Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- 5 Reportage as Redemption
- 6 Kinship as History
- 7 Nation-ness as Consciousness
- 8 History as Storytelling
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
5 - Reportage as Redemption
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- 5 Reportage as Redemption
- 6 Kinship as History
- 7 Nation-ness as Consciousness
- 8 History as Storytelling
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Summary
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.
– Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History, VIII” (1940: 257)Let us pass through the arched doorway of the Mecca; let us see what the Mecca looks like inside, see who the people in it are and how they live, when they came and why they stay.
– John Bartlow Martin “The Mecca: The Strangest Place in Chicago”On August 22, 1962, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote to Elizabeth Lawrence, her editor at Harper and Row, about her fixation upon the Mecca Building, the turn-of-the-century apartment complex John Bartlow Martin (an essayist who would in 1968 serve as Robert Kennedy's urban policy counselor in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination) had declared “the strangest place in Chicago.” The building, described with curatorial gusto by Martin in Harper's Magazine, had “become one of the most remarkable Negro slum exhibits in the world” (1950: 87).
For Brooks, however, the Mecca (site of her first employment and subject of a series of unpublished prose narratives) registered more than urban blight: it signaled the “material collapse” of a community dependent upon white agency as it indexed the possibility of recovering the subjectivities trapped within.
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- Writing America BlackRace Rhetoric and the Public Sphere, pp. 119 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998