Street, Text, and Representation in African American Literature

Comprehensive and comparative, this volume investigates African American street novelists since the Chicago Black Renaissance and the semiotic strategies they employ in publication, consumption, and depiction of street life. Divided into three chapters, this text analyzes the content, style, and ethics of “street” narrative through a discursive/rhetorical lens, exploring the development of street literature’s formal and contextual concerns to resolve the sociocultural and political questions surrounding cultural work. The book also gives emphasis to “text” or (post)structural literary analysis by answering questions about the genre’s aesthetic and linguistic techniques that respond to the injustices of urban planning. The last chapter, “Representation,” investigates the phenomenological hermeneutics of more recent street literature and its satire, highlighting the political stakes for authorship, credibility, and subjectivity. Through historical and contemporary studies of urban space, Blackness, and adaptations of street literature, this work attempts to network activists, artists, and scholars with the greater reading public by providing a functional ontology of reading the inner city.

Mattius Rischard is an Assistant Professor of English at Montana State University-Northern. He received his M.A. and PhD at the University of Arizona from the Department of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Programs, specializing in African American literature of the 20th century, with focus on the urban novel and digital/visual culture. He has taught writing and literature for the University of Arizona, Pima Community College, and as a Writing Assessment Specialist for the University of Texas system. He publishes and presents on sociohistorical, aesthetic, and phenomenological methods for reading the problematics of modernity across academic, popular, and marginal representations of urban life.