The Creativity Stimulus (Page 2)

In Detroit the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, built around the inimitable 93-year-old woman who gives the center its name, has served as a home for some of the city's sharpest young organizers and artists, in its Detroit Summer program. One of them, the acclaimed rapper Invincible, has produced an eleven-minute video for her song "Locusts." It serves not just as a fine documentary of the center's work against gentrification and displacement or a profound meditation on the Motortown's past but also as a defiant middle finger in the face of pessimists like Florida, who all but wrote off Detroit in a recent Atlantic Monthly cover story.

Obama's green-jobs-for-youth proposal emerged first from Oakland's Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, where staffers tried to figure out how to make the environmental movement pay attention to the hip-hop youths coming into the center. On the other side of Oakland, the Eastside Arts Alliance helped revitalize the troubled city's International District by serving as a haven for socially conscious artists, organizers and intellectuals, bringing together leaders of the Black Arts Movement with those of the hip-hop movement.

Deeply rooted in the communities that made Obama's victory possible, these centers understand their work as transformational. Their communities are the most vulnerable to assaults on creativity, but they are also incubators of the most innovative ideas and movements of our time. This "creative communities" approach has created a vigorous and vital alternative to neoliberal and neoconservative versions of change.

Cross-generational dialogues have begun between older activists inspired by the examples of 1930s WPA arts projects and 1970s CETA cultural development programs and the post-NEA-meltdown do-it-yourselfers raised on the independent ethics and aesthetics of hip-hop and punk. Such discussions could help shape a framework for a cultural policy that focuses on the de-monopolization and reregulation of the culture industry, preserves national arts legacies, restores and upholds localism, aligns corporate interests with individual expression, promotes a radical spirit of diversity and unshackles creativity to rebuild communities and the national economy.

A creativity stimulus policy might follow the example of the distinguished tenure of Brazil's former culture minister, Gilberto Gil. The famed musician's art collided with the repressive dictatorship, and he was temporarily exiled in the late '60s. More recently, his desire to rerelease three of his most famous songs under a Creative Commons license--songs he said celebrated "the idea of the permanent transformation of everything that exists, of the uninterrupted remaking that produces culture, life and the world"--was thwarted by the publisher and owner of his songs, Warner/Chappell Music.

In 2003, in his first speech as culture minister, Gil stated that he wanted to forge "the opening of territory for creativity and new popular languages," ensure "the availability of space for adventure and daring" and secure "the space of memory and invention." Our urgent task is not just to repair the present but to recover the past and sow the future. When we are committed to advancing creativity, we will free these trailblazers to write the new narratives of America.

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