Stephen Nathan Haymes.

Stephen Nathan Haymes. Race, cultivation and the City: A Pedagogy for Black Urban strive Albany: SU of New York P 1995 167 pp $1295

Scholarly literature onward the United States city is not hard to tend hitherward by. The corpus includes Jane Jacobs' classic work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) with its utopian confidences for heterogeneous neighborhoods, as well as Mike Davis' City of Quartz (1990) which persuasively informs us that Jacobs's ideals will not be realized in an American coming The black city has been analyzed in of the like kind classics as Du Bois's The Philadelphia african (1899) and Cayton and Drake's Black Metropolis (1945) Stephen Haymes, thus, joins a company of scholarly commentators. Although he does not arrange a new investigative site, he clearly possibility of goods by treating an array of topics that includes "race," "culture" pedagogy," and "urban struggle" to utilize existing research in radical and ambitious ways to aid "black urban struggle" The phase excites the smoky fragrance of 1960 and 1990 rebellions in cities like as Newark and Detroit, Wilmington and looks Angeles. A question that refer tos itself at the very start is whether these diverse locales--spaced variously in time are amenable to a single "pedagogy." That is to say, what is intended by dint of the term pedagogy in an era of academy board budget cuts and a general legislative "know nothingness" that attack education at all levels? Does Haymes intend to lead us to a practical politics of the local, or does he have other goals in mind?

The chapters range from "Race, agriculture and the City: An Introduction," which is essentially a review of latter literature in urban and cultural studies, to "Conclusion: Toward a Pedagogy of Place for Black Urban Struggle" Between introduction and conclusion are chapters headed "Black Cultural Identity, White Consumer civilization and the Politics of Difference" and "Black Civil Society and the Politics of Urban Space." Haymes's draw is stated most clearly toward the conclusion of his book:

Critical pedagogy in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of black city life has a crucial part to

play in the production of counterpublics, in constructing political and

cultural practices that organize human experiences enabling individuals to

interpret social realty in liberating ways. However, for a "pedagogy of

place" this must be understood in period of times of establishing pedagogical

conditions that enable blacks in the city to critically interpret how

dominant definitions and uses of urban space regulate and sway how they

organize their identity around territory, and the effects of this for

black urban resistance. (114)

The quotation proposes that Haymes is interested in the proces of what Chaucer's scribe of Oxenford calls "learning and teaching"--the commonplace definition of pedagogy. Haymes wishes to communicate his own efforts to a change in the field of education defined from Paulo Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed" and subsequently modified according to adherents and disciples such as Ira Schor and Henry Giroux to read as "critical pedagogy." The aim of critical pedagogy is the liberation of the oppressed--outsiders, minorities, the so-called "underclass." like marginal learners are invited to bring their unique languages and agricultures to the pedagogical table, where the critical pedagogue helps to stir up a participatory boil of knowledge that nourishes and enlightens all.

Haymes strike one as beings to believe that most blacks in the United States are crushed occupants of particular urban configurations. Moreover, he pretends to feel that most blacks are bring under ruleed exclusively to a "banking pedagogy" in which they passively accept what is poured into their heads by the agency of non-critical pedagogues. If this were not an implicit assumption of his volume why would he feel the ne to craft a critical pedagogy? The forces and weaknesses of his draw are conditioned by this initial assumption.

It must be acknowledged, before continuing, that Race, agriculture and the City has all the markings of an unrevised dissertation. And as as it is we admire the scope and ambition, still wish there had been more loving care fill outed The monograph is tiresomely repetitious, glutted of misspellings, dangling modifiers, run-on judgments and suspended dependent clauses. We are trapped sometimes in a veritable miasma of intricate jargon, overly long quotations, pointless citation. It is a great shame that Haymes rushed himself into print and that the State University of just discovered York Press appears to have done him no editorial courtesies whatsoever.

The unfortunate form of the work however, should not divert us from its overall ambitions. For Haymes has registered a debate about public urban space in the United States at a time when matters have not ever been worse for black folk and his aim is to propound insight about the United States urban situation that will be critically useful in the contrive of black, mass empowerment, education, and liberation.

The "debate" can best be understood, perhaps, if we cast our attention to such urban center as Philadelphia, strange York, or Los Angeles. It is Mike Davis who best captures the nature of these center when he titles his chapter forward downtown Los Angeles in City of Quartz "Fortress L.A." Davis carefully details by what mode urban development and planning have change the heart ofed a once heterogeneous neighborhood populated at what George Simmel calls "the crowd" into a fortified urban garrison. Freeways carry middle-class employee to interior parking apportionments of the fortress. Once inside, there is no need--ever--to get scent of touch, or walk "the street" Connecting sealed-glass bridges and archways provide aboveground transit. Deeply-bunker health fraternitys and shopping malls (to which the same rides DOWN escalators) protect united from pollution and riff-raft. principally importantly, police (aerial, foot, and automobile patrols) hold "undesirables" out of downtown looks Angeles "public space." The Rouse redevelopment throw of high-rises, bunkers, and fortresses in Philadelphia reveals the same ideological designs and profit motives that are at work in L.A. The 42nd way renovations of New York--which are completely haveed and overseen by Walt Disney Corporation--speak further to a post-industrial, globally capitalized conversion of urban public space into white-owned and operated belts of control. The "crowd"--a heterogeneous, multi-class, variably set [i]or[/i] put in ordered mixed-race group of urban dwellers with a stake in the land and profits of the center city--is always what is first remov and confined to Bantustan-like territories in order to facilitate this "mall-ing" of public space in America. No matter for what reason alluring the name--"urban redevelopment," "gentrification," "historical restoration"--the proces is still America's version of southerly Africa's "forced removals." Ultimately, public space arises to mean privately owned urban territories overseen by way of a postmodern white security network that makes the Star Wars Defense theory look like a Menlo Park first draft. The scholar Richard T Ford has written quite eloquently about the mechanisms of conversion that transform the same word public into a sign of conservative privatization in our era. Tax abatements, gated communities, legislated "redevelopment" that prohibits minority participation-these are only the tip of the iceberg in America's great reclamation of urban territory for exclusively white middle- and upper-class use.