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The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape is a collection of poems, rap
lyrics, short stories, essays, interviews, and artwork about
Chicago, the city that came to be known as "Chiraq" ("Chicago"
"Iraq"), and the people who live in its vibrant and occasionally
violent neighborhoods. Tuned to the work of Chicago's youth,
especially the emerging artists and activists surrounding Young
Chicago Authors, this literary mixtape unpacks the meanings of
"Chiraq" as both a vexed term and a space of possibility. "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.
In recent decades, poetry slams and the spoken word artists who
compete in them have sparked a resurgent fascination with the world
of poetry. However, there is little critical dialogue that fully
engages with the cultural complexities present in slam and spoken
word poetry communities, as well as their ramifications. In Killing
Poetry, renowned slam poet, Javon Johnson unpacks some of the
complicated issues that comprise performance poetry spaces. He
argues that the truly radical potential in slam and spoken word
communities lies not just in proving literary worth, speaking back
to power, or even in altering power structures, but instead in
imagining and working towards altogether different social
relationships. His illuminating ethnography provides a critical
history of the slam, contextualizes contemporary black poets in
larger black literary traditions, and does away with the notion
that poetry slams are inherently radically democratic and utopic.
Killing Poetry-at times autobiographical, poetic, and
journalistic-analyzes the masculine posturing in the Southern
California community in particular, the sexual assault in the
national community, and the ways in which related social media
inadvertently replicate many of the same white supremacist,
patriarchal, and mainstream logics so many spoken word poets seem
to be working against. Throughout, Johnson examines the promises
and problems within slam and spoken word, while illustrating how
community is made and remade in hopes of eventually creating the
radical spaces so many of these poets strive to achieve.
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