Fighting the Cultural Wars in Urban America , was selected as one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Village Voice . Professor Kelly open with an autobiographical reflection from his freshman experience at the California State University, Long Beach, to make the argument that movements for social change need not be incompatible with academic work. They investigate, they collect data, they listen to people's stories, they formulate analyses, and then develop tactics and strategies.
Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.
What presides over the poem is not the most lucid intelligence, sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a whole. It is that in which man spatters the object with all of his mobilized riches. Thus it is in the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folks, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists that we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born. Professor Kelly argues that the cognitive map of the future, of a world not yet born led to the Montgomery bus boycott by Rosa Parks. Before Rosa Parks famous refusal, the black community had already possessed knowledge of how they were collectively treated on public transportation, their stories and opinions were discussed in churches, the streets, on the buses, and in the meetings of the Women Political Council.