
Professor Redding's talk focussed on Chester Himes’ novel Run Man Run (1959) which tells the recurrent American tale of the police and their murder of black men. Witness to a shooting and pursued by a bent white cop, the protagonist seeks solace in black cultural tradition and community. This talk considered the evisceration of geographic sense and communal relations in the de-industrializing, racially-stratified postwar city, as characters are tasked to elude, to survive, rather than to know, master, and contemplate. Any quest to draw sustenance from community is rendered doubly difficult as urban social space becomes another source of persecution.