Epilogue: The Politics of Urban Writing and the Hegemony of FIRE

Abstract

During the 1970s and the 1980s, the New York downtown literary scene was emblematic for its political and social engagements. Archival research shows that the magazines were replete with explicit and implicit artistic and social manifestoes, with literary and political advertisements. Some of these were invitations to participate in public readings on the Lower East Side, at St Mark’s Place for example, or publicity for new or established magazines along with their mission statements. Others were collages of avant-garde writing employed as vicarious sociopolitical instruments, revolutionary calls to take part in grassroots action, and not least, diagnostic or visionary reflections on the critical state of the neighborhood and the city. At the symbolic end of this textual spectrum, Richard Kostelanetz’s map in “East Village 1970–71” takes the meanings of Alphabet Town ad litteram and designs a discursive chart of St. Mark’s Place between the First and Second Avenues. He assigns a sentence to each public and private site that represents its significance in the literal, cultural, or social economy of the place. “Here do the community’s kings and queens hold court pontificating their messages,” “Main Street to some here, Hell’s Hole to others” or “A misplaced bodega that does little perceptible business” are several illustrations of Kostelanetz’s socio-spatial and cultural mapping.¹ At the radical end, the “Koff Manifesto” is worth recalling for its combination between symbols of violent reaction (suggestively represented by the red background, the raised fist and the gun) and the definition of the artist as the subversively political figure par excellence: “The artists. They abandon the world on your doorstep. They show you the things you live among, so you may know yourself.”² On a note of milder dissidence, Michael Carter’s “Manifesto” published in the multimedia, art, and literature magazine, Red Tape, articulates a similar type of mission, for writers this time, as an imperative of visionary hope, urban knowledge, systemic awareness, and ultimately dissidence.

All hope lies with the hopeless and we may end up liberating hope itself. There is nothing wrong with vision, even of one’s own novel. Vision is the axis upon which hope turns and without it we are merely mechanisms in a production we can’t understand.

—Michael Carter, “Manifesto,” Red Tape, 1983