Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3.1
The Nine current blues clubs on Chicago's South Side.
I chronicle, second, that the future of these blues clubs and blocks is unclear. The
detailed ethnographic analysis uncovers a politically vibrant, unpredictable, and contra-
dictory club owner. This club owner currently embodies the paradoxical drives to com-
modify this club and to retain it as is (to resist commodification) whose resolution is at
the moment unclear. Her ambivalence about what to do is visible as she negotiates the
contradictory pull of economic realities and aspirations set again social-cultural dreams
and hopes. At issue, I suggest, is Nigel Thrift's (2004) notion of “competing cultural
capitals”; that is, there are two potentially rich sources for obtaining a kind of resource
(personalenrichment) inconflicting realms whichobscuresthepersonalcommitment to
one political path. A kind of double consciousness lodges within the same person with
each element never superseding the other and turbulently coexisting. This club owner,
at this point in an ambiguous state, has yet to decide which realm is most meaningful to
her.
Bothfindingsidentifysomethingimportant:agencymattersintheseclubsandisalive
and well in the subaltern environments of our cities. But it is not a simple, unfettered
agency. On Chicago's South Side, club owners as reflexive beings seize and “bear”
neoliberal-capitalist drives and sensibilities in their making of knowledge. They pro-
duce a personal habitus even as they temper these to generate a desired social milieu
and world. In this process, an “instantiated” three-step process (externalization, objecti-
