Dreaming Despite Despair

Ralph's (2014) book Renegade Dreams invites the reader into Eastwood, a West Side Chicago African-American neighborhood notorious for high unemployment, high violence, and its gang presence. In his ethnographic study of gang members living in urban poverty, Ralph creates a counter-narrative to the dominant notion of African-American game members.Dr. Ralph presents excerpts of the lived experiences of gang members to draw the readers into the street life of Chicago. The Divine Knights, the pseudonym for the gang profiled in this book has a rich history in Chicago. From the Divine Knights' inception as civil rights activists to the present hierarchical drug organization known for violence, readers are submerged in the long history of some of its members. This book ignites sentiments of sorrow, fear, despair, and hope. Those all too familiar with the lived experience of gang membership in a large urban area Renegade Dreams will remind you of the injury one experiences, and resilience one must have to survive. "Renegades," as mentioned in the title, are the newer generation of gang members attempting to survive in a dilapidated neighborhood left barren by government and industry.From 2007 through 2010, Dr. Ralph lived in Eastwood conversing with community members, drug addicts, gang members, HIV patients, clergymen, and gun hot survivors. He collected data through conversations, and participant observation, and framed the book from his extensive field notes. He selected participants through the snowballing method.Dr. Ralph breaks the book into the five main chapters: Development Or, Why Grandmothers Ally with the Gang; Nostalgia Or, The Stories a Gang Tells about Itself; Authenticity Or, Why People Can't Leave the Gang; Disability Or, Why a Gang Leader Helps Stop the Violence; and Disease Or, How a Will To Survive Helps the Healing. Through thematic analysis the five overarching themes emerged.In each of the chapters Ralph offers a glimpse into the injury inflected upon the residences of Eastwood. Chronicling their fight to protect their neighborhood from gentrification, to learning to live through incurable chronic diseases, Dr. Ralph depicts the Eastwoodians' resiliency.The purpose of Dr. Ralph's research is clear. His aim was to "access the political potential of the frame, both for scholars and non-academics who have dedicated their lives to addressing urban poverty" (p. 176). He sought to "reframe seemingly familiar narratives that, because of their familiarity, impede our understanding of how injury is experienced" (p. 169). Through the Divine Knight's narratives, the author gives voice to those in a socially isolated community. He changes the narrative of the constructed notions of gang members by "unearthing alternate frames" (p. 171), and deconstructing "how we understand social life in Eastwood" (p. 92). He did this by:articulating another iteration of a theory of isolation, in the hopes of developing a successively closer approximation of what inner-city injury looks like at present, and to grapple with its interconnections with governmental and community institutions as well as its relationship to social and historical processes. (p. 171)The book's framework is both interpretative, and emancipatory, although most of the book is interpretative. As he interprets the character's experiences, and deconstructs the socially constructed ideology of Black gang members. This book does not conceal or chide the violence occurring in this neighborhood. In a unique and liberatory manner he uses this violence to attest for both injury and resilience, and how one relates to the other. …