Best of
Class
2007
Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader
Michael Parenti - 2007
Parenti’s work has enlightened and enlivened readers for many years, covering a wide range of subjects.Here is a rich selection of his most lucid and penetrating writings on real history, political life, empire, wealth, class power, technology, culture, ideology, media, environment, sex, and ethnicity. Also included are a few choice selections drawn from his own life experiences and political awakening. Parenti goes where few political observers dare to tread. Time and again he takes the extra step beyond the parameters of permissible opinion, and time and again he succeeds in carrying the reader with him.The selections herein, that are reprinted from previously published works, have been revised and updated. Other offerings appear here for the very first time."Radical in the true sense of the word, [Parenti] digs at the roots which...sustain our public consciousness."—Los Angeles Times Book Review"Prominent leftist public intellectual Parenti has built a reputation for himself as a trenchant, yet engaging and accessible, critic of capitalism, imperialism, and other forms of exploitation and violence and this diverse collection of his writings will not disappoint his fans (nor, probably, convince his detractors). Over the course of the collection he takes on the corporate media, intellectual repression in academia, the stolen presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 (not that he's a fan of Al Gore or John Kerry), right wing judicial activism, free-market orthodoxies and mythologies, racism, sexism, homophobia, postmodern attacks on Marxism, the distortions of dominant history, ill-informed demonizations of the Venezuelan political process, his own life, and many other topics."—Book News, Inc."A prolific author, a charismatic speaker, and a regular guest on radio and television talk shows, Parenti communicates his message in an accessible, provocative, and historically informed style that is unrivaled among fellow progressive activists and thinkers."—Aurora OnlineMichael Parenti is a critically acclaimed author and an extraordinary public speaker. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University and has taught at a number of colleges and universities, in the United States and abroad. He is the author of twenty books, including Superpariotism , The Assassination of Julius Caesar, Inventing Reality, and Democracy for the Few.
The Non-Designer's Design & Type Books, Deluxe Edition
Robin P. Williams - 2007
Here in one volume, Robin Williams has joined together a new edition of her classic The Non-Designer's Design Book—in glorious full color for the first time—and her best-selling The Non-Designer's Type Book. Robin uses her straightforward and lighthearted style to define the principles that govern good design and type as well as the logic behind those principles. Using numerous examples, you'll learn what looks best and why on your way to designing beautiful and effective projects. Whether you are a Mac user or a Windows user, a type novice or an experienced graphic designer, you will find inspiration and direction for the design quandaries and conundrums you are sure to encounter!These essential guides to design and type will teach you about:• The four principles of design that underlie every design project• Categories of type• Working with color• How to combine typefaces for maximum effect• Readability and legibility• The proper typographic treatment of punctuation• Letter spacing, line spacing, and paragraph spacing• Special characters and accent marks
I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time
Kristin Prevallet - 2007
Essays. Much admired by her contemporaries for her experiments in poetic form, Kristin Prevallet now turns those gifts to the most vulnerable moments of her own life, and in doing so, has produced a testament that is both disconsolate and powerful. Meditating on her father's unexplained suicide, Prevallet alternates between the clinical language of the crime report and the lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, she offers a defiant refusal of east consolations or redemptions. Driven by the need to extend beyond the personal and out the toward the intolerable present, Prevallet brings herself and her readers to the chilling but transcendent place where, as she promises, darkness has its own resolutions. According to Fanny Howe, here elegy and essay converge and there is left a beautiful sense of the poetic itself as all that is left to comfort a person facing a catastrophic loss. This is the quietest and most intimate book by one of our best poets--Forest Gander.
Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System
Douglas S. Massey - 2007
While other developed countries face similar challenges from globalization and technological change, none rivals America’s singularly poor record for equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of recent economic shifts. In Categorically Unequal, Douglas Massey weaves together history, political economy, and even neuropsychology to provide a comprehensive explanation of how America’s culture and political system perpetuates inequalities between different segments of the population.Categorically Unequal is striking both for its theoretical originality and for the breadth of topics it covers. Massey argues that social inequalities arise from the universal human tendency to place others into social categories. In America, ethnic minorities, women, and the poor have consistently been the targets of stereotyping, and as a result, they have been exploited and discriminated against throughout the nation’s history. African-Americans continue to face discrimination in markets for jobs, housing, and credit. Meanwhile, the militarization of the US-Mexican border has discouraged Mexican migrants from leaving the United States, creating a pool of exploitable workers who lack the legal rights of citizens. Massey also shows that women’s advances in the labor market have been concentrated among the affluent and well-educated, while low-skilled female workers have been relegated to occupations that offer few chances for earnings mobility. At the same time, as the wages of low-income men have fallen, more working-class women are remaining unmarried and raising children on their own. Even as minorities and women continue to face these obstacles, the progressive legacy of the New Deal has come under frontal assault. The government has passed anti-union legislation, made taxes more regressive, allowed the real value of the federal minimum wage to decline, and drastically cut social welfare spending. As a result, the income gap between the richest and poorest has dramatically widened since 1980. Massey attributes these anti-poor policies in part to the increasing segregation of neighborhoods by income, which has insulated the affluent from the social consequences of poverty, and to the disenfranchisement of the poor, as the population of immigrants, prisoners, and ex-felons swells.America’s unrivaled disparities are not simply the inevitable result of globalization and technological change. As Massey shows, privileged groups have systematically exploited and excluded many of their fellow Americans. By delving into the root causes of inequality in America, Categorically Unequal provides a compelling argument for the creation of a more equitable society.
A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Centennial Series
Material Feminisms
Stacy AlaimoCatriona Mortimer-Sandilands - 2007
In lively and timely essays, an international group of feminist thinkers challenges the assumptions and norms that have previously defined studies about the body. These wide-ranging essays grapple with topics such as the material reality of race, the significance of sexual difference, the impact of disability experience, and the complex interaction between nature and culture in traumatic events such as Hurricane Katrina. By insisting on the importance of materiality, this volume breaks new ground in philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, science studies, and other fields where the body and nature collide.
Home Girls Make Some Noise!: Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology
Gwendolyn D. PoughMaya Freelon - 2007
The anthology explores Hip-Hop as a worldview, as an epistemology grounded in the experiences of communities of color under advanced capitalism, as a cultural site for rearticulating identity and sexual politics. With critical essays, cultural critiques, interviews, personal narratives, fiction, poetry, and artwork. The contributors are varied, from women working within the Hip-Hop sphere, Hip-Hop feminists and activists "on the ground," as well as scholars, writers, and journalists.
Ethical Theory: An Anthology
Russ Shafer-Landau - 2007
Ethical Theory: An Anthology is an authoritative collection of key essays by top scholars in the field, addressing core issues including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, as well as traditionally underrepresented topics such as moral knowledge and moral responsibility.Brings together seventy-six classic and contemporary pieces by renowned philosophers, from classic writing by Hume and Kant to contemporary writing by Derek Parfit, Susan Wolf, and Judith Jarvis ThomsonGuides students through key areas in the field, among them consequentialism, deontology, contractarianism, and virtue ethicsIncludes coverage of metaethics, normative ethics, and practical ethicsReaches beyond traditional texts by also including important, but usually underrepresented, topics such as moral knowledge, moral standing, moral responsibility, and ethical particularismRaises questions about the status and rational authority of morality
Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City
Mary Pattillo - 2007
But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems that had plagued the area for decades. Black on the Block tells the remarkable story of how these residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and self-consciously black neighborhood that continues to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy consensus and political unity, and here Pattillo teases out the divergent class interests that have come to define black communities like North Kenwood–Oakland. She explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification. Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors. “A century from now, when today's sociologists and journalists are dust and their books are too, those who want to understand what the hell happened to Chicago will be finding the answer in this one.”—Chicago Reader “To see how diversity creates strange and sometimes awkward bedfellows . . . turn to Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block.”—Boston Globe
Dance Lest We All Fall Down
Margaret Willson - 2007
She, a white American anthropologist, joins forces with an African-Brazilian shantytown activist to change the violence and despair they see around them. Their pledge to the residents to create a top-quality educational center for girls becomes a turbulent journey that takes us from the shantytowns of Northeastern Brazil to urban Seattle to high-society London. With the author, we experience a world of drug dealers, street urchins, and capoeiristas, English socialites, power-hungry "do-gooders," and wise teachers. This is a true story of insight and inspiration, courage, passion, and intrigue.
