Short description:

Examining how writers and musicians respond to attempts to define and categorize inequality in moral terms, Culture, the Arts and Inequality: American Artists and Social Justice analyses the writers and artists who challenge the moral categories through which inequality has been maintained and mobilized.

Long description:

Examining how writers and musicians respond to attempts to define and categorize inequality in moral terms, Culture, the Arts and Inequality: American Artists and Social Justice analyzes the writers and artists who challenge the moral categories through which inequality has been maintained and mobilized.

Beginning with the work of Langston Hughes, whose fears for the African American community echo fifty years later in Stevie Wonder?s urban chronicles, and including key American voices such as Nelson Algren, Thomas McGrath, Ann Petry, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as ?Godfather of Rap? Gil Scott-Heron, this book tackles the mechanisms that compelled writers and musicians to reassert the worth and value of those they wrote about, opposing the fixing in place of moral classifications applied to cultures and people deemed of little worth. Without adequate analysis of those classifications, and particularly the role of moral attribution in identifying and categorizing those deemed unworthy, we struggle to understand inequality?s impact on society and individuals?leading to a partial conceptualization of how it is understood and experienced.

Recognizing that new ways of thinking about class, dominated by moral questions but with real material effects, and its impact on writers, musicians, and society are at stake, this interdisciplinary project redefines discourses on inequality in the United States today.

"This book is a fascinating interdisciplinary study of how U.S. writers and musicians have not only represented inequality of different sorts (primarily of class and race), but model subaltern systems for understanding the moral aspects of inequality and oppression. One might say that it approaches the artist not only as historian, but also as historiographer (that is someone who investigates how one goes about writing history) emerging from a particular oppressed group. It is also a truly interdisciplinary study, engaging the work of authors in different genres and of musicians. The work here is extremely timely. Questions of class, racial, gender, and sexual inequality and the representation of those sorts of inequality are central to U.S. politics, education, and culture at this moment. It is very useful to understand that these debates (conflicts, really) and their interrogation have a long arc in U.S. expressive culture. Its relevance will be of some duration." 

James Smethurst, Professor of African-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

"This book offers a new perspective by putting the writers and musicians covered in conversation with each other for the first time. Ian Peddie puts forward a useful lens through which to examine the issue of inequality, and no doubt these artists have things to say about it. With inequality rates seemingly ever on the rise, the subject is both timely and important, and this book makes a significant and potentially lasting contribution toward fostering a critical conversion."

Frederik Byrn K?hlert, Lecturer in English and Film,  Edinburgh Napier University

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Introduction
1. Langston Hughes and ?Negro Neighborhoods?: From the Ghetto to the Hyperghetto
2. Exclusionary Discourses, Articulated Disadvantages: Nelson Algren and
The Politics of Inequality in Mid-Century America.
3. Thomas McGrath: The Moral Obligation to Those Who Suffer
4. Ann Petry: The Spatiality of Injustice
5. The Privacy of Pain: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Privations of Property
6. Village Ghetto Land: Stevie Wonder and the Arrival of the Hyperghetto
7. Gil Scott Heron: Revolution of the Mind
Epilogue

Bibliography