The creative underclass
Subtitle: youth, race, and the gentrifying city
By: Tyler Denmead
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Durham; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 204
ISBN-13: 9781478006596; 9781478005933; 9781478007319
Subjects: Arts; New Urban Arts (Providence, R.I.); Gentrification; Arts and youth; Education (Secondary); African American youth
Description: "As an undergraduate at Brown University, Tyler Denmead founded New Urban Arts, a nationally recognized arts and humanities program primarily for young people of color in Providence, Rhode Island. Along with its positive impact, New Urban Arts, under his leadership, became entangled in Providence's urban renewal efforts that harmed the very youth it served. As in many deindustrialized cities, Providence's leaders viewed arts, culture, and creativity as means to drive property development and attract young, educated, and affluent white people, such as Denmead, to economically and culturally kickstart the city. In The Creative Underclass, Denmead critically examines how New Urban Arts and similar organizations can become enmeshed in circumstances where young people, including himself, become visible once the city can leverage their creativity to benefit economic revitalization and gentrification. He points to the creative cultural practices that young people of color from low-income communities use to resist their subjectification as members of an underclass which, along with redistributive economic policies can be deployed as an effective means with which to both to oppose gentrification and better serve the youth who have become emblematic of urban creativity."--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Troublemaking; title: The hot mess; title: Chillaxing; title: Why the creative underclass doesn't get creative-class jobs; title: Autoethnography of a "gentrifying force"; title: Is this really what white people do in the creative capital?