Overview

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.

Structure and Focus

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.

Analytical Approach

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.

Last Chapter: Representation

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.

Goals and Significance

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.