The Fall of Public Man

to the rise of a neoliberalism which has both commoditized otherness and stripped away the buffers of the welfare state. The introduction establishes that, although Brennan critiques the formation of \"theory,\" he is not dismissive of theory in principle; he actually is deeply invested in a trajectory of theory, embodied in the Hegel-Marx line: Bakhtin, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Said. Lamenting the predominance of the Nietszchèan line—in which he includes Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Vattimo, Negri, and Virilio—Brennan blasts the celebratory and uncritical use of \"poststructuralism's infinitely interchangeable metaphors of dispersal: decentered subjects, nomadism, ambivalence, the supplement, rhizomatic identity, and the constructed self—terms whose sheer quantity nervously intimates a lack of variation.\" At such polemical textual moments, we feel the full force of Brennan's bile at a discipline that has abnegated its responsibilities; at the same time, the polemic (as all polemics do) tends to create the fantasy of an other whose totality is self-evident and whose heterogeneity is merely superficial. What, indeed, about the politically engaged work of Cary Nelson, BarrettWatten, Michael Bibby, andMichael True, among others, not to mention the intellectuals left of Noam Chomsky, whose dissident work may share the anarchism of the academic left, but whose consequences have been real and whose relationship to dissenting movements in the US and throughout the world is undeniable? (Chomsky gets three short mentions in this book.) Brennan's relative exclusion of contemporary examples of Gramscian intellectuals actively engaged with social movements makes Wars ofPosition a difficult book, because it offers few models for emerging from the malaise that the academy seems to Detailfrom cover suffer from. Yet Brennan is clearly at his best when he is arguing against the received versions of theorists, engaging his Hegelian impulses to reverse the unexamined consensus. His critical reassessment of Orientalism (1978), for example, suggests that Said's foundational text on the Western fantasies of the Middle East has been misread as a Foucauldian project; rather, for Brennan, while Orientalism clearly borrows heavily from Foucault, Said ultimately is arguing against the poststructuralist doxa that underwrite much of contemporary postcolonial theory. Said, in Brennan's reading, is a crucial figure not only for his resistance to the sacred cows of poststructuralism, but also for his embrace of the public responsibilities of the intellectual.

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Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development

L'un des desaccords les plus interessants et significatifs chez les pragmatistes contemporains est celui de Rorty avec ses critiques a propos de la signification de l'ethique et de la politique neodeweyienne. L'A. etudie plus particulierement les critiques de West exposees dans « The American Evasion of Philosophy » (1989). Suit la reponse de West

Democratic evasions: Cornel West and the politics of pragmatism. Author's reply : The American evasion of philosophy: a genealogy of pragmatism

Rap Music and Street Consciousness. By Cheryl Keyes. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xxv + 303, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, musical notation, glossary, notes, discography, bibliography, indices. $34.95 cloth) As a reader whose commitment to the study of folklore is rooted in a fascination with African American oral folk poetry-from toasts to rap to hip hop-I have been alert to Cheryl Keyes' previous writings on this subject (1993, 1996, 2000). Here, in her first full-length treatment of rap, published as part of the distinguished Music in American Life series of the University of Illinois Press, Keyes succeeds in comprehensively approaching rap "from the perspectives of ethnomusicology, folklore, and cultural studies" (ix). The book covers rap from its beginnings until 2000. Written for a general audience, Rap Music and Street Consciousness details the geographic, cultural, and economic settings from which this music emerged, in addition to providing a thorough analysis of the music itself, and it is a pleasure to read. The author situates herself-student outsider, musician not in the industry, African American, woman-and discusses the problematics of these multiple identities in her role as participant-observer. Of many subjects covered in this wideranging work, especially noteworthy are the origins and present social location of rap, the current public controversy over rap language and culture, and the role of women in rap. Keyes' historical overview begins, of course, in Africa. African poetic speech and performance (including antecedents of jive) are shown to have provided an artistic and cultural matrix for formal and stylistic developments in America black performance. Bringing the subject into the present, the author covers new versions of the rap genre that have developed over the past decade and generally entwines recent musical and social developments in an interesting and relevant way. Gang culture, a major context for rap performance, grew out of poverty worsened by the flight of wealth to the suburbs and resultant inner-city decay. The forced migration and involuntary isolation of African American community segments amid gentrification caused by the construction of superhighways such as the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York are further example of social dislocation whose effects are expressed in rap. Generalized apprehension about the oppressor, often expressed in widespread conspiracy rumors-for instance, that African Americans have been the target of intentional spreading of AIDS and crack-cocaine addiction (Turner 1993)-is also expressed in rap poetry and music. In the face of oppressive conditions, however, many rappers have become mainstream, achieving a high degree of commercial success, some artists starting their own labels and becoming moguls. Rap music videos, another popular format, display visually as well as musically the cultural messaging so intrinsic to rap, though the entry of many rap music videos into mainstream television venues remains problematic. …

Rap Music and Street Consciousness

The relevance of the arts to wellbeing has been recognised within clinical fields, as reflected in therapeutic forms based on various art modalities, from music to drama therapy. However, there has hitherto been little appreciation in fields such as positive psychology of the broader potential of the arts as a vehicle for flourishing and fulfilment. As such, this paper proposes the creation of ‘positive art’ as a field encompassing theory and research concerning the wellbeing value of art. To show the scope and possibilities of this proposed field, the paper provides an indicative summary of literature pertaining to four major art forms: visual art, music, literature and drama. Moreover, the paper identifies five main positive outcomes that are consistently found in the literature across all these forms: sense-making, enriching experience, aesthetic appreciation, entertainment, and bonding. The paper aims to encourage a greater focus on the arts in fields like positive psychology, enabling science to more fully understand and appreciate the positive power of the arts.

