section, "Representation," employs phenomenological hermeneutics to explain how street literature sheds light on a broader practice of critiquing representation as a culturally significant endeavor. This involves the act of representing one person, sign, or thing to convey the intentions of another, which has political implications for authorship, credibility, and subjectivity. These issues are connected to one's rhetorical ethos and the legitimacy of perspective in the novel, which often functions as a semi-autobiography. Comprehensive and comparative analysis of the genre as a whole are lacking in scholarship, leaving a critical vacuum for understanding the ontological and aesthetic implications of the cultural work being performed by the genre itself in calling attention to the crises of urban policy. Popular Black street narrative imputes resistance to socio-spatial inequality, and impacts other traditions of struggle and protest, such as in film and music; but it is also a call to action, an invocation for our democracy to relearn the ethics of how it reads and participates in the American street-as-text, and the text-as-street. There is a significant lack of work being done to properly preserve and historicize “Street” texts, so-called for their gritty, urban sites of publication, consumption, and depiction— like the once-famous works of Chester Himes or Iceberg Slim, once the best-selling African American author, who died relatively penniless. Less has been done to connect their tradition with contemporary writers, like Omar Tyree or Sister Souljah, who have transformed the genre into a tool of postmodern political activism, or satirists like Percival Everett and Paul Beatty, who have inverted and parodied the form to critique the shortcomings of the urban novel and its reader-response. Representations of urban space are inflected by the spatial practices of modern internment, and responded to in urban cultural production. Through historical and contemporary studies of urban space, Blackness, and adaptations of street literature, this work concludes by seeking to establish a performative engagement between networks of support in the greater reading public and the ontology of the inner city. It also draws attention to the human rights abuses engendered by aesthetically rendering the creative element of the space invisible while rendering the impoverished damage imagery of a city’s suffering hyper-visible.