Black literature of the 1980s grew in conjunction with the multifaceted cultural phenomenon known as Hip-Hop. A key aspect of this growth was the subversion of Eurocentric rules and expectations. This mindset connected to deep African American traditions on multiple levels. First, in rejecting the general belief that art should be made in accordance with Eurocentric aesthetic principles, Hip-Hop took its place in a long line of African American literary and artistic forms that took that position either as an explicitly political statement, as a reflection of respect toward African American audiences, or as some combination. Second, Hip-Hop also questioned specific tenets of Eurocentric art, such as the idea that written literature was more sophisticated than oral literature, or that linear development was inherently superior to cyclical forms. Third, Hip-Hop developed aesthetic and pragmatic strategies for making art outside of a Eurocentric framework. Fourth, Hip-Hop drew upon Afro-Diasporic conceptual frameworks and traditions as the foundation of those strategies. Finally, it used artistic debates around all of these questions as part of the art itself.

This chapter traces the ways in which, in the early 1960s, the Society of Umbra, an informal community of African American writers, artists, musicians, and activists, combined elements of bohemianism and Black cultural self-determination to lay the groundwork for the Black Arts Movement. It chronicles the emergence of the group from various activist and artist organizations of the Lower East Side of New York City as these African Americans became discontent with the political limitations of bohemian nonconformity and the artistry committed only to anti-bourgeois self-cultivation. Analyzing the poetry of Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson, and Calvin Hernton, it clarifies how these poets pursued a shared attempt to reveal how bohemian libidinal energies could be transformed from personal artistry and individual redemption into a revolutionary Black nationalist consciousness that could, in turn, lead to collective action.

The many ingredients that fed Mass Incarceration, including racism, populism, media sensationalism, and political opportunism, are long-standing features of the American landscape. What changed that made these factors particularly salient and channeled them into a transformation of the criminal justice (and legal) system? The best answer is a crime surge.

Afro-Latin American newspapers included extensive coverage of Black populations in other countries. Articles on Black populations and race relations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe and Africa are examples of “practices of diaspora,” international communication and engagement among Black peoples that grew out of, and helped to forge, feelings of connectedness and racial solidarity. The Black press also reported on, or offered commentary on, more formal political movements promoting Black internationalism, such as Garveyism. Black papers in Argentina and Uruguay reported regularly on their northern neighbor, Brazil. Cuban papers included Puerto Rican and Dominican writers and discussions of Haiti. Throughout Latin America, writers and intellectuals of all races watched with mixed horror and fascination the workings of racial segregation and anti-Blackness in the United States. Diasporic ties were further thickened by travel, migration, and personal connections and friendships among African American and Afro-Latin American writers and intellectuals.

States make decisions to allocate resilience to (or withhold resilience from) stakeholders across these networked interests through the lens of the state’s own vulnerability and resilience needs. We have revealed how the state’s “other-regarding” responsibility to govern in the “collective interest” – allocating resilience to shore up particular (competing) individual, aggregated and/or institutional claims – and the state’s own “self-regarding” need to shore up its resilience vis-à-vis citizens, markets, and society – interact to produce and provoke state responses to squatting. Finally, because Resilient Property analyses seek to explore as much as possible of the “problem space,” we have looked beyond the horizontal scale of national legislation or litigation to investigate how multi-scalar states craft complex solutions to complex problems. This includes tailoring responses to the specific needs and priorities, pressures and strains, commitments and constraints, that come to fore at the local, regional, national or supra-national level. Multilayered responses to squatting allow scope for normative hybridity within state responses to “wicked” property problems, in ways that can support systemic equilibrium. In the first part of this chapter, we reflect on three types of state responses to squatting: (1) property/private law responses; (2) criminal justice/law-and-order responses; and (3) responses deploying other administrative functions of the state. We consider how state responses reflect alignments between state self-interest and selected aspects of the state’s other-regarding responsibilities; and how they contribute (or not) to restoring equilibrium and shoring up the authority and legitimacy of the state in moments of crisis. These national-jurisdiction level legal responses are embedded within a polycentric, multimodal, and multi-scalar matrix. In the second part of the chapter, we examine two city-level case studies: New York City and Barcelona – to reflect on moments in which local- or city-level responses were key to restoring equilibrium, or triggering tipping-points for change.

Throughout DeLillo's fiction, DeLillo, like Underworld's Nick Shay, shakes free from the constraints of his own biographical history and personal relationship with the Bronx in particular.

DeLillo’s fiction acts as a commentary on the human condition and its relation to spatial stimuli. New York City represents a fixed point of reference that the author revisits and continuously extracts meaning from its inhabitants’ movement throughout the cityscape and the architectural constructs that affect their lives.

This chapter examines variation and change in the speech of performances by actors from the New York City region.

This chapter considers Ellison’s contradictory relationship to the black writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. While Ellison met and conversed with Alain Locke about black writing as an undergraduate at Tuskegee, and benefitted directly from mentoring by African American creative forebears like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright after his move to New York in the late 1930s, he also expressly distanced himself from these figures later. In chapters like 1963-64’s canonical “The World and the Jug,” for example, Ellison emphasizes the influence of various white modernists like T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and André Malraux as he downplays his debt to Hughes and Wright, both of whom bookended the politicized aesthetic of the Renaissance. As a counterpoint, I consider Ellison stylistic points of resemblance with these earlier black modernists to suggest a more substantial genealogical connection than Ellison himself admitted at times in his own rhetorical self-fashioning.

Ellison came to New York City with a musical education from Tuskegee and an interest in pursuing sculpture. But owing to his new friendships with young writers, including Richard Wright, and his job working for the Federal Writer’s Project collecting “Negro Lore,” his focus soon shifted to writing. This chapter explores the influence that Ellison’s early New York encounters had on inspiring his first attempts at writing fiction and in shaping the thematic and aesthetic concerns that would endure throughout his life’s work.

Ellison spent more time in New York City than in any other place. The half-century Ellison lived in post-World War II New York coincided not only with the city’s ascendance to the global center of arts, letters, and finance, but also with the transformation of the U.S. into a global hegemon. By the 1970s Ellison had become an important figure in several of the city’s institutions. As one of the nation’s foremost writers, and a resident of Harlem, Ellison’s life in New York highlights the artistic center and the cultural margins of the city.

While forests are among the most classic common resources, urban forests are generally not thought of as commons, or even as forests. Instead, urban trees are divided up by ownership – private trees, street trees, park trees. They are typically planted and managed individually – truly a case where we fail to see the forest through the trees.

The value of urban forests is clear. Trees that thrive offer significant amenities to their immediate neighbors. Together these trees form the urban canopy, which provides multiple ecosystem services – improving air quality, moderating the heat island effect, managing stormwater, and providing habitat.

As the value of urban trees has become clearer, cities have invested in ‘million tree’ planting initiatives. Unfortunately, these programs too often reinforce social inequalities. Looking at New York City, this chapter examines tree planting through an environmental justice lens, and proposes that considering the urban forest as a unified public commons can be a path forward towards a more equitable city.

This chapter looks closely at how literary societies in New York and Philadelphia served as engines of the creation of a particular kind of Black modernity, as expressed in the speeches, essays, and poetry of the members of such societies.