Race Riots and Resistance uncovers a long-hidden, tragic chapter of American history. Focusing on the «Red Summer» of 1919 in which black communities were targeted by white mobs, the book examines the contexts out of which white racial violence arose. It shows how the riots transcended any particularity of cause, and in doing so calls into question many longstanding beliefs about racial violence. The book goes on to portray the riots as a phenomenon, documenting the number of incidents, describing the events in detail, and analyzing the patterns that emerge from looking at the riots collectively. Finally and significantly, Race Riots and Resistance argues that the response to the riots marked an early stage of what came to be known as the Civil Rights Movement.

Longlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Ryan Chapman’s “gritty, bracing debut” (Esquire) set during a prison riot is “dark, daring, and laugh-out-loud hilarious…one of the smartest—and best—novels of the year” (NPR). A largescale riot rages through Westbrook prison in upstate New York, incited by a poem in the house literary journal. Our unnamed narrator, barricaded inside the computer lab, swears he’s blameless—even though, as editor-in-chief, he published the piece in question. As he awaits violent interruption by his many, many enemies, he liveblogs one final Editor’s Letter. Riots I Have Known is his memoir, confession, and act of literary revenge. His tale spans a childhood in Sri Lanka, navigating the postwar black markets and hotel chains; employment as a Park Avenue doorman, serving the widows of the one percent; life in prison, with the silver lining of his beloved McNairy; and his stewardship of The Holding Pen, a “masterpiece of post-penal literature” favored by Brooklynites everywhere. All will be revealed, and everyone will see he’s really a good guy, doing it for the right reasons. “Fitfully funny and murderously wry,” Riots I Have Known is “a frenzied yet wistful monologue from a lover of literature under siege” (Kirkus Reviews).

As the Civil War rages, another battle breaks out behind the lines. During a long hot July in 1863, the worst race riots the United States has ever seen erupt in New York City. Earlier that year, desperate for more Union soldiers, President Abraham Lincoln instituted a draft—a draft that would allow the wealthy to escape serving in the army by paying a $300 waiver, more than a year's income for the recent immigrant Irish. And on July 11, as the first drawing takes place in Lower Manhattan, the city of New York explodes in rage and fire. Stores are looted; buildings, including the Colored Foundling Home, are burned down; and black Americans are attacked, beaten, and murdered. The police cannot hold out against the rioters, and finally, battle-hardened soldiers are ordered back from the fields of Gettysburg to put down the insurrection, which they do—brutally. Fifteen-year-old Claire, the beloved daughter of a black father and Irish mother, finds herself torn between the two warring sides. Faced with the breakdown of the city—the home—she has loved, Claire must discover the strength and resilience to address the new world in which she finds herself, and to begin the hard journey of remaking herself and her identity. Addressing such issues as race, bigotry, and class head-on, Walter Dean Myers has written another stirring and exciting novel that will shake up assumptions, and lift the spirit.

Riots in Literature addresses representations of crowd disorder as manifestations of popular politics, including colonial and postcolonial contexts. The terms used to describe disorder are themselves, of course, contested. Words like “mob,” “demonstration” and “protest,” not to mention “riot’ itself, denote a particular perspective based on an elitist taxonomy for dealing with social and cultural phenomena in society. Of primary concern is the way in which the text describes and designates crowd behaviour using the language of denigration, metaphors of the primitive and animalistic, brutal images, and silences, and where the mediation of the event is expressed in terms of the binary order/disorder. The contributors to this volume are interested in the analysis of the interaction of official political culture and crowd politics as represented in literature and orature, and how such representations contribute to the discourses of authority and subversion of their period. The essays are wide-ranging and explore the phenomenon of riots in literature through studies of popular risings in Shakespeare; Carlyle and the French Revolution; the Rebecca Riots in Wales; popular ballads and the Indian War of Independence in 1857, post-partition riots in India and Pakistan in the 1960s, township violence in South African fiction post-1948, the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles in detective fiction and avant garde disturbances in France of the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the book, these essays focus attention on the tension-filled relationship that is perceived between literature and discourses of power and popular resistance.

