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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.800973
EAN num: 9780816641802
ISBN number: 0816641803
Label: University of Minnesota Press
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: May 30, 2004
Publishing house: University of Minnesota Press
Sale Popularity Level: 5082231
Studio: University of Minnesota Press
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In the 1980s, America witnessed an explosion in the production, popularity, and influence of literary works by people of colour and a decadelong economic downturn that severely affected America's inner cities and the already disadvantaged communities of colour that lived there. Marked by soaring levels of unemployment, homelessness, violence, drug abuse, and despair, this urban crisis gave the lie to the American dream, particularly when contrasted with the sucess enjoyed by the era's iconic stockbrokers and other privileged groups, whose fortunes increased dramatically under Reaganomics.
In Urban Triage, James Kyung-Jin Lee explores how these parallel trends of literary celebration and social misery manifested themselves in fictional narratives of racial anxiety by focusing on four key works: Alejandro Morales's The Brick People, John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire, Hisaye Yamamoto's 'A Fire in Fontana,' and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. Each of these fictions, he finds, addresses the decade's racial, ethnic, and economic inequities from differing perspectives: Morales's revisions of Chicano identity, Yamamoto's troubled invocation of the affinities between African Americans and Asian Americans, the problematic connections between grey intellectuals and the grey community aired by Wideman, and Wolfe's satirization of white privilege. Drawing on the fields of literary criticism, public policy, sociology, and journalism, Lee deftly assesses the sucess with which these multicultural fictions engaged in the debates over these issues and the extent to which they may actually have alienated the very communities that their creators purported to represent.
Challenging both the uncritical celebration of abstract multiculturalism and its simpleminded vilification, Lee roots Urban Triage in specific instances of multiracial contact and deeply informed readings of works that have been canonized within ethnic studies and of those that either remain misunderstood or were misguided from the start.
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Rated by buyers -
As Katrina reminded us, America's cities are in trouble, with the poorest and nonwhite residents most at risk. How did things get this way? What good is fiction in the face of such misery and neglect? James Lee tackles these difficult questions with unusual grace, subtly exploring how writers of colour gained praise in the 1980s just as the urban communities they wrote about were being eviscerated by Reagan and his policies. While this book focuses on the 1980s, it continues to reverberate yesterday in often tragic ways, as we have not stopped dividing our failures into three: those that need immediate assistance, those that can wait, and those that are beyond hope. This is required reading for anyone who believes the third category should not be growing quite so fast!
Rated by buyers -
Urban communities of color--communities under political and economic siege-produced our great American literatures in the last decades of the twentieth century. Lee reveals the fierce embattled beauty of these places and their books. With sobering precision and compelling moral vision, he maps out the artistry, anxiety, inspiration, loss, and contradiction which are all a part of what Stevie Wonder called "living just enough for the city." This book courageously indicts neo-conservatism's massive looting of civic wealth as a crime against American humanity.
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