Text

theses

The Brick: Newark’s Artistic Inquiry into Urban Crisis reads Newark through its artists, through their biographies and oral histories, and through their work as texts, and reads its artists through Newark, the social and cultural streams that shaped the city, from the sixties until now. Because these artists actively sought to express urban experience, this dissertation considers how their work both represents and is representative of the cities that inspired it. My project focuses on five Newark-born artists to show how close attentive readings of their work can reveal fresh thinking about urban problems. Many social scientists and critics ignore art and culture in their discussions of postindustrial cities. The artists I discuss are a novelist, two poets, a photographer, and a jazz trombonist. The poems, images, and music they created have an aim to ethically describe urban space—writing that is justice-seeking rather than only aesthetic, and help us to discover what happened in Newark. I claim that artists have made significant contributions to the history of cities, not only in terms of what their art is about, but how they made their art. Chapter 1 explores Amiri Baraka and Philip Roth, the ways they write about Newark, and the ways they have been primary in dominating how Newark has been imagined in American culture, even though there are fresh insights to be made about their work. Chapter 2 is about Newark’s long, overlooked jazz culture. I explore this jazz culture through the life and music of Grachan Moncur III, a jazz trombonist. By closely listening to Moncur’s music, I give a more nuanced understanding of Newark’s jazz culture, which was often synonymous with its African American community. Chapter 3 gives close readings of Lynda Hull’s poems about Newark and other cities. I examine how she juxtaposes private memory and public knowledge and presents an empathic reading of cities. Chapter 4 focuses on Helen Stummer, a photographer who took photos of people in Newark's Central Ward between 1980 and 1993. I discuss the meanings of photographs by other social documentary photographers, placing Stummer in a broader cultural context.

ETD_4755

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10002600001.ETD.000068780

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Sean Daniel Singer

Date on t.p.is 2011

doi:10.7282/T3KP80SM

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.