Best of
Class

2002

This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation


Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 2002
    Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating have brought together an ambitious new collection of over 80 original contributions offering a bold new vision of women-of-color consciousness for the 21st century.Through personal narratives, theoretical essays, textual collage, poetry, letters, artwork and fiction, this bridge we call home examines and extends the discussion of issues at the center of the first Bridge, such as classism, homophobia, racism, identity politics, and community building, while exploring the additional issues of third wave feminism, Native sovereignty, lesbian pregnancy and mothering, transgendered issues, Arab-American stereotyping, Jewish identities, spiritual activism, and surviving academe. Written by women and men---both 'of color' and 'white,' located inside and outside the United States---and motivated by a desire for social justice, this bridge we call home invites feminists of all colors and genders to develop new forms of transcultural dialogues, practices, and alliances.Building on and pushing forward the revolutionary call for transformation announced over two decades ago, this bridge we call home will challenge readers to rethink existing categories and invent new individual and collective identities.

Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights


Thom Hartmann - 2002
    He begins by uncovering an original eyewitness account of the Boston Tea Party and demonstrates that it was provoked not by "taxation without representation" as is commonly suggested but by the specific actions of the East India Company, which represented the commericial interests of the British elite.Hartmann then describes the history of the Fourteenth Amendment--created at the end of the Civil War to grant basic rights to freed slaves--and how it has been used by lawyers representing corporate interests to extend additional rights to businesses far more frequently than to freed slaves. Prior to 1886, corporations were referred to in U.S. law as "artificial persons." but in 1886, after a series of cases brought by lawyers representing the expanding railroad interests, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were "persons" and entitled to the same rights granted to people under the Bill of Rights. Since this ruling, America has lost the legal structures that allowed for people to control corporate behavior.As a result, the largest transnational corporations fill a role today that has historically been filled by kings. They control most of the world's wealth and exert power over the lives of most of the world's citizens. Their CEOs are unapproachable and live lives of nearly unimaginable wealth and luxury. They've become the rudder that steers the ship of much human experience, and they're steering it by their prime value--growth and profit and any expense--a value that has become destructive for life on Earth. This new feudalism was not what our Founders--Federalists and Democratic Republicans alike--envisioned for America.It's time for "we, the people" to take back our lives. Hartmann proposes specific legal remedies that could truly save the world from political, economic, and ecological disaster.

The Gentle Art of Blessing: A Simple Practice That Will Transform You and Your World


Pierre Pradervand - 2002
    In The Gentle Art of Blessing, Pradervand shows that the practice of blessing has the power to create more than just a renewed perspective. It unleashes tangible benefits throughout your entire life -- through your daily interactions, your life-long relationships, and in the way your approach your place in the world. Pradervand describes blessing as genuinely wishing the best for another person through seeing their individual worth and honoring them for it. By looking at several different perspectives -- providing spiritual inspiration from Hinduism, Taoism, the Koran, the Bible, and other important spiritual sources -- The Gentle Art of Blessing explores the potential in shifting one's attitude from confrontation and negativity to acceptance and enthusiasm. A powerfully simple way of perceiving and shaping our surroundings, blessings can reflect the unconditional love and acceptance that is necessary for world -- and inner -- peace.

Dialogues II


Gilles Deleuze - 2002
    He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In Dialogues II Deleuze examines his philosophical pluralism in a series of discussions with Claire Parnet. Conversational in tone, this is the most personable and accessible of all Deleuze's writings, in which he describes his own philosophical background, relationships and development, and some of the central themes of his work. This second edition includes a new essay, 'The Actual and the Virtual'. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam and Eliot Ross Albert.

Season of the Body: Essays


Brenda Miller - 2002
    A memoir in essay form, with the body as its central reference point.

When Daddy Prays


Nikki Grimes - 2002
    I hear them through the door and wall . . .when Daddy prays." In this collection of new poems by Nikki Grimes, a child learns about prayer from his father, whose prayers carry the family through each day -- no matter what the circumstances.Nikki Grimes believes that spirituality and prayer are signs of true strength and power. When Daddy Prays celebrates fathers who help their children see this. Nikki writes, "In my view there is no more powerful image than that of a strong man bowing before God."And illustrator Tim Ladwig has created remarkable images, rich with tenderness and touches of affectionate humor, to enhance and complete this exceptional book.

The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction


Jonathan Sterne - 2002
    It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class.A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.

