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.

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.

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.

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.

Civil Rights and the Southern Folk Aesthetic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Community Action ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Process Art ◽  
Freedom Summer ◽  
Feminist Fiction ◽  
Class Divisions

This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers began their careers as social workers associated with War on Poverty programs; both were also influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s version of community action, implemented during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In their novels, Walker and Bambara explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, focusing on intraracial class divisions that community action was supposed to suture. In both novels, these divisions turn out to be ineradicable, and their persistence marks the Southern folk aesthetic—the influential version of process art that Walker, Bambara, and other black feminist writers created in the 1970s.

Legal Services and the Cockroach Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
Young Men ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Legal Services ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
Process Art ◽  
Oscar Zeta Acosta ◽  
Gender Biases ◽  
Political Turn

This chapter focuses on the Chicano writer and lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, whose novels, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People, chart his transformation into a radical lawyer for Los Angeles’s Brown Power Movement. Acosta began his career with Legal Services, a network of War on Poverty–funded Legal Aid offices. When he turned to movement activism, he radicalized Legal Services’ demand that lawyers use their expertise to challenge laws that work against the interest of their lower-class clients. This demand became central to Acosta’s version of process art. At the same time, Acosta’s work replicates gender biases that ran throughout the War on Poverty. His political turn entailed his rejection of welfare mothers as clients in favor of militant young men—a turn that paralleled the War on Poverty’s focus on male delinquents.

“These Guys Came Out Looking Like Movie Actors”

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-576
Author(s):  
Mina Roces
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Working Hours ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
World War ◽  
Marginal Group ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Agricultural Laborer

This article analyzes the dress and consumption practices of the first generation of Filipino male migrants to the United States who arrived from 1906 until the end of World War II. It argues that Filipino migrant men used dress and consumption practices to fashion new identities that rejected their working selves as a lower-class marginal group. The contrast between the utilitarian clothes worn during working hours and the formal suit accentuated the sartorial transformation from lower-class agricultural laborer or Alaskan cannery worker to fashionable dandy and temporarily erased the stigma of manual labor. Two groups of well-dressed Filipino men behaved in contradictory ways: as binge consumers and as anti-consumers. Collectively, Filipino consumption practices that included dress challenged the parameters of social exclusion.

Umm Kulthūm

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
Arabic Speakers ◽  
Egyptian Government

Umm Kulthum was probably the most famous singer in the Arab world during the 20th century, and among the most highly regarded for her command of poetic texts and the historic Arab musical system brought together in affective performances, working closely with accomplished poets and composers of her day. She became a public figure in general, certainly in the later decades of her life, when she became closely associated with then president Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir of Egypt and spoke frequently about her love for her country and its people. Born to a poor village family in the Egyptian delta, her background resembled that of millions of her compatriots. She was raised in an agrarian setting. Her father was the imam of the local mosque. Like many children of her generation, she attended Qurʾan school (kuttāb), which was among the few educational opportunities for lower-class children under the then British occupation. She learned to sing by mimicking her father and her brother, who sang religious songs for weddings and special occasions to make additional money. Her strong voice drew great attention. She moved to Cairo in about 1923 to advance her career. Thanks to her performances and commercial recordings, her career took off, and by the late 1920s she had become wildly successful. Films and live broadcasts followed in the 1930s. In the 1940s, like many Egyptians, she began to express the shared dismay at the continued British presence during World War II, the corruption of the Egyptian government, and the war in Palestine. After the Egyptian Revolution in 1952, she, again like many of her cohort, expressed support for the revolutionary government in song and speech and, later, for ‘Abd al-Nasir himself. Her musical style changed over the years as she continually cultivated new listeners. Owing to the wide dissemination of her recordings, the powerful Egyptian radio-broadcasting capacity, and her touring, she became well known and popular throughout the Arab world. After the Egyptian defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, she launched a successful series of benefit concerts designed to replenish the Egyptian war department’s treasury. When she died in 1975, it was said that her funeral was bigger than ‘Abd al-Nasir’s had been. Probably owing to her stature as a public figure, most publications about Umm Kulthum have been biographical in nature, as writers attempted to document her life, her social impact, and the reasons for her various successes. She rarely sought an audience outside the world of Arabic speakers, and she was little known in the West until the late 20th century, with the burgeoning interest in “world music.”

Education in a Multi-Ethnoracial Setting: Seattle's Neighborhood House and the Cultivation of Urban Community Builders, 1960s–1970s

2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Service Agency ◽  
Social Service Agency ◽  
World War ◽  
Settlement House ◽  
Civic Leaders ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Societal Changes

During the mid-1960s, the War on Poverty ushered in a change in outlook on the poor and stimulated Neighborhood House (a social service agency that began as a settlement house) to focus on educative, community-building initiatives. Yet ironically, while staffers offered educational programs for residents, they were themselves becoming educated. The space Neighborhood House provided emerged as a powerful venue in which staffers developed their talents to become socially minded civic leaders. This study of the post–World War II transformation of settlement work in a city in the Pacific Northwest reveals commonalities with other places as well as distinctiveness to Seattle conditions. The article expands the extant scholarship on multi-ethnoracial communities, War on Poverty programs, and settlement house responses to societal changes. In doing so, it reveals the ways in which Neighborhood House provided an important educative space for those who worked there, a place that nurtured their growth as civically minded community builders.

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