Award winning poet Joshua Clover theorises the riot as the form of the coming insurrection Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an “age of riots” as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar Joshua Clover offers a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was supplanted by the strike in the early nineteenth century. It returned to prominence in the 1970s, profoundly changed along with the coordinates of race and class. From early wage demands to recent social justice campaigns pursued through occupations and blockades, Clover connects these protests to the upheavals of a sclerotic economy in a state of moral collapse. Historical events such as the global economic crisis of 1973 and the decline of organized labor, viewed from the perspective of vast social transformations, are the proper context for understanding these eruptions of discontent. As social unrest against an unsustainable order continues to grow, this valuable history will help guide future antagonists in their struggles toward a revolutionary horizon.

Literary Nonfiction. Canadian History. BC Books in BC Schools pick. Reading the Riot Act is a phrase that has entered the popular lexicon, meaning the action taken by authority figures when they perceive that their charges are getting out of hand. The act itself is a seldom-used piece of legislation actually designed to prevent a riot from taking place. Supposedly, the mere mention of the Riot Act is enough to bring hardened miscreants bent on destruction to their collective senses. But if a riot has started, it's already too late to read the Riot Act. Every city has its distinct history of rioting--the Rocket Richard riots in Montreal, the Christie Pits riot in Toronto, the Winnipeg and Regina riots, even the Shakespeare riots in New York where rival factions rioted over which actor was the better interpreter of Shakespeare's work. READING THE RIOT ACT is a popular history that rereads and rewrites the legacy of riots in Vancouver. The project was conceived following the city's Stanley Cup riots in 1994, when official reports and media coverage differed significantly from eyewitness accounts. Later, media reports on the APEC riots downplayed and obscured certain facets of the conflict. Seeking out sources beyond the official reports, Barnholden has compiled a record of participants and observers, allowing the vanquished to have their say. Barnholden shuns the simplistic bad apple explanation, and explores the deeper economic causes and effects of riots. This book contains some stirring narrative of conflicts that have defined the history of Vancouver.--Prairie Fire ...demonstrates that even unexpected, apparently spontaneous flarings are about something deeper, from unemployment pressures, freedom of speech and inhumane conditions in prisons all the way to racism and the disappointing performances by our professional sports teams and Axl Rose, the frontman of the notorious GM Place no-show rock band Guns'n' Roses... This tapestry is woven against a backdrop of class war, demonstrating that while the rowdies ground beneath the heels of the police are always the working poor, it's suspiciously rare that they take their grievances to the neighbourhoods of their bosses... Challenging the popular conception that riots are just the result of 'a few bad apples' sowing discontent, Barnholden advances the competing thesis that the entire orchard may in fact be infested with parasites.--The Columbia Journal Until Reading the Riot Act was published, the book containing the most detailed information on riots in Vancouver was the local police department's autobiography, A Century of Service (1986), which Michael Barnholden makes reference to in his own text. The difference with Reading the Riot Act is its focus and perspective, which presents riots as battles in the class war, as it aims to cut through the media distortion around such events and dispense with the 'bad apple' theory of their cause. It makes for a more engaging, accessible and believable read than the police department's book.--Max Sartin, The RAIN TAXI Review of Books

This study explores numerous depictions of crowd violence, literal and figurative, found in American Modernist fiction, and shows the ways crowd violence is used as a literary trope to examine issues of racial, gender, national, and class identity during this period. Modernist writers consistently employ scenes and images of crowd violence to show the ways such violence is used to define and enforce individual identity in American culture. James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck, for example, depict numerous individuals as victims of crowd violence and other crowd pressures, typically because they have transgressed against normative social standards. Especially important is the way that racially motivated lynching, and the representation of such lynchings in African American literature and culture, becomes a noteworthy focus of canonical Modernist fiction composed by white authors.