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Positive art: Artistic expression and appreciation as an exemplary vehicle for flourishing.

This article argues that live hip hop performances at small independent clubs are democratic, political spaces that can create collective agency between the audience and performers. It draws upon Hannah Arendt's notion of “acting in concert” in order to illustrate the ways that live hip hop shows can be interactive spaces of collective identity and coordinated political practice. In live shows, performers and audience jointly produce a space of interactive engagement in which they can contest dominant cultural values. This article outlines the dynamics of live shows at small clubs, discusses five shows as case studies, and considers some significant problems with audiences at shows, including the difficulties of translating political action from the clubs into larger public spaces.

Live Hip Hop, Collective Agency, and “Acting in Concert”

Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization

Working in the Space of Disaster: Yusef Komunyakaa's Dialogues with America

Post-1952 Puerto Rican poetry comprises a range of overlapping yet distinctive poetic practices that share a flexible, affective spatial imagination that poeticizes a felt knowledge of geographical and sociopolitical space. After 1952--when Puerto Rico became an Estado Libre Asociado (ELA), or "commonwealth" of the United States, thus formalizing the island's status as an "internal colony"--Puerto Rican poetry became more diverse in form, language, and subject matter. This occurred concomitantly with increased migration to the US mainland, flexibility of travel between the mainland and the island, and expanded bilingualism of Puerto Ricans. Various scholars have demonstrated that this paradoxically entrenched and ambiguous political status has produced a uniquely experienced sense of space and place. (1) I examine the contours of the affective spatial imagination in post-1952 poetry by reading a handful of representative poems, arguing that three seemingly divergent poetic practices embody overlapping conceptions of space and time. These poetic conceptions of Puerto Rican subjectivity are developed through an affective spatial imagination that can be defined as a creative articulation of sensory and emotional perceptions of commonwealth-era spaces. The affective spatial imagination maps the emotional registers of embodied experience to the lived geographical spaces of Puerto Ricans, and in doing so validates feeling as a way of knowing. This historically specific yet linguistically flexible imagination simultaneously connects commonwealth-era Puerto Rican poetry to poetic practices in the Americas (in both English and Spanish) and points to the powerfully syncretic position of that poetry in the hemisphere. Theorizing how an affective spatial imagination anchors selected poems facilitates an understanding of post-1952 Puerto Rican poetry as a whole. The difficulty of conceptualizing post-1952 Puerto Rican poetry stems from the fact that it encompasses two standard languages, numerous nonstandard ones, various local, national, and hemispheric poetic traditions, and different loci of enunciation and practice--one in "developed" North America, the other in the "developing" Caribbean. Despite these various dislocations, Puerto Ricans still "imagine themselves as part of their own national community" (Negron-Muntaner 1). There is in use, after all, just a single "Puerto Rican poetry" meant to conjure and clearly categorize a dizzying array of voices. This essay posits a shared affective spatial imagination as key to understanding post-1952 Puerto Rican poetry overall. I focus on three overlapping poetic "practices"--rather than "traditions," a term that tends to imply a neat, historically continuous and hierarchical process of inheritance--that I believe encompass the finest commonwealth-era Puerto Rican poetry. These practices share many characteristics with Latina/o, Latin American, and US poetry, and the more homogeneous Puerto Rican poetry that preceded them, but they are new practices that combine and discard a range of others. Each is a syncretic practice that establishes a relationship between various poetics, languages, and sensibilities in and through the affective spatial imagination. In his article on Clemente Soto Ve1ez and la vanguardia atalayista (the literary movement Soto Ve1ez helped to start in the late 1920s), Rafael Catala suggests that one of the movement's goals was to establish an innovative relationship (entroncar) between poetics and politics while also following Jose Marti's, Eugenio Maria de Hostos's, and Ramon Emeterio Betances's objectives to gain cultural and political independence from Europe and the US. Catala writes, "El movimiento literario atalayista proporciona una oportunidad para pensar y cuajar una practica cultural. Esto es, la literatura entronca con los diferentes elementos que la componen" ("The Atalayista literary movement provides an opportunity for thinking through and gelling together a cultural practice. …

Michael Dowdy

Papers

Live Hip Hop, Collective Agency, and “Acting in Concert”

Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization

Working in the Space of Disaster: Yusef Komunyakaa's Dialogues with America

"A Mountain / in My Pocket": The Affective Spatial Imagination in Post-1952 Puerto Rican Poetry

American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement