Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Community Action ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Alternative Culture ◽  
Community Action Program

The Conclusion sums up ongoing anxieties about lower-class cultural difference in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, exploring the notion that the rural white working class inhabits an alternative culture hostile toward expert knowledge. The Conclusion develops this notion through a reading of Carolyn Chute’s The School on Heart’s Content Road and Treat Us like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves. In these fictions, Chute imagines an educational co-op that creates working-class experts, bypassing the division between professionals and lower-class clients that marked the Community Action Program. Chute embodies this notion of working-class expertise in the novels’ form; she presents them as alternative histories, accessible to nonexpert reading practices. However, the novels replicate the War on Poverty–era notion of class culture, which cannot be eradicated without exterminating the tribal consciousness of working-class Maine.

Black Arts and the Great Society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
Lower Class ◽  
Community Action ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Black Arts

This chapter discusses two Black Arts writers who benefited from War on Poverty patronage: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Gwendolyn Brooks. In The System of Dante’s Hell and In the Mecca, the two writers developed distinct versions of participatory art. Like much of Baraka’s Beat-period work, The System of Dante’s Hell thematizes his dissatisfaction with the white counterculture and desire to create art that could connect him with black urban audiences. However, the novel draws on the counterculture’s essentialist conception of lower-class culture in ways that would continue to shape Baraka’s cultural nationalist output of the late 1960s. In contrast, Brooks’s In the Mecca rejects the immersive drama that defines Baraka’s Black Arts. Inspired by her Community Action Program–sponsored work with Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, the collection insists that minority poets use the resources of poetic form to achieve a calibrated distance from their lower-class subjects.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Community Action ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Action Program ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Process Art ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Community Action Program

Focusing on the African American poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the Introduction explores links between 1950s and 1960s process literature and the Community Action Program. Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) was funded through the War on Poverty, and his version of process art fulfilled the participatory requirements of the Community Action Program. Both Baraka and many welfare activists allied with the Community Action Program also drew on a binary conception of class culture popularized by the post–World War II counterculture and liberal social science. This binary conception produced two figures that alternately incited and frustrated literary and social work efforts to bridge the gap between the middle class and the poor: the juvenile delinquent and the welfare mother.

Maximum Feasible Participation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Community Action ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Joyce Carol Oates ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Process Art ◽  
Binary Model

Ranging from the 1950s to the present, Maximum Feasible Participation traces the literary legacy of the War on Poverty. After World War II, countercultural and minority writers developed an antiformalist art that privileged process over product, rejecting literary conventions that separated authors from their audiences. This aesthetic was part of a broader trend toward participatory professionalism: an emerging model of expert work that challenged boundaries between professionals and clients. During the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration promoted this model through the Community Action Program, which encouraged “maximum feasible participation” by lower-class clients. Not coincidentally, many writers, especially cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), established institutions that were funded by this program. Participatory professionalism, however, hinged on a concept of poverty that was the paradigm’s undoing. Postwar social scientists developed a binary model of class, which insisted that the poor inhabit a culture of poverty at odds with middle-class norms. This theory resonated with process artists’ depictions of poverty as an alternative, present-oriented worldview that disrupted traditional literary conventions. This notion of cultural difference at once enabled and frustrated process art, and it lent itself to political programs aimed at dismantling the welfare state. With in-depth readings of Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Philip Roth, and Carolyn Chute, Maximum Feasible Participation shows how mid-twentieth-century welfare politics transformed American writers’ understanding of audience and literary form.

Chicago Influences on the War on Poverty

1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel A. Cazenave
Keyword(s):  
Social Reform ◽  
Community Action ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Action Program ◽  
Resident Participation ◽  
Youth Program ◽  
Institutional Conflict ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Gray Areas ◽  
Community Action Program

The most controversial component of the War on Poverty in the 1960s was its Community Action Program (CAP). Controversy resulted largely from the CAP because it employed activist professionals, mandated massscale resident participation, and encouraged federal-agency-sponsored institutional conflict as a mechanism for social reform. These strategies were tested earlier in the Mobilization for Youth program founded in the late 1950s, and in the early 1960s in the Ford Foundation Gray Areas programs and the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency projects. Indeed, the basic models of social expertise and community action employed in those programs were used in Chicago two decades before.

Writing Urban Crisis after Moynihan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Community Action ◽  
Literary Journalism ◽  
Action Program ◽  
Urban Crisis ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Urban Writing ◽  
Community Action Program

This chapter explores literary responses to the late 1960s crisis in participatory professionalism, provoked by the period’s race riots and by conservatives’ successful appropriation of liberal poverty discourse. The chapter focuses on two texts that address the Community Action Program: Joyce Carol Oates’s them and Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. While these texts voice opposing political positions, both distrust white liberal efforts to speak for the ghetto, drawing on traditions of urban writing (naturalism and literary journalism) that resist the process imperative to break down barriers between author, audience, and lower-class subject matter. At the same time, both writers complicate their literary objectivity by incorporating aspects of the very participatory professionalism they seek to delimit.

scholarly journals Labour Conflicts and Working-Class Culture in Early Modern Holland

1990 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Dekker
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Modern Era

SUMMARYFrom the 15th to the 18th century Holland, the most urbanized part of the northern Netherlands, had a tradition of labour action. In this article the informal workers' organizations which existed especially within the textile industry are described. In the 17th century the action forms adjusted themselves to the better coordinated activities of the authorities and employers. After about 1750 this protest tradition disappeared, along with the economic recession which especially struck the traditional industries. Because of this the continuity of the transition from the ancien régime to the modern era which may be discerned in the labour movements of countries like France and England, cannot be found in Holland.

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