Culture Wars in Urban Society

I thought the book Yo' mama's disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America by Robin D. G. Kelley was an interesting spin on the culture wars we had been discussing in class. In the fist chapter, he addresses the problem of minority literature in that people tend to generalize it and not analyze it's meaning properly.

"My purpose, then, is to offer some reflections on how the culture concept employed by social scientists has severely impoverished contemporary debates over the plight of urban African Americans and contributed to the construction of the ghetto as a resevoir of pathologies and bad cultural values. ... While some aspects of black expressive cultures certainly help inner city residents deal with and even resist ghetto conditions, most of the literature ignores what cultural forms mean for the practitioners. Few scholars acknowledge that what also might be at stake here are aesthetics, style, and pleasure."

Although I couldn't read all of it, I thought the urban point of view showed more than just culture wars in terms of the literary canon. The chapter I found most interesting was the fifth one, How the New Working Class Can Transform America, because it gives insight into culture wars beyond academia how the face of the working class is shifting.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1gl4RP__PTEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA15&dq=culture+wars&ots=dAOhcdg31i&sig=qwV5w-862U3_yvsyIbpbLgGWJ0k#PPP1,M1


(P.S. I apologize for the profanity in Chapter 1, I couldn't get the site to load with the cover first...)