Culture, the Arts, and Inequality

Examining how writers and musicians respond to attempts to define and categorize inequality in moral terms, Culture, the Arts and Inequality: American Artists and Social Justice analyzes the writers and artists who challenge the moral categories through which inequality has been maintained and mobilized.

Beginning with the work of Langston Hughes, whose fears for the African American community echo fifty years later in Stevie Wonder’s urban chronicles, and including key American voices such as Nelson Algren, Thomas McGrath, Ann Petry, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as “Godfather of Rap” Gil Scott-Heron, this book tackles the mechanisms that compelled writers and musicians to reassert the worth and value of those they wrote about, opposing the fixing in place of moral classifications applied to cultures and people deemed of little worth. Without adequate analysis of those classifications, and particularly the role of moral attribution in identifying and categorizing those deemed unworthy, we struggle to understand inequality’s impact on society and individuals—leading to a partial conceptualization of how it is understood and experienced.

Recognizing that new ways of thinking about class, dominated by moral questions but with real material effects, and its impact on writers, musicians, and society are at stake, this interdisciplinary project redefines discourses on inequality in the United States today.