What kind of a world does a city make?
The skyline of Houston, Texas
What does a city’s literature tell us about the place, its history, its culture, or what is imagined as possible?
Researchers at Rice University — including undergraduates, graduate students, and professors — present work on this website that is generated in classrooms and faculty seminars. We aim to expand understandings of “literature” beyond the familiar idea of readers curled up with a book, in private. Yes, literature is this relation of a reader to a text, literature is an “inside” process of meaning making. But literature is also networks of relations, communities of people, literature is funding streams and city policies that create cultural geographies where people love some venues and believe that others are “not for them.” Behaviors, practices, policies, and material places all make up what is being called here “arts infrastructures.”
Aware of Houston as a notoriously under-researched major urban center (the 4th largest in the US), our work investigates big questions related to the now.
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The Houston Arts Alliance has dedicated itself to providing resources to artists during COVID-19. Most tangibly, they have started a relief fund that artists can apply to, but they also have various resource guides and an open phone line.
Learn more at their website.
Like all infrastructure, literary infrastructure is ultimately about the mediums for the provision of services. Understanding this infrastructure, therefore, helps us understand those who are provided with literary services and those who are not. In our comparative infrastructure project, for example, we see how organizations that celebrate the arts of traditionally marginalized populations are underfunded and our organizational write-ups give Houston-specific examples. In our white papers, writers discuss how gentrification is leading to literary infrastructure gaps, exacerbating inequality.
By using a template method, we have conducted independent research about the literary infrastructures in various peer cities to Houston. After this comparison, we find that Houston has strong literary organizations in general fields but lacks support for nonprofits targeting traditionally marginalized populations. Additionally, Houston could also benefit from increased integration in national literary infrastructures.
Both Ada Louise Huxtable and Philip Lopate were prominent New York architecture critics when they were befuddled by the 1980s incarnation of Houston. In their respective pieces Deep in the Heart of Nowhere and Houston Hide-and-Seek, both express excitement and apprehension at Houston being lauded the city of the future due to its difference from a traditional city. What makes Houston so odd to these commentators? For one, it lacks many of the established placemaking attributes of fancy cities and instead sprawls into some sort of nothingness. Whether Houston still exists in this nothing state forty years later and whether this nothingness is truly nothing or the result of normative judgement are just two of the questions that remain in this topic.
To learn more about place in Houston read our white papers.
As explored in John Marquez's Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South, black Houstonians and Latinos have joined together a variety of times to fight the white supremacy that challenges them both.
Spaces that society has designated as empty or worthless is reclaimed by Houstonians out of necessity or to create new understandings of space. This empty space can be queered, decolonized, used for art production, or simply resided in.
Repeated research has shown that exposure to literature at an early age has lasting affects on youth. Creating literary infrastructures that engage children is key to ensuring a city's next generation of readers and writers.
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