Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- 1 Race Progress and Exemplary Biography
- 2 Reading Riot
- 3 Rendezvous with Modernism, Fascism – and Democracy
- 4 “If I Were a Negro”
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
2 - Reading Riot
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- 1 Race Progress and Exemplary Biography
- 2 Reading Riot
- 3 Rendezvous with Modernism, Fascism – and Democracy
- 4 “If I Were a Negro”
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Summary
The streets were like avenues of the dead. They only caught a ten-year-old Negro boy. They took his clothes off, and burned them. They burned his tail with lighted matches, made him step on lighted matches, urinated on him, and sent him running off naked with a couple of slaps in the face.
– James T. Farrell The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1935)In the twentieth century … the idea of community scarcely means anything anymore … except among the submerged, the “lowly” … called communities because they are informed by their knowledge that only they of the community can sustain and re-create each other. The great, vast, shining Republic knows nothing about them – recognizes their existence only in time of stress, as during a military adventure, say, or an election year, or when their dangerous situation erupts into what the Republic generally calls a “riot.” And it goes without saying that these communities, incipient, wounded, or functioning, are between the carrot and the stick of the American dream.
– James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985a: 123–4)The determining of a relationship between news and its subsequent privileging as history takes on a renewed urgency in the aftermath of the 1992 spring riot in Los Angeles.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing America BlackRace Rhetoric and the Public Sphere, pp. 25 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998