Globilized production, consumption, and investment, administration of planetary flows of people, seemingly universal mediascapes, all derive from the communities of scale cities offer…In a century where human life indisputably changed, one persistent universal has been the deepening orientation of social life toward urban rather than agrarian conditions. (4).For Green, the city was modernity, and Ellison saw the African-American’s relationship to the city and their struggles adapting to it indicative of man’s struggle to adapt to modernity. The concept of the city as the face of the new world is not a new one. During the industrial revolution, when cities and urban populations boomed, the city represented both progress and societal decay. Drastic change in both society and culture was manifested through the growth of cities then, just as Green and Ellison viewed the city as indicative of America’s struggle with the emergence of modernity.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Green and Ellison
I found Adam Green’s argument in Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 that the African-American migration from South to North, rural community to city (Chicago in particular) is directly linked to the rise in modernism fascinating, especially when viewed in context with Ralph Ellison’s writings. In Shadow and Act, Ellison describes “the Negro as a symbol of man.” For Ellison, African-American struggle and migration into Northern cities and their developing culture represented a shift in humanity as a whole and their struggles with the emergence of modernity. I really liked Green’s view of the city itself as the crux of this and how:
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ReplyDeleteJohanna,
ReplyDeleteExcellent post! Don't you love when we get to use stuff from Purcell's class? I too was thinking about Ellison's essays in Shadow and Act,more specifically his essay, "Harlem is Nowhere." In this essay we see Ellison describing the psychological ramifications of the Negro's migration from the South to the North. Ellison writes, "This abruptness of change and the resulting clash of cultural factors within Negro personality account for some of the extreme contrasts found in Harlem, for both is negative and its positive characteristics. For if Harlem is the scene of the folk-Negro's death agony, it is also the setting of his transcendence." I think Ellison would agree with your statement that Chicago represented a place of progress for African-Americans as well as a hurdle.
Although black culture may have clashed with urban life and continues to clash, we find that blacks in Chicago during the 1940s and 1950s were also able to find a way to adapt to their new enviroment, which was to use modern-day technology and practices to their advantage. Although one of the goals of the commodification of black culture may have been for blacks to make a profit, I think one of the most important goals for blacks through this practive was to create a safe space for themselves, a place where their imagination could spur political and social change and hopefully make the city a safer place for their existence. No matter their circumstances, I have always been amazed by how African-Americans have been able to, to use a popular idiom, make lemonade out of their lemons.
Joanna and Lucy,
ReplyDeleteI also saw the Ellison connections from Rich's class in Green's book. Ellison wrote about the endurance of the black artist as an example of individual triumph and as a national symbol ("the negro as symbol of man"? for Post WWII America encompassing all citizens. The connection to Green's project is seamlessly direct, as he writes in the introduction. "Two social structures loom large in relation to U.S. blacks' modernity in the United States, factoring with special significance in this study: the city and the nation as community" (3). Green discusses the importance of revising previous scholarship concerning the agency of African American's living in the modern U.S. city. For example, he acknowledges Houston Baker and Paul Gilroy's contributions, but asserts that their interpretive angle of seeing African American's as oppositional and resistant to the forms of production and distribution in the culture industry does not align with the evidence of black artists and entrepreneurs like Mahalia Jackson and Willie Dixon who creatively carved out an alternative commercial spirit within modern American capitalism. Active agents are the key words that run throughout Ellison's essays and the larger themes in Green's first two chapters concerning African Americans in modernity.
Matt