Best of
Sociology

1997

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood


David Simon - 1997
    But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad.Through the eyes of one broken family--two drug-addicted adults and their smart, vulnerable 15-year-old son, DeAndre McCollough, Simon and Burns examine the sinister realities of inner cities across the country and unflinchingly assess why law enforcement policies, moral crusades, and the welfare system have accomplished so little. This extraordinary book is a crucial look at the price of the drug culture and the poignant scenes of hope, caring, and love that astonishingly rise in the midst of a place America has abandoned.

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty


Dorothy Roberts - 1997
    This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of  the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black women's--especially poor black women's--control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives.   It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new , and socially transformative, definition of  "liberty" and "equality" for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.The author is able to combine the most innovative and radical thinking on several fronts--racial theory, feminist, and legal--to produce a work that is at once history and political treatise.  By using the history of how American law--beginning with slavery--has treated the issue of the state's right  to interfere with the black woman's body, the author explosively and effectively makes the case for the legal redress to the racist implications of current policy with regards to 1) access to and coercive dispensing of birth control to poor black women 2) the criminalization of parenting by poor black women who have used drugs 3) the stigmatization and devaluation of poor black mothers under the new welfare provisions, and 4) the differential access to and disproportionate spending of social resources on the new reproductive technologies used by wealthy white couples to insure genetically related offspring.The legal redress of the racism inherent in current  American law and policy in these matters, the author argues in her last chapter, demands and should lead us to adopt a new standard and definition of the liberal theory of "liberty" and "equality" based on the need for, and the positive role of government in fostering, social as well as individual justice.

Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?


Beverly Daniel Tatum - 1997
    Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America.

The Racial Contract


Charles W. Mills - 1997
    Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence.The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the "separate but equal" system of segregation in the United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War. Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy's invisible white male bias, Mills's explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.

Our America


LeAlan Jones - 1997
    Wells housing project.Set against the stunning photographs of a talented young photographer from the projects, Our America evokes the unforgiving world of these two amazing young men, and their struggle to survive unrelenting tragedy. With a gift for clear-eyed journalism, they tell their own stories and others, including that of the death of Eric Morse, a five-year-old who was dropped to his death from the fourteenth floor of an Ida B. Wells apartment building by two other little boys. Sometimes funny, often painful, but always charged with their dream of Our America, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman reach out to grab your attention and break your heart.

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America


Saidiya Hartman - 1997
    Scenes of Subjection examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent. By looking at slave narratives, plantation diaries, popular theater, slave performance, freedmen's primers, and legal cases, Hartman investigates a wide variety of "scenes" ranging from the auction block and minstrel show to the staging of the self-possessed and rights-bearing individual of freedom.While attentive to the performance of power--the terrible spectacles of slaveholders' dominion and the innocent amusements designed to abase and pacify the enslaved--and the entanglements of pleasure and terror in these displays of mastery, Hartman also examines the possibilities for resistance, redress and transformation embodied in black performance and everyday practice.This important study contends that despite the legal abolition of slavery, emergent notions of individual will and responsibility revealed the tragic continuities between slavery and freedom. Bold and persuasively argued, Scenes of Subjection will engage readers in a broad range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.

The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy


Howard Zinn - 1997
    It is rare that a historian of the Left has managed to retain as much credibility while refusing to let his academic mantle change his beautiful writing style from being anything but direct, forthright, and accessible. Whether his subject is war, race, politics, economic justice, or history itself, each of his works serves as a reminder that to embrace one's subjectivity can mean embracing one's humanity, that heart and mind can speak with one voice. Here, in six sections, is the historian's own choice of his shorter essays on some of the most critical problems facing America throughout its history, and today.

The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy


Allan G. Johnson - 1997
    Explains what patriarchy is (and isn't), how it works, and what gets in the way of understanding and doing something about it.

Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth


Michel Foucault - 1997
    His work has affected the teaching of any number of disciplines and remains, twenty years after his death, critically important. This newly available edition is drawn from the complete collection of all of Foucault's courses, articles, and interviews, and brings his most important work to a new generation of readers.Ethics (edited by Paul Rabinow) contains the summaries of Foucault's renowned courses at the Collège de France, paired with key writings and interviews on friendship, sexuality, and the care of the self and others.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies


Jared Diamond - 1997
    one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal

Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice


Maurianne Adams - 1997
    This thoroughly revised second edition continues to provide teachers and facilitators with an accessible pedagogical approach to issues of oppression in classrooms. Building on the groundswell of interest in social justice education, the second edition offers coverage of current issues and controversies while preserving the hands-on format and inclusive content of the original. Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice presents a well-constructed foundation for engaging the complex and often daunting problems of discrimination and inequality in American society. This book includes a CD-ROM with extensive appendices for participant handouts and facilitator preparation.

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language


Robin I.M. Dunbar - 1997
    It's an evolutionary riddle that at long last makes sense in this intriguing book about what gossip has done for our talkative species. Psychologist Robin Dunbar looks at gossip as an instrument of social order and cohesion--much like the endless grooming with which our primate cousins tend to their social relationships.Apes and monkeys, humanity's closest kin, differ from other animals in the intensity of these relationships. All their grooming is not so much about hygiene as it is about cementing bonds, making friends, and influencing fellow primates. But for early humans, grooming as a way to social success posed a problem: given their large social groups of 150 or so, our earliest ancestors would have had to spend almost half their time grooming one another--an impossible burden. What Dunbar suggests--and his research, whether in the realm of primatology or in that of gossip, confirms--is that humans developed language to serve the same purpose, but far more efficiently. It seems there is nothing idle about chatter, which holds together a diverse, dynamic group--whether of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, or workmates.Anthropologists have long assumed that language developed in relationships among males during activities such as hunting. Dunbar's original and extremely interesting studies suggest otherwise: that language in fact evolved in response to our need to keep up to date with friends and family. We needed conversation to stay in touch, and we still need it in ways that will not be satisfied by teleconferencing, email, or any other communication technology. As Dunbar shows, the impersonal world of cyberspace will not fulfill our primordial need for face-to-face contact.From the nit-picking of chimpanzees to our chats at coffee break, from neuroscience to paleoanthropology, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language offers a provocative view of what makes us human, what holds us together, and what sets us apart.

Myth of the Welfare Queen


David Zucchino - 1997
    Odessa, supporting an extended family, exhibits almost superhuman strength and resolve. Cheri, a single mother, is a tireless advocate for the homeless. Zucchino beautifully portrays them as figures of profound courage and quiet perseverance, systematically shattering all misconceptions and stereotypes about these women and so many others like them.

Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler


Thomas Frank - 1997
    But today it is culture that stands at the heart of the American enterprise, mass entertainment the economic dynamo that brings the public into the consuming fold and consolidates the power of business over the American mind. For a decade The Baffler has been the invigorating voice of dissent against these developments, in the grand tradition of the muckrakers and The American Mercury. This collection gathers the best of its writing to explore such peculiar developments as the birth of the rebel hero as consumer in the pages of Wired and Details; the ever-accelerating race to market youth culture; the rise of new business gurus like Tom Peters and the fad for Hobbesian corporate "reengineering"; and the encroachment of advertising and commercial enterprise into every last nook and cranny of American life. With its liberating attitude and cant-free intelligence, this book is a powerful polemic against the designs of the culture business on us all.

Aphrodite's Daughters: Women's Sexual Stories and the Journey of the Soul


Jalaja Bonheim - 1997
    Based on the stories of ordinary American women, beautifully written, and irresistibly engaging, it shows the immensely important role sexuality plays in shaping our spiritual journey. Aphrodite’s Daughters OverviewReflecting upon love and lust, sex and marriage, wounding and healing, women on the spiritual path share their most intimate erotic secrets with honesty, courage, and passion in a series of true stories. Aphrodite’s Daughters sends a strong, persuasive message: It is time to honor sex as a sacred, soul-making force. Aphrodite’s Daughters OverviewWomen from all walks of life have found that this book transforms the way they feel about their sexual journeys. It is a must-read for every man and woman on the spiritual path.“A brave, beautiful, erotic, and wise book in a society where sexuality, like so much of our humanity, is cut off from the sacred. Jalaja Bonheim’s honesty marries body to ecstasy, heart to spirit.”—Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart“Aphrodite’s Daughters is a scorcher of a book, one that I’m tempted to start reading all over again after I’ve just finished it.”—Gnosis MagazineA Simon & Schuster eBook

The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses


Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí - 1997
    A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of OC woman, OCO central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age. A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed. "

The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship


Lauren Berlant - 1997
    Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus. As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy. Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.

The Idea of Decline in Western History


Arthur Herman - 1997
    Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to shows how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.

Pascalian Meditations


Pierre Bourdieu - 1997
    This critique of scholastic reason can be made in the name of Pascal because his thought expressed the features of human existence which the scholastic outlook ignores - his concern with symbolic power, his refusal of the ambition of foundation, his attention, devoid of all populist naivete, to ordinary people and his determination to seek the raison d'etre of the seemingly most illogical behaviour rather than condemning or mocking it.

Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification


Timur Kuran - 1997
    It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency.Private Truths, Public Lies uses its theoretical argument to illuminate an array of puzzling social phenomena. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India's caste system.

Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism


Uma Narayan - 1997
    Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding.Questioning the problematic roles assigned to Third World subjects within multiculturalism, Narayan examines ways in which the flow of information across national contexts affects our understanding of issues. Dislocating Cultures contributes a philosophical perspective on areas of ongoing interest such as nationalism, post-colonial studies, and the cultural politics of debates over tradition and "westernization" in Third World contexts.

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism


Eva Illouz - 1997
    Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage.Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance—from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses—is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all.Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.

The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology


Georges BatailleMeyer Barash - 1997
    At a pivotal moment of history when an enormous catastrophe was obviously inevitable, Bataille confronted the most intractable problems of human existence head-on. How to live an integrated existence in a ruthless, absurd and indifferent universe? How to oppose repressive social structures given the failure of the democracies, the political left, and with the rise of the Nazi ideology?The texts in this book comprise lectures given to the "College of Sociology" by Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, and a large cache of the internal papers of the secret society of Acéphale founded by Bataille in 1937.The College of Sociology was a semi-public reading and discussion group attended by the cream of Parisian intelligentsia in the ominous atmosphere of the oncoming war. Bataille and Caillois produced some of their greatest texts for these sessions. Acéphale was its "dark", occulted side, a genuine secret society that conducted torch-lit rituals in a forest at night intended to confront death itself. Until the remarkable discovery a few years ago of its internal papers — which include theoretical texts, meditations, minutes of meetings, rules and interdictions and even a membership list — almost nothing was known of its activities. This book reveals the history of one of the strangest associations in "literary", or any other history.In these texts the narrative of a desperate adventure unfolds, of a wholly unreasonable quest: "What we are starting is a war." Bataille risked all in this undertaking, and death was not absent from it; with a few fellow travellers he undertook what he later described as a "journey out of this world".

English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States


Rosina Lippi-Green - 1997
    Using examples drawn from a variety of contexts: the classroom, the court, the media and corporate culture, she exposes the way in which discrimination based on accent functions to support and perpetuate social structures and unequal power relations. English with an Accent: focuses on language variation linked to geography and social identity looks at how the media and the entertainment industry work to promote linguistic stereotyping examines how employers discriminate on the basis of accent reveals how the judicial system protects the status quo and reinforces language subordinationThis fascinating and highly readable book forces us to acknowledge the ways in which language is used to discriminate.

Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb


Bernard Lefkowitz - 1997
    Glen Ridge was the kind of peaceful, affluent suburb many Americans dream about. The rapists were its most popular high school athletes. And although rumors of the crime quickly spread through the town, weeks passed before anyone saw fit to report it to the police. What made these boys capable of brutalizing a girl that some of them had known since childhood? Why did so many of their elders deny the rape and rally around its perpetrators? To solve this riddle, the Edgar award-winning author Bernard Lefkowitz conducted years of research and more than two hundred interviews. The result is not just a wrenching story of crime and punishment, but a hauntingly nuanced portrait of America's jock culture and the hidden world of unrestrained adolescent sexuality.

Postmodernity and Its Discontents


Zygmunt Bauman - 1997
    Society has held to the concepts of beauty, purity, and order for centuries, and now a new worldview has emerged with the individual at its nucleus.Framed by discussions of such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Emannuel Levinas, Hans Jones and Richard Rorty, Postmodernity and Its Discontents explores this brave new era, tackling head-on such issues as the postmodernization of surveillance and social control; the often tenuous threads binding morality, ethics, and freedom together; contemporary artistic and aesthetic theory; and the complex associations between solidarity, difference and freedom.Arguing that you need most what you lack most, internationally renowned scholar Zygmunt Bauman asserts that freedom without security assures no greater happiness than security without freedom. In this thoughtful, nuanced volume, Bauman searches for a balance between the two, tipping the scales of the postmodern world decidedly in our favor.

Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America


Robin D.G. Kelley - 1997
    He undermines widespread misunderstandings of black culture and shows how they have contributed to the failure of social policy to save our cities.

Henry and the Great Society: A novel


H.L. Roush - 1997
    Man's longing for paradise.

The Goffman Reader


Erving Goffman - 1997
    Among the most inventive, unique and individualistic of thinkers in American sociology, his works first appeared in the early 1950's at a time when a more formal, traditional sociology dominated the scene. In this collection, Goffman's work is arranged into four categories: the production of self, the confined self, the nature of social life, and the framing of experience. Through this arrangement, readers will not only be presented with Goffman's thinking in chronological order, but also with a framework of analysis that clearly introduces the social theoretical ideas by which Goffman shaped the direction of sociological thought through the late twentieth century.

Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory


Katie Conboy - 1997
    Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on the female body as the site where representations of difference and identity are inscribed. Drawn from a broad range of disciplines, Writing on the Body explores the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body. The volume includes classic and contemporary essays on rape, pornography, eroticism, anorexia, body building, menstruation, and maternity, and challenges racial, class and sexual categories. Complemented by the editors' introduction, Writing on the Body is a comprehensive sourcebook on the major theoretical positions and critical trends surrounding the female body.

Formations of Class & Gender: Becoming Respectable


Beverley Skeggs - 1997
    Formations of Class & Gender demonstrates why class should be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity and power. Beverley Skeggs identifies the neglect of class, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society.The book questions how theoretical frameworks are generated for understanding how women live and produce themselves through social and cultural relations. It uses detailed ethnographic research to explain how `real′ women inhabit and occupy the social and cultural posit

The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy


Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen - 1997
    A book of history, theory and polemic, the authors show how, if we are to survive, economies must become needs-based, environmentally sustainable, co-operative and local. They explain how the current capitalist system is none of these things, is inherently unstable and is dependent on the exploitation of various marginalized groups, particularly women, and of the environment. They call instead for a new politics and economics based on subsistence and present examples of such a perspective in practice.

Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices


Stuart Hall - 1997
    Combining examples with activities and selected readings it offers a unique resource for teachers and students in cultural studies and related fields as an introduction to this complex and central theme.

The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909


Selim Deringil - 1997
    Deringil’s vivid narrative traces the Ottoman state’s pursuit of legitimization in public ceremonies, in the iconography of buildings, music, the honors system and the language of the chancery; in its proto-nationalist reformulation of Islamic legal practices; in its efforts to inculcate, through an expanded education system, the idea of an "Ottoman citizenry"; and in the efforts of the Ottoman elite to present a "civilized" image abroad.

Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995


Ranajit Guha - 1997
    Its most famous members - Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and others - were instrumental in establishing the discipline best known as postcolonial studies. A selection of the definitive and most influential work from the collective's eponymous journal, these essays chart the course of subaltern history from an early concentration on peasant revolts and popular insurgency to an engagement with the more complex processes of domination and subordination in a variety of the changing institutions and practices of evolving modernity.

New York City Tattoo: The Oral History of an Urban Art


Michael McCabe - 1997
    Tattooing at the time evoked the dangerous fringes of society, and for over a decade Michael McCabe assiduously gained the confidence of the few surviving practitioners of this vanished era. These highly-charged interviews provide a privileged look into a clannish world of honor, respect, and jealously guarded trade secrets. They reveal facets of New York social history and a volatile, misunderstood and secretive art form.

The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility


Angelo M. Codevilla - 1997
    Codevilla illustrates that as people shape their governments, they shape themselves. Drawing broadly from the depths of history, from the Roman republic to de Tocqueville's America, as well as from personal and scholarly observations of the world in the twentieth century, The Character of Nations reveals remarkable truths about the effects of government on a society's economic arrangements, moral order, sense of family life, and ability to defend itself.Codevilla argues that in present-day America, government has had a profound negative effect on societal norms. It has taught people to seek prosperity through connections with political power; it has fostered the atrophy of civic responsibility; it has waged a Kulturkampf against family and religion; and it has dug a dangerous chasm between those who serve in the military and those who send it in harm's way. Informative and provocative, The Character of Nations shows how the political decisions we make have higher stakes than simply who wins elections.

I Want to Take You Higher: The Psychedelic Era 1965-1969


James Henke - 1997
    The chief curator of the Rock and R oll Hall of Fame and Museum presents a tribute of the style and sound of the Summer of Love '

Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches


John W. Creswell - 1997
    Five actual journal articles are reproduced in the appendix as examples of the different research designs.

Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum


Terri Kapsalis - 1997
    The quintessential examination of women, gynecology is not simply the study of women’s bodies, but also serves to define and constitute them. Any critical analysis of gynecology is therefore, as Kapsalis affirms, an investigation of what it means to be female. In this respect she considers the public exposure of female "privates" in the performance of the pelvic exam. From J. Marion Sims’s surgical experiments on unanesthetized slave women in the mid-nineteenth century, to the use of cadavers and prostitutes to teach medical students gynecological techniques, Kapsalis focuses on the ways in which women and their bodies have been treated by the medical establishment. Removing gynecology from its private cover within clinic walls and medical textbook pages, she decodes the gynecological exam, seizing on its performative dimension. She considers traditional medical practices and the dynamics of "proper" patient performance; non-traditional practices such as cervical self-exam; and incarnations of the pelvic examination outside the bounds of medicine, including its appearance in David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers and Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece "Public Cervix Announcement." Confounding the boundaries that separate medicine, art, and pornography, revealing the potent cultural attitudes and anxieties about women, female bodies, and female sexuality that permeate the practice of gynecology, Public Privates concludes by locating a venue from which challenging, alternative performances may be staged.

The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice From the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters


Anna Julia Cooper - 1997
    "This collection is a major contribution to the reconstruction of gender balance in African-American history" --Manning Marable, Columbia University

Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism


Vamık D. Volkan - 1997
    Yet we are at a loss to find solutions to such struggles. In Bloodlines, Vamik Volkan, a world-renowned psychiatrist specializing in international relations, explores ethnic violence by examining history and diplomacy through a psychoanalytic lens.The result is a work that lays the foundation for understanding the differences between ethnic groups as well as the common ground they share. Timely, brilliant, and gripping, Bloodlines gives fascinating insights into how personal identity intertwines with nationality, and why hatred of others' becomes a part of our sense of self.

The Post-Development Reader


Majid Rahnema - 1997
    Little today remains of that enthusiasm. The question they now ask is: can anything be done to stop the process and regenerate the forces needed to bring about change more in accordance with their own aspirations? This Reader brings together an exceptionally gifted group of thinkers and activists - from South and North - who have long pondered these questions. Diverse in background and experience, they are all committed, however, to seeing through the rhetoric of development, free from the distorting lenses of ideology and habit. They are also interested in looking at 'the other side of the story', particularly from the perspective of the 'losers'.  It is these orientations which make this Reader such an original compilation. The contributors illuminate the wisdom of vernacular society which modern development thinking and practice has done so much to denigrate and destroy. They deliver devastating critiques of the dominant development paradigm and what it has done to the peoples of the world and their richly diverse and sustainable ways of living. Most importantly, in terms of the future, they present some of the experiences and ideals out of which ordinary people are now trying to construct their own more humane and culturally and ecologically respectful alternatives to development, which, in turn, may provide useful signposts for those concerned with the post-development era that is now at hand.

Gangs and the Abuse of Power (Tookie Speaks Out Against Gang Violence)


Stanley Tookie Williams - 1997
    Tookie tells how kids can avoid falling into a gang's power.

Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism


Aldon Lynn Nielsen - 1997
    Centering on groups of avant-garde poets, the study particularly attends to those poets whose radical forms of new writing formed the basis for much of what followed in the Black Arts period. Exploring the farthest reaches of black creative experimentation in words and music, Black Chant yields an invaluable reassessment of African-American cultural history as it has been shaped throughout the era we now call postmodern.

A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America


David K. Shipler - 1997
    To tell the story in human rather than abstract terms, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David K. Shipler bypasses both extremists and celebrities and takes us among ordinary Americans as they encounter one another across racial lines.We learn how blacks and whites see each other, how they interpret each other's behavior, and how certain damaging images and assumptions seep into the actions of even the most unbiased. We penetrate into dimensions of stereotyping and discrimination that are usually invisible, and discover the unseen prejudices and privileges of white Americans, and what black Americans make of them.We explore the competing impulses of integration and separation: the reference points by which the races navigate as they venture out and then withdraw; the biculturalism that many blacks perfect as they move back and forth between the white and black worlds, and the homesickness some blacks feel for the comfort of all-black separateness. There are portrayals of interracial families and their multiracial children--expert guides through the clashes created by racial blending in America. We see how whites and blacks each carry the burden of our history.Black-white stereotypes are dissected: the physical bodies that we see, the mental qualities we imagine, the moral character we attribute to others and to ourselves, the violence we fear, the power we seek or are loath to relinquish.The book makes clear that we have the ability to shape our racial landscape--to reconstruct, even if not perfectly, the texture of our relationships. There is an assessment of the complexity confronting blacks and whites alike as they struggle to recognize and define the racial motivations that may or may not be present in a thought, a word, a deed. The book does not prescribe, but it documents the silences that prevail, the listening that doesn't happen, the conversations that don't take place. It looks at relations between minorities, including blacks and Jews, and blacks and Koreans. It explores the human dimensions of affirmative action, the intricate contacts and misunderstandings across racial lines among coworkers and neighbors. It is unstinting in its criticism of our society's failure to come to grips with bigotry; but it is also, happily, crowded with black people and white people who struggle in their daily lives to do just that.A remarkable book that will stimulate each of us to reexamine and better understand our own deepest attitudes in regard to race in America.

Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War"


Diana Taylor - 1997
    The specific identity in question is that of Argentina, and Taylor’s focus is directed toward the years 1976 to 1983 in which the Argentine armed forces were pitted against the Argentine people in that nation’s "Dirty War." Combining feminism, cultural studies, and performance theory, Taylor analyzes the political spectacles that comprised the war—concentration camps, torture, "disappearances"—as well as the rise of theatrical productions, demonstrations, and other performative practices that attempted to resist and subvert the Argentine military.Taylor uses performance theory to explore how public spectacle both builds and dismantles a sense of national and gender identity. Here, nation is understood as a product of communal "imaginings" that are rehearsed, written, and staged—and spectacle is the desiring machine at work in those imaginings. Taylor argues that the founding scenario of Argentineness stages the struggle for national identity as a battle between men—fought on, over, and through the feminine body of the Motherland. She shows how the military’s representations of itself as the model of national authenticity established the parameters of the conflict in the 70s and 80s, feminized the enemy, and positioned the public—limiting its ability to respond. Those who challenged the dictatorship, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to progressive theater practitioners, found themselves in what Taylor describes as "bad scripts." Describing the images, myths, performances, and explanatory narratives that have informed Argentina’s national drama, Disappearing Acts offers a telling analysis of the aesthetics of violence and the disappearance of civil society during Argentina’s spectacle of terror.

Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy


Robert W. McChesney - 1997
    This is a must reading for anyone who wants to get a quick understanding of this troubling trend."—Susan J. Douglas, author of Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital


Lisa Lowe - 1997
    This perspective contributes to an overall critique of traditional approaches to modernity, development, and linear liberal narratives of culture, history, and democratic institutions. It also frames a set of alternative social practices that allows for connections to be made between feminist politics among immigrant women in Britain, women of color in the United States, and Muslim women in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and Canada; the work of subaltern studies in India, the Philippines, and Mexico; and antiracist social movements in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. These connections displace modes of opposition traditionally defined in relation to the modern state and enable a rethinking of political practice in the era of global capitalism. Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Nandi Bhatia, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chungmoo Choi, Clara Connolly, Angela Davis, Arturo Escobar, Grant Farred, Homa Hoodfar, Reynaldo C. Ileto, George Lipsitz, David Lloyd, Lisa Lowe, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Aihwa Ong, Pragna Patel, José Rabasa, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Jaqueline Urla

The American Dream: The 50s


Richard B. Stolley - 1997
    A series of books chronicling our lives in powerful time capsules, from the dawn of the century -- when horses outnumbered cars 21 million to 8,000 -- to its close.

Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again


Bent Flyvbjerg - 1997
    Why has social science failed in attempts to emulate natural science and produce normal theory? Bent Flyvbjerg argues that the strength of social science is in its rich, reflexive analysis of values and power, essential to the social and economic development of any society. Richly informed, powerfully argued, and