Description
"Chiraq" has come to connote the violence-interpersonal and structural-that many Chicago youth regularly experience. But the contributors to The End of Chiraq show that Chicago is much more than Chiraq. Instead, they demonstrate how young people are thinking and mobilizing, engaged in a process of creating a new and safer world for themselves, their communities, and their city.
In true mixtape fashion, the book is an exercise in "low end theory" that does not just include so-called underground and marginal voices, but foregrounds them. Edited by award-winning poets, writers, and teachers Javon Johnson and Kevin Coval, The End of Chiraq addresses head-on the troublesome relationship between Chicago and Chiraq and envisions a future in which both might be transformed.
About the Author
Javon Johnson is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the director of African American and African diaspora studies. He is the author of Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities (2017) and is an award-winning spoken word poet who has appeared on HBO, BET, and TVOne.
Kevin Coval is the founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and artistic director of Young Chicago Authors. He is the coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015); author of A People's History of Chicago, Schtick, L-vis Lives!, and Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica); and author (with Idris Goodwin) of This Is Modern Art.
Book Information
ISBN 9780810137189
Author Javon Johnson
Format Paperback
Page Count 200
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 305g