The Gay Gospel?: How Pro-Gay Advocates Misread the Bible
Joe Dallas - 2007
In a biblical manner, Dallas examines believers' personal responses and the need for bold love and commitment as theybecome familiar with the movement's background and beliefsstudy a clear, scriptural response to each beliefextend Christ's love to those living the homosexual lifestyleThis resource is an important one for those who have been unsure how to respond to the growing acceptance of homosexuality in the evangelical community. It offers the balance between conviction and compassion and a practical guide to communicating with those who have embraced the pro-gay Christian movement.
There Is an Anger that Moves
Kei Miller - 2007
Using language full of unique beauty and charisma, Miller writes everything from love poems to biblical chronicles, exploring themes such as conflicting identity, home and family, and the spirit of his Jamaican ancestors.
War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication
James Aulich - 2007
Beginning with the onset of the Great War in 1914, this title charts the poster's evolution as a tool of protest and counter-culture.
Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms, Grades 5-12
Jeff Zwiers - 2007
Language is the lifeblood of learning in all content areas, and it plays a major role in academic achievement. Building Academic Language explains the functions and features of academic language that every teacher (language arts, history, math, & science teachers, etc.) should know for supporting academic reading, writing, and discussion. The book includes research-based instructional and assessment activities that content teachers can use to build students' abilities to understand and describe the many abstract concepts, higher-order thinking skills, and complex relationships in a discipline. The book emphasizes an approach that builds from students' existing ways of learning and communicating, scaffolding them to think and talk as content area experts think and talk about math, science, history, and language arts. Major topics and themes include:What is academic language and how does it differ by content area? How can language-building activities (discussions, small groups, etc.) support content understanding? How can we build language abilities for content reading and writing - and vice versa? How can we build on students' diverse ways of understanding, learning, and communicating about the world? How can we more effectively model and scaffold academic language in our teaching and assessment?
Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America
Micki McElya - 2007
She was everyone's mammy, the faithful slave who was content to cook and care for whites, no matter how grueling the labor, because she loved them. This far-reaching image of the nurturing black mother exercises a tenacious hold on the American imagination.Micki McElya examines why we cling to mammy. She argues that the figure of the loyal slave has played a powerful role in modern American politics and culture. Loving, hating, pitying, or pining for mammy became a way for Americans to make sense of shifting economic, social, and racial realities. Assertions of black people's contentment with servitude alleviated white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. African American resistance to this notion was varied but often placed new constraints on black women.McElya's stories of faithful slaves expose the power and reach of the myth, not only in popular advertising, films, and literature about the South, but also in national monument proposals, child custody cases, white women's minstrelsy, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement. The color line and the vision of interracial motherly affection that helped maintain it have persisted into the twenty-first century. If we are to reckon with the continuing legacy of slavery in the United States, McElya argues, we must confront the depths of our desire for mammy and recognize its full racial implications.
Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life
Margaret M. Lock - 2007
They have begun to perceive embodiment as dynamic rather than static, as experiences that vary over time and across the world as they are shaped by discourses, institutions, practices, technologies, and ideologies. What has emerged is a multiplicity of bodies, inviting a great many disciplinary points of view and modes of interpretation. The forty-seven readings presented in this volume range from classic works of social theory, history, and ethnography to more recent investigations into historical and contemporary modes of embodiment.Beyond the Body Proper includes nine sections conceptually organized around themes such as everyday life, sex and gender, and science. Each section is preceded by interpretive commentary by the volume’s editors. Within the collection are articles and book excerpts focused on bodies using tools and participating in rituals, on bodies walking and eating, and on the female circumcision controversy, as well as pieces on medical classifications, spirit possession, the commodification of body parts, in vitro fertilization, and an artist/anatomist’s “plastination” of cadavers for display. Materialist, phenomenological, and feminist perspectives on embodiment appear along with writings on interpretations of pain and the changing meanings of sexual intercourse. Essays on these topics and many others challenge Eurocentric assumptions about the body as they speak to each other and to the most influential contemporary trends in the human sciences.With selections by: Henry Abelove, Walter Benjamin, Janice Boddy, John Boswell, Judith Butler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Stuart Cosgrove, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, Alice Domurat Dreger, Barbara Duden, Friedrich Engels, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Judith Farquhar, Marcel Granet, Felix Guattari, Ian Hacking, Robert Hertz, Patricia Leyland Kaufert, Arthur Kleinman, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Jean Langford, Bruno Latour, Margaret Lock, Emily Martin, Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nancy K. Miller, Lisa Jean Moore, John D. O’Neil, Aihwa Ong, Mariella Pandolfi, Susan Pedersen, Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Rayna Rapp, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Kristofer Schipper, Matthew Schmidt, Peter Stallybrass, Michael Taussig, Charis Thompson, E.P. Thompson, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Victor Turner, Terence Turner, Jose van Dijck, Keith Wailoo, Brad Weiss, Allon White
An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt
Kathryn A. Bard - 2007
Provides an unprecedented introduction to the archaeology of ancient Egypt and its culture, monuments, and civilizationBeautifully illustrated with over 120 color and black and white illustrations, including artifacts, maps, and site and building plansIncludes special sections on such topics of perennial interest as building the pyramids at Giza, mummification, and deciphering hieroglyphsOrganized into 11 chapters, covering: the history of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology; prehistoric and pharaonic chronology and the ancient Egyptian language; geography, resources, and environment; and seven chapters organized chronologically and devoted to specific archaeological sites and evidenceIncludes discussion of new excavations in Egypt, connecting recent work with the results of projects spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Ludlow
David Mason - 2007
The novel follows two primary characters: the fictional Luisa Mole, orphaned in the opening chapter, who must choose between life among the miners and the middle-class family who adopt her; and the historical figure Louis Tikas, a Cretan immigrant who, in the course of the book, becomes a labor organizer and a Ludlow martyr. But several minor characters Too Tall MacIntosh, Lefty Calabrini, George Reed and his family, and even John D. Rockefeller, Jr. also play significant roles in the book, which never succumbs to simplistic political pieties, but is engaged with identity and being.
American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945
Gavin Jones - 2007
Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression.Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference.Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism
Chad Bryant - 2007
Six months later, Hitler's troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia - the first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as good Czechs.By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the post-war expulsion of Czechoslovakia's three million Germans and for the Communists' rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their post-war successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.
Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion
Julio Cammarota - 2007
Revolutionizing Education makes an extraordinarily unique contribution to the literature on adolescents by offering a broad framework for understanding this research methodology. With an informative combination of theory and practice, this edited collection brings together student writings alongside those of major scholars in the field. While remaining sensitive to the methodological challenges of qualitative inquiry, Revolutionizing Education is the first definitive statement of YPAR as it relates to sites of education.
Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism
Kalyan Sanyal - 2007
Analyzing critical questions from a third world perspective such as: Will the integration into the global capitalist network bring to the third world new economic opportunities? Will this capitalist network make the third world countries an easy prey for predatory multinational corporations? The end result is a discourse, drawing on Marx and Foucault, which envisages the post-colonial capitalist formation, albeit in an entirely different light, in the era of globalization.
