Chocolate Cities: The Black of American Life

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Review ------ "A very smart new book by two culturally agile sociologists. . . . While Chocolate Cities is a story of inventive adaption, fierce survival and Black joy, it is also a history of trauma and communities under siege. This book stands as a witness to the investment of struggle, skill and resources it has taken to build and sustain chocolate cities. It is also a testament to the criminal failure of America to see and honor these essential points on the ." (Kalamazoo College/Praxus Center) “If Chocolate Cities were itself made of chocolate, it would come in a variety of forms: the central theses of the book like unsweetened cacao nibs, true and deep-flavored, long-lasting, challenging, surprising. Census data as chocolate bar, scored into bite-size forms. Musical references like the aroma of chocolate, wafting through the room. And the personal stories Robinson and Hunter delve into are multi-layered, well-baked undertakings.” (Memphis: The City Magazine) "Hunter and Robinson have set out a marker for thinking differently about black people in urban America." (PopMatters) "Hunter and Robinson offer an in into the ways black folks have eked out a social world regardless of the racism, segregation, and brutality often concomitant in cities across the North American experience. ... For undergraduates, graduates, and any lay reader interested in black life in the US." (CHOICE 2018-07-01) "A tour de force. Hunter and Robinson work assiduously and effectively to help readers to think about how seemingly disconnected ideas, themes, and practices should be understood together. The book paints a portrait of the complexity of black life, culture, politics, and interests." (American Journal of Sociology) "Chocolate Cities offers a critical contribution to urban sociology through its refreshing approach to the cultural geography of Black life. . . . Chocolate Cities makes compelling theoretical arguments that encourage scholars and practitioners to rethink the relationship between race, racism, culture, and space." (City & Community) "Hunter and Robinson’s Chocolate Cities gives sociology a needed shaking up and will influence the discipline for years to come. By putting Black agency at the center of their epistemology, Hunter and Robinson’s Chocolate Cities cuts across and shapes multiple sociological microcosms." (Sociology of Race and Ethnicity) "Good books enlighten and educate. Great books mess up your mind. Good books deepen many a field of study. Great books blow holes in many fields of study. Good books deliver a line of argument. Great books reframe and problematize a line of argument. Good books help you settle down and furnish your intellectual home. Great books set you wandering and teach you that you are homeless. Good books bring in. Great books bring the funk. I could go on with this list of contrasts between good and great. Yes, Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson’ s Chocolate Cities: The Black of American Life is a great book, yes it messed up my mind, and yes it does all those things great books do." (Ethnic and Racial Studies) Read more ( javascript:void(0) ) From the Inside Flap -------------------- “A masterpiece! Chocolate Cities is a testament to the magic that is possible when you combine the funky wisdom of the Mothership with the best scholarship from the Ivory Tower.”— George Clinton, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame musician and founder of Parliament Funkadelic “Chocolate Cities is simply the most instructive and illuminating book on American geography and culture I have ever read. Hunter and Robinson pull no punches and sacrifice no nuance in countering traditional hegemonic notions of race, space, and movement with loving, textured Black American notions of race, space, and movement. Chocolate Cities is a critical occasion to rethink everything we thought we knew about American space and spatial liberation.”— Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division “A significant, timely, and provocative race-based social ping of the United States, reflecting a sense of the everyday lives of African Americans. These masterful sketches, rooted in oral history and illuminated by poetry, music, fiction, and film, make it an extraordinary book that needs to be read and considered far beyond the academy.”—Elijah Anderson, Yale University, author of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life “Chocolate Cities is bold on too many levels to name. It rethinks our standard notions of geography, data, history, academic discipline, and theory. It sings and dances off the page. Chocolate Cities kicks up enough funk to provoke a major paradigm shift in research on Black places.”—Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City "Chocolate Cities is a terrific contribution to our understanding of the role of expressive culture in reping the boundaries of racialized space. In it, we learn both about the legacies of structural racism and how black communities responded creatively to it to build solidarity, foster black joy, and resist oppression through an intersectional fight for humanity waged from coast to coast, in big cities and small towns, on trains, planes, and buses, in songs and on the page, in the church, in the courts, and in the streets."—Tricia Rose, Brown University “In one of the most original s of the urban I have read in decades, Hunter and Robinson overturn the dominant social science imaginary that see ‘inner’ cities only in crisis, chaos, and decline. Theirs is a sociological imagination constructed from the eyes, ears, hearts, memories, songs, and prayers of real city folk, those Black communities who cling to their village, continually remake their culture, and build power to beat back the chaos imposed on them. This is what it means to live in a Chocolate City. Chocolate, after all, is more than a color.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination “Modeling the very best of collaborative research and writing, Chocolate Cities is a brilliant, creative, and innovative work. The authors engage the rich literary and musical heritage that black city dwellers have bequeathed the world while building upon and extending the best social science and humanities scholarship. Hunter and Robinson offer us a beautifully written work that is sure to become an influential classic in the fields of Sociology, American Studies, African American Studies, and beyond.”—Farah Jasmine Griffin, Director, African American Studies, Columbia University “Hunter and Robinson offer an iteration of black thought that explores how black life—as song and tune, as fight and struggle—is necessarily geographic life. Here, threads of black geographies emerge across and underneath prevailing cartographies—within the USA while also reaching out to touch other global diasporic sites—to show that the black imagination is tied to place-making practices. Powerfully, the authors write black geographies and chocolate cities as ‘living geographies’—sites shaped by brutal and unforgiving racial economies that engender creative praxis and freedom struggle.”—Katherine McKittrick, author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle “Rarely does a book disrupt existing paradigms and displace dominant narratives. This is exactly what Hunter and Robinson achieve in Chocolate Cities. This book changes the ways we understand Black and White Americans in profound ways, especially how they experience and define themselves according to geographic regions throughout the United States. This book creatively weaves together data from rich and untapped sources to tell a unique American story. A must read for all who wish to rethink current racial dynamics in America and unravel them in fresh new ways.”—Aldon Morris, author of The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology Read more ( javascript:void(0) ) See all Editorial Reviews ( /dp/product-description/0520292839/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books&isInIframe=0 )