The Heart of Dogen's Shobogenzo


Dōgen - 2002
    This book is centered around those essays that generations have regarded as containing the essence of Dogen's teaching. These translations, revised from those that first appeared in the 1970s, clarify and enrich the understanding of Dogen's religious thought and his basic ideas about Zen practice and doctrine. Dogen's uncommon intellectual gifts, combined with a profound religious attainment and an extraordinary ability to articulate it, make Sho�bo�genzo� unique even in the vast literature the Zen school has produced over the centuries, securing it a special place in the history of world religious literature.

An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art


Annie Finch - 2002
    The editors invited over fifty contemporary poets to select a poetic meter, stanza, or form, describe it, recount its history, and provide favorite examples. The essays represent a remarkably diverse range of literary styles and approaches, and show how the forms of contemporary English-language poetry derive from a wealth of different traditions.The forms range from hendecasyllabics to prose poetry, haiku to procedural poetry, sonnets to blues, rap to fractal verse. The range of poets included is equally impressive--from Amiri Baraka to John Frederick Nims, from Maxine Kumin to Marilyn Hacker, from Agha Shahid Ali to Pat Mora, from W. D. Snodgrass to Charles Bernstein. Achieving this level of eclecticism is a remarkable feat, especially given the strong opinions held by members of the various camps (e.g., the New Formalists, LANGUAGE poets, feminist and multicultural poets) that exist within today's poetry community. Poets who might never occupy the same room here occupy the same pages, perhaps for the first time. The net effect is a book that will surprise, inform, and delight a wide range of readers, whether as reference book, pleasure reading, or classroom text.Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is author of The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse, Eve, and Calendars. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.Kathrine Varnes teaches English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the author of the book of poems, The Paragon. Her poems and essays have appeared in many books and journals.

Reading the Bible from the Margins


Miguel A. de la Torre - 2002
    This introduction focuses on how issues involving race, class, and gender influence our understanding of the Bible.Describing how "standard" readings of the Bible are not always acceptable to people or groups on the "margins," this book afters valuable new insights into biblical texts today.

Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity


Julie Bettie - 2002
    Documenting the categories of subculture and style that high school students use to explain class and racial/ethnic differences among themselves, Bettie depicts the complex identity performances of contemporary girls. The title, Women Without Class, refers at once to young working-class women who have little cultural capital to enable class mobility, to the fact that class analysis and social theory has remained insufficiently transformed by feminist and ethnic studies, and to the fact that some feminist analysis has itself been complicit in the failure to theorize women as class subjects. Bettie's research and analysis make a case for analytical and political attention to class, but not at the expense of attention to other axes of identity and social formations.

Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision


Peter Irons - 2002
    Supreme Court sounded the death knell for school segregation with its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. So goes the conventional wisdom. Weaving together vivid portraits of lawyers and such judges as Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren, sketches of numerous black children throughout history whose parents joined lawsuits against Jim Crow schools, and gripping courtroom drama scenes, Irons shows how the erosion of the Brown decision--especially by the Court's rulings over the past three decades--has led to the "resegregation" of public education in America.

The Journal of C.J. Jackson: A Dust Bowl Migrant, Oklahoma to California, 1935


William Durbin - 2002
    Jackson, a young farmer whose family is forced to abandon their farm and seek a new life in California. April 10, 1935 The dust has been blowing bad for several years in a row now. And with crop failures coming back to back like they have, hundreds of families have lost their farms. A Monday never passes without Sheriff Jake Allison posting a notice of foreclosure at the Boise City courthouse. Times are so rough, that when they hold an auction to sell a place, the only people that show up are the banks and the insurance companies. Nobody else has a nickel. C.J. Jackson is a young man living through one of the most tragic times in the Dust Bowl of an America fraught with political, economic, and environmental problems. In this intense journal of life in the Oklahoma panhandle, C.J. tells it like it is-and it is bad.

The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660-1789


Timothy C.W. Blanning - 2002
    Blanning explores the cultural revolution which transformed eighteenth-century Europe. During this period the court culture exemplified by Louis XIV's Versailles was pushed from the center to the margins by the emergence of a new kind of space - the public sphere. The author shows how many of the world's most important cultural institutions developed in this space: the periodical, the newspaper, the novel, the lending library, the coffee house, the voluntary association, the journalist, and the critic.

Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor


Tara Herivel - 2002
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Action Strategies For Deepening Comprehension: Role Plays, Text-Structure Tableaux, Talking Statues, and Other Enactment Techniques That Engage Students with Text


Jeffrey D. Wilhelm - 2002
    This book has many motivating ideas like this that energize students before, during, and after reading. These strategies can be done individually, or through pair work or groups. Great for deepening reading strategies such as activating prior knowledge, inferring, visualizing, making connections, and more. For use with Grades 4 & Up.

