The creative underclass: Youth, race and the gentrifying city
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The creative underclass: Youth, race and the gentrifying city Tyler Denmead. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2019, 204 pp., ISBN 978-1-4780-0593-3 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-4780-0659-6 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-4780-0731-9 (eBook) Darlene E. Clover1
© UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning and Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This is a book about class and art. More specifically, it is about unintentionally reenforcing social stratification in the United States and the role a community-based arts education youth organisation – New Urban Arts – played in maintaining this structural inequality in the name of creativity. Speaking candidly from his position as a white, privileged male and founder-leader of New Urban Arts, Tyler Denmead reflects critically upon how he attempted to create the pedagogic conditions for young people to develop their own cultural practices and creative lifestyles as a means to escape their creative underclass status. Using ethnographic fieldwork methodology, Denmead reveals how this project inadvertently served as a tool in the “gentrifying force” of the creative cultural capital exercises of the State. What Denmead illustrates through thick, rich description is on the one hand the potential of New Urban Arts to provide a creative space of encounter for “troubled youth” that allowed them to explore and learn collectively everything from identity to racism, and hold racial capitalism accountable. Crucially, however, he failed on the other hand to read the script that entangled his organisation in a theatre of arts and culture as a creative driver for upmarket property development and urban renewal. Within this performative structure, he acknowledges that the creative underclass of youth his organisation served would never play a leading role in socioeconomic mobility. This slim volume is made up of six chapters, the first three of which “describe and interpret three symbolic cultural practices created and interpreted by youth
* Darlene E. Clover [email protected] 1
University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
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participants in and through New Urban Arts” (pp. 2–3). In chapter one, Denmead looks at the “privilege” of troublemaking, comparing the American version of Dennis the Menace, a privileged white male child, 1 to Gabriela, a working-class female youth member of New Urban Arts, to illustrate the chasm between middle-class and underclass troublemaking. Privileged youth roam freely about the streets without adult supervision, argue with adults, pull pranks, write on walls and are loud; they inhabit a world of exploration, freedom, endearing mischievousness and entitlement. Poor and working-class children are controlled, taught to stay inside lest they be perceived as a threat to society, to practise behavioural management strategies that keep them out of trouble and to keep quiet so as not to draw the attention of the police; they are trained for mundane tasks, to conform, to blend in. Yet through Gabriela’s stories, told to Denmead in interviews, we see how you
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