1st Edition
Culture, the Arts, and Inequality American Artists and Social Justice
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Langston Hughes and “Negro Neighborhoods”: From the Ghetto to the Hyperghetto
2. Exclusionary Discourses, Articulated Disadvantages: Nelson Algren and
The Politics of Inequality in Mid-Century America.
3. Thomas McGrath: The Moral Obligation to Those Who Suffer
4. Ann Petry: The Spatiality of Injustice
5. The Privacy of Pain: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Privations of Property
6. Village Ghetto Land: Stevie Wonder and the Arrival of the Hyperghetto
7. Gil Scott Heron: Revolution of the Mind
Epilogue
Bibliography
Biography
Ian Peddie is Professor of English at Sul Ross State University, USA. He is the author and editor of numerous works on literature and culture, including Music and Protest (2012), Popular Music and Human Rights, Volumes I and II (2011), and The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest (2006).
"This book is a fascinating interdisciplinary study of how U.S. writers and musicians have not only represented inequality of different sorts (primarily of class and race), but model subaltern systems for understanding the moral aspects of inequality and oppression. One might say that it approaches the artist not only as historian, but also as historiographer (that is someone who investigates how one goes about writing history) emerging from a particular oppressed group. It is also a truly interdisciplinary study, engaging the work of authors in different genres and of musicians. The work here is extremely timely. Questions of class, racial, gender, and sexual inequality and the representation of those sorts of inequality are central to U.S. politics, education, and culture at this moment. It is very useful to understand that these debates (conflicts, really) and their interrogation have a long arc in U.S. expressive culture. Its relevance will be of some duration."
James Smethurst, Professor of African-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
"This book offers a new perspective by putting the writers and musicians covered in conversation with each other for the first time. Ian Peddie puts forward a useful lens through which to examine the issue of inequality, and no doubt these artists have things to say about it. With inequality rates seemingly ever on the rise, the subject is both timely and important, and this book makes a significant and potentially lasting contribution toward fostering a critical conversion."
Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Lecturer in English and Film, Edinburgh Napier University