Tessa's Tip-tapping Toes


Carolyn Crimi - 2002
    She boogies, bops shimmies, and hops. On her family's raids through Mrs. Timboni's kitchen, Tessa tangos across the teapot and sashays with saltshakers.Soon Mrs. Timboni brings home a cat--but Oscar is no ordinary cat. He doesn't like to nap or chase mice. Instead, he croons on Mrs. Timboni's counter, sings in her sinks, and trills on the dining room table. Is it any wonder that there's magic in the air when these two talents finally meet?

Cultural Resistance Reader


Stephen Duncombe - 2002
    George Hill in 1649 to Hacktivists staging virtual sit-ins in the 21st century, from the retributive fantasies of Robin Hoods to those of gangsta rappers, culture has long been used as a political weapon.This expansive and carefully crafted reader brings together many of the classic texts that help to define culture as a tool of resistance. With illuminating introductions throughout, it presents a range of theoretical and historical writings that have influenced contemporary debate, providing tools for the reader's own interventions. In these pages can be found the work of Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, Antonio Gramsci, C.L.R. James, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Bakhtin, Stuart Hall, Christopher Hill, Janice Radway, Eric Hobsbawm, Abbie Hoffman, Mahatma Gandhi, Dick Hebdige, Hakim Bey, Raymond Williams, Robin Kelley, Tom Frank and more than a dozen others, including a number of new activists/authors published here for the first time.

Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation


Winfried Menninghaus - 2002
    It acutely says no to a variety of phenomena that seemingly threaten the integrity of the self, if not its very existence. A counterpart to the feelings of appetite, desire, and love, it allows at the same time for an acting out of hidden impulses and libidinal drives.In Disgust, Winfried Menninghaus provides a comprehensive account of the significance of this forceful emotion in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, and theory of culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics addressed include the role of disgust as both a cognitive and moral organon in Kant and Nietzsche; the history of the imagination of the rotting corpse; the counter-cathexis of the disgusting in Romantic poetics and its modernist appeal ever since; the affinities of disgust and laughter and the analogies of vomiting and writing; the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis in a theory of disgusting pleasures and practices; the association of disgusting otherness with truth and the trans-symbolic real in Bataille, Sartre, and Kristeva; Kafka's self-representation as an Angel of disgusting smells and acts, concealed in a writerly stance of uncompromising purity; and recent debates on Abject Art.

Plain Style


Christopher Lasch - 2002
    Written for the benefit of the students at the University of Rochester, where Lasch taught from 1970 until his death in 1994, it quickly established itself in typescript as a local classic--a lively, witty, and historically minded alternative to the famous volume by William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style.Now available for the first time in published form, Plain Style is fundamentally a clear, readable, practical guide to the timeless principles of effective composition. At the same time, however, in ways that Stewart Weaver explains in his critical introduction, it is a distinctive and revealing addition to the published work of an eminent American thinker. No mere primer, Plain Style is an essay in cultural criticism, a political treatise even, by one for whom directness, clarity, and honesty of expression were essential to the living spirit of democracy.As the teachers and students who have for years benefited from its succinct wisdom will testify, Plain Style is an indispensable guide to writing and, indeed, Christopher Lasch's least-expected but perhaps most serviceable work.

Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks)


Brian Leiter - 2002
    His writings on moral philosophy are amongst the most widely read works both by philosophers and non-philosophers. Many of the ideas raised are both startling and disturbing and have been the source of great contention.On the Geneaology of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained and important contribution to moral philosophy, featuring many of the ideas fir which he is best known: the slave revolt in morals, will to power, geneaology, perspectivism. The Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Nietzsche on Morality introduces the reader to these and other important Nietzschean themes patiently and clearly. It is the first book to examine the work in such a way and will be a vital point of reference for any Nietzsche scholar.The Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Nietzsche on Morality will be vital for all studentnts coming to Nietzsche for the first time.

Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2000: Issues in Cultural Theory, No. 4


Maurice Berger - 2002
    By placing meticulously rendered objects in environments that carefully recreate the details of a museum setting, down to their wall colors, lighting, display cases and wall labels, Wilson incisively explores the question of how the museum consciously and unconsciously perpetuates racist beliefs and behavior. From Egyptian and classical Greek and Roman sculpture to African-American memorabilia, from the primativist painting of Picasso to the uniforms worn by often black museum guards, Wilson's provocative juxtapositions speak to a complex history of museological omission, manipulation and oversight. This book marks the artist's first mid-career survey.

Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London


Sean Shesgreen - 2002
    The London Cries is a body of graphic art produced between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that provided continually changing representations of the tradesmen and street hawkers that roamed London from its beginnings right up to the present. Analyzing prints, drawings, lithographs, and paintings done during this time period, Sean Shesgreen traces portraits of ordinary men and women who made their living on the streets of this bustling city; characters include milkmaids, cheapjacks, beggars, prostitutes, Merry Andrews, religious fanatics, and other colorful figures of their stripe.Images of the Outcast examines the Cries in relationship to the historical actualities of street trading, bourgeois attitudes toward the poor, and other forms of art. Through a lively discussion of the prints, drawings, sketches and oils of artists, from the anonymous craftsmen of the sixteenth century to Theodore Gericault and others, Shesgreen provides an important overview of this significant genre. Many of the riveting images the author discusses have never been published or analyzed before.

The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism


Rey Chow - 2002
    To radically reconceptualize the ways ethnicity functions in capitalist society, Chow proposes that it be analyzed in conjunction with Max Weber's famous theory about the protestant work ethic, especially in terms of the economic and psychological, as well as the religious-spiritual, ramifications of the word "protest." In her reading of the politics of ethnicity, she examines a diverse set of texts, works of Foucault, Weber, Derrida, Balibar, Bront�, Asian-American authors Hongo and Yau; films of Hitchcock, Duras, and Resnais; and the drawings of Hong Kong cartoonist Larry Feign.

Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000


Geoff Eley - 2002
    Only in the wake of World War II were democratic frameworks secured, and, even then, it was decades before democracy truly blanketed the continent.Neither given nor granted, democracy requires conflict, often violent confrontations, and challenges to the established political order. In Europe, Geoff Eley convincingly shows, democracy did not evolve organically out of a natural consensus, the achievement of prosperity, or the negative cement of the Cold War. Rather, it was painstakingly crafted, continually expanded, and doggedly defended by varying constellations of socialist, feminist, Communist, and other radical movements that originally blossomed in the later nineteenth century. Parties of the Left championed democracy in the revolutionary crisis after World War I, salvaged it against the threat of fascism, and renewed its growth after 1945. They organized civil societies rooted in egalitarian ideals which came to form the very fiber of Europe's current democratic traditions. The trajectories of European democracy and the history of the European Left are thus inextricably bound together.Geoff Eley has given us the first truly comprehensive history of the European Left--its successes and failures; its high watermarks and its low tides; its accomplishments, insufficiencies, and excesses; and, most importantly, its formative, lasting influence on the European political landscape. At a time when the Left's influence and legitimacy are frequently called into question, Forging Democracy passionately upholds its vital contribution.

Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform


Sharon Hays - 2002
    But what does this "success" look like to the welfare mothers and welfare caseworkers who experienced it? In Flat Broke With Children, Sharon Hays tells us the story of welfare reform from inside the welfare office and inside the lives of welfare mothers, describing the challenges that welfare recipients face in managing their work, their families, and the rules and regulations of welfare reform. Welfare reform, experienced on the ground, is not a rosy picture. The majority of adult welfare clients are mothers--over 90 percent--and the time limits imposed by welfare reform throw millions of these mostly unmarried, desperate women into the labor market, where they must accept low wages, the most menial work, the poorest hours, with no benefits, and little flexibility. Hays provides a vivid portrait of their lives--debunking many of the stereotypes we have of welfare recipients--but she also steps back to explore what welfare reform reveals about the meaning of work and family life in our society. In particular, she argues that an inherent contradiction lies at the heart of welfare policy, which emphasizes traditional family values even as its ethic of "personal responsibility" requires women to work and leave their children in childcare or at home alone all day long. Hays devoted three years to visiting welfare clients and two welfare offices, one in a medium-sized town in the Southeast, another in a large, metropolitan area in the West. Drawing on this hands-on research, Flat Broke With Children is the first book to explore the impact of welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives, and the first book to offer us a portrait of how welfare reform plays out in thousands of local welfare offices and in millions of homes across the nation.

Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa


Leo Zeilig - 2002
    Includes interviews with leading African socialists and activists.With contributions from Leo Zeilig, David Seddon, Anne Alexander, Dave Renton, Ahmad Hussein, Jussi Vinnikka, Femi Aborisade, Miles Larmer, Austin Muneku, Peter Dwyer, Trevor Ngwane, Munyaradzi Gwisai, Tafadzwa Choto, and Azwell Banda.Leo Zeilig coordinated the independent media center in Zimbabwe during the presidential elections of 2002 and, prior to this, worked as a lecturer at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. He then worked for three years as a lecturer and researcher at Brunel University, moving later to the Center of Sociological Research at the University of Johannesburg. He has written on the struggle for democratic change, social movements, and student activism in sub-Saharan Africa. Zeilig is co-author of The Congo: Plunder and Resistance 1880–2005.