Media Arabic: A Coursebook for Reading Arabic News
Alaa Elgibali - 2007
Media Arabic introduces the language of the newspapers, magazines, and internet news sites to intermediate and advanced level students of Modern Standard Arabic. Using this textbook, students will be able to master core vocabulary and structures typical of front-page news, recognize various modes of coverage, distinguish fact from opinion, detect bias, and read critically in Arabic. Drawing on their long experience as Arabic instructors, Alaa Elgibali and Nevenka Korica have organized the book into six chapters, each covering a dominant news topic: Talks and Conferences, Demonstrations and Protests, Conflicts and Terrorism, Elections, Rule of Law, and Business. In addition, the book offers three self-assessment units and a glossary organized by theme. The book enables students to read extended texts with greater accuracy and speed by focusing on the relationships among meaning, language form, and markers of cohesive discourse. The activities include pre-reading discussions as well as extensive practice on vocabulary in context, organizing information, skimming, scanning, critical reading, and analyzing content.
Writings of Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg - 2007
Contains "Reform or Revolution?", concerning the reformist program of parliamentary socialism; "The Socialist Crisis in France", concerning the entry of the Socialist Party into the French Government; and other essays.
My Name Is Child of God... Not "Those People": A First Person Look at Poverty
Julia K. Dinsmore - 2007
Not Those People. The story of her growing up in a large Irish Catholic working-class family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, draws together the experiences of living in poverty, the role of the church and music in her life, and the many remarkable people who populated her life and the lives of her family. The author describes economic hardship and social challenges as being as "regular as the turning seasons in my coming up years," and refers to her life in poverty as the "soil of my art." Through her stories and reflections, Julia Dinsmore puts a face on poverty and challenges readers to answer God's call to respond to poverty and its effects.
All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900
Martha S. Jones - 2007
All Bound Up Together explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. Martha Jones reveals how, through the nineteenth century, the woman question was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights.Unlike white women activists, who often created their own institutions separate from men, black women, Jones explains, often organized within already existing institutions--churches, political organizations, mutual aid societies, and schools. Covering three generations of black women activists, Jones demonstrates that their approach was not unanimous or monolithic but changed over time and took a variety of forms, from a woman's right to control her body to her right to vote. Through a far-ranging look at politics, church, and social life, Jones demonstrates how women have helped shape the course of black public culture.
Ballad of Jamie Allan
Tom Pickard - 2007
THE BALLAD OF JAMIE ALLAN recounts the true adventures of an eighteenth-century gypsy musician who lived on the English-Scottish Borders and died in Durham jail, serving a life sentence for stealing a horse. Though once patronized by dukes and earls, Allan lost their support as his wayward behavior began to exceed their own. Drawing on newspaper accounts and court depositions, Pickard brings the ballad tradition of stark reportage to life with his own genius for the form. Through the words of his cohorts and contemporaries, Allan emerges as a spirit of the Borders, that wild and historically lawless region where rivers and fells set the stage for his captures and escapes.
Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet
Lisa Nakamura - 2007
At the same time many scholars lauded the widespread use of text-driven interfaces as a solution to the problem of racial intolerance. Today’s online world is witnessing text-driven interfaces such as e-mail and instant messaging giving way to far more visually intensive and commercially driven media forms that not only reveal but showcase people’s racial, ethnic, and gender identity.Lisa Nakamura, a leading scholar in the examination of race in digital media, uses case studies of popular yet rarely examined uses of the Internet such as pregnancy Web sites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures.While popular media such as Hollywood cinema continue to depict nonwhite nonmales as passive audiences or consumers of digital media rather than as producers, Nakamura argues the contrary—with examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca, and Minority Report; and online joke sites—that users of color and women use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics.Lisa Nakamura is associate professor of speech communication and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and coeditor, with Beth Kolko and Gilbert Rodman, of Race in Cyberspace.
Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America
David M.P. Freund - 2007
P. Freund argues that previous attempts to answer this question have overlooked a change in the racial thinking of whites and the role of suburban politics in effecting this change. In Colored Property, he shows how federal intervention spurred a dramatic shift in the language and logic of residential exclusion—away from invocations of a mythical racial hierarchy and toward talk of markets, property, and citizenship. Freund begins his exploration by tracing the emergence of a powerful public-private alliance that facilitated postwar suburban growth across the nation with federal programs that significantly favored whites. Then, showing how this national story played out in metropolitan Detroit, he visits zoning board and city council meetings, details the efforts of neighborhood “property improvement” associations, and reconstructs battles over race and housing to demonstrate how whites learned to view discrimination not as an act of racism but as a legitimate response to the needs of the market. Illuminating government’s powerful yet still-hidden role in the segregation of U.S. cities, Colored Property presents a dramatic new vision of metropolitan growth, segregation, and white identity in modern America.
The Battle For Welfare Rights: Politics And Poverty In Modern America
Felicia Kornbluh - 2007
It tells the fascinating story of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest membership organization of low-income people in U.S. history. Setting that story in the context of its turbulent times, the 1960s and early 1970s, historian Felicia Kornbluh shows how closely tied that story was to changes in mainstream politics, both nationally and locally in New York City.The Battle for Welfare Rights offers new insight into women's activism, poverty policy, civil rights, urban politics, law, consumerism, social work, and the rise of modern conservatism. It tells, for the first time, the complete story of a movement that profoundly affected the meaning of citizenship and the social contract in the United States.
Stitching Identitites in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka
Sandya Hewamanne - 2007
Less interested in the difficult living conditions and work routines of assembly line workers in Sri Lanka than in their smiles, winks and songs, the author weaves theories of identity, globalisation and cultural politics into her account of their efforts to negotiate ever shifting roles of gender, class and sexuality.
Nomads under the Westway: Irish Travellers, Gypsies and Other Traders in West London
Christopher Griffin - 2007
This scholarly yet personal view of the lives of Gypsies and other nomadic groups in West London also explores the broader contexts of immigration, race relations, and the "wheeler-dealer" culture of metropolitan areas.
A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women Since 1500
Rebecca Jennings - 2007
Covering landmark moments and well-known personalities (such as Radclyffe Hall and the publication and banning of her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness), but also examining the lives and experiences of ordinary women, it brings both variety and nuance to their shared history. In doing so, it also explores cultural representations of, and changing attitudes to, female same-sex desire in Britain.The narrative is arranged chronologically and begins with the accounts of a number of women in the 18th century who passed themselves off as men. The C18th & C19th saw 'Romantic Friendships' between women and, later, the emergence of a science of sexuality, and the concept of the female 'sexual invert''. At the same time, 'New Women' were pursuing independent careers, a self-confidence reflected in the publication of a number of novels explicitly about lesbian experience. The 20s and 30s were characterised by parliamentary debates on lesbianism, court cases and scandals, though, with two world wars, lesbian experiences were already changing, and a newly vibrant lesbian 'scene', centred on bars and night-clubs, was emerging, supported by a growing number of lesbian-oriented magazines and societies. The contemporary period has been marked by political movements and campaigns, in which lesbians have been active, and increasingly vocal debates surrounding the 'sex wars'.
Something about the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry [With CD]
Al Young - 2007
Something About the Blues uses the blues as a theme throughout 100 new and previously-published poems. Selections evoke the cold, hard city, love gone wrong and blues music itself, with tributes to Ma Rainey, Lena Horne and other notable performers. Something About the Blues includes an audio CD with Al Young's dynamic, soulful readings of more than 20 of the poems from the book, plus Langston Hughes? reading of his classic ?The Weary Blues.? Many of Young's performances feature a live blues band.