[2013] White Punks in Chocolate City: Reflections on Gentrification While Blasting “Welcome to Paradise” (original) (raw)
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2011
Following the September 11 terrorist attacks there were increased demands in America for patriotism. This attitude of hyper-patriotism, in accordance with the Bush Administration’s appropriation of the American civil religion, precluded many discursive possibilities for dissent. Yet there were some who still utilized the available outlets of public discourse to dissent from Bush Administration policies. Green Day’s 2004 song, “Jesus of Suburbia,” is just such an exemplary dissent discourse. What follows is divided into four sections. First, I analyze the ideological circumstances which preceded the release of “Jesus of Suburbia.” Second, I reflect on the respective conceptual insights of Ivie’s humanizing dissent and Burke’s perspective by incongruity; ultimately, I suggest their programs be joined into an individual construct: dissent by incongruity. Third, I examine how “Jesus of Suburbia” employed dissent by incongruity to critique imperialistic policies. Finally, I argue Green D...
Reclaiming the chocolate city: Soundscapes of gentrification and resistance in Washington, DC
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2020
In Washington, DC, Black residents have experienced unprecedented levels of cultural and physical displacement since 2000. Because of gentrification, the first “chocolate city,” long been defined by its blackness, has experienced shifts in the economy and commitments by the local government, that privilege policies that facilitate the displacement of Black families. Everyday struggles against gentrification have been of wide-ranging theoretical concern and pose an ongoing challenge for scholars in geography to understand the ways people resist gentrification and displacement. In this article, I show through an analysis of the anti-gentrification movement, #DontMuteDC, how Black people challenge the processes of gentrification by reclaiming space and resisting capitalist dispossession through cultural production. I demonstrate the relationship between Black sound aesthetics, gentrification, and a spatial politics of reclamation. I analyze the movement’s emphasis on go-go music as par...
Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America. JOHN ARCHER, PAUL J. P. SANDUL, and KATHERINE SOLOMONSON, editors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp. xxv + 387. 90 b&w photos, 1 table. $35.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8166-9299-6. For nearly a century, suburbia has been characterized as the backbone of white, middle-class America—the new post-World War II “city upon a hill” where both pastoral and moral ideals could be achieved beyond the bounds of urban toil. This representation has begun to shift in recent decades as popular culture hits like Weeds, Breaking Bad, and Fargo dramatize the deviant lifestyles of white suburbanites. New comedies like Blackish and Fresh off the Boat offer an intersectional analysis of the suburbs by capturing how families of color have struggled with and have capitalized on claiming white middle-class privilege on the cul-de-sac. Stories of suburban deviance and conformity alike abound in Making Suburbia, in which editors John Archer, Paul Sandul, and Katherine Solomonson argue that as the suburbs have become increasingly more heterogeneous, the ability to define them as bland, maladaptive, sub-urban, automobile-centric, and homogenous becomes more difficult. Framed by both Henri Lefebvre’s idea of space as socially produced along with Michel de Certeau’s focus on the bricolage of everyday life, this interdisciplinary collection investigates how suburbanites create their own “spatial stories” through quotidian place-making practices and interactions (p. x). Following Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue’s The New Suburban History (2006) in their attention to locality, essays in this volume focus on local instances in which people see and define themselves as suburban within specific conditions and discourses. From garage bands to Asian American shopping malls, the essays illuminate how suburbanites have continually refashioned their communities and identities in often complex and divergent ways since World War II.
The Wayfarer: Visions of the urban in the songs of Bruce Springsteen
City, Culture and Society, 2020
Scholars have "acclaimed Springsteen's precision in capturing the complex social and cultural contexts of being American and living in America" (Moss, 2011, p. 344) and they have explored many aspects of his songs and performances. Studies have notably analysed the prominent role of social, gender and political issues in ⋆ Picture by the author.