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E-book The Florida Room

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Penilaian

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There is every thing for you here. There is nothing for you here. As much can be said, and has been said, about a city like Miami in a state like Florida. The same might be said for this book. The logic of the case study requires evaluation and reward. (Why does this thing merit our attention? What sets it apart?) Its specialness separates it from the rest. If we can get out of that logic— what’s in this for me?— there might be something else entirely given, here, in that place and in this book, that isn’t bound up with taking or a summary “takeaway” from the local. What may be given is hospitality, a hardy encouragement to stay for a minute, even when it feels unfamiliar and disorienting, and especially when it resists easy import into your own story. Visits of any duration are most welcome to The Florida Room. To hold a reader’s attention in the humidity of residential particulars is the challenge of writing about place for those who have not been there. The experience of reading will likely require more rest stops. For the initiates, it is the how and the mode of assembly of place in this book that might delay and make dif fer ent the familiar and orienting. This may require other forms of re-freshment. Miami, Florida, is a place that will never be clearly or fully writ-ten about. It will not offer neat arguments about something or someplace else. This is the difficult beauty and won der of its laboratory. It is also what offers assurance: surely there is something for you here.The Florida Room is a method, a spatial imaginary, a vestibule, an addi-tion to the main house of writings about place. The chapters are temporary rooms for connectivity between seemingly disparate things and people, and thus make necessary movement between history, theory, biography, and— most of all— music. Music’s making and magic make pos si ble the geographic thought experiment and peopling of this book. For the ways it compresses place, time, communities, and their creative play, music allows The Florida Room to hear Miami as a place of and from many. We hear the Miccosukee as founding its rock-and- roll aesthetics. There are more than a few archipelagic island groupings sounded here: the Lucayan that built it and the Ca rib bean, notably Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica, that further con-toured it. The mainland is here, too, especially southern Georgia, brought by those who moved in reverse of the Great Migration to “the bottom,” as it is colloquially known. Miami’s attachment to northern capitals such as New York and Philly is most palpable in music in recorded and live forms. If any consistent critique can and should be made of Miami studies, it is that it is always incomplete. Who and when is here partly reflects my generational experience and those whom I grew up with. Its datedness is an argument. Its partialness is an argument too: this place needs hundreds of theorists and storytellers, old and young. What is offered here is not an encyclopedic mission to include everywhere and everyone but an invitation to revel in its small reveal of how many versions can be told about this place.1 In this book it may be even hard to detect how certain details tell Miami. They find subterranean com pany with others that have long resisted the appeal for Miami’s spectacular inclusion as a modern metropole. Their subtle narra-tive tread grounds fantasies by those interests, from real estate to the arts, that would deny the histories of those who made and make it a place to live and do beautiful things.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

780.97 VAZ t

Penerbit

London : Duke University Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

249 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781478022541

Klasifikasi

780.97

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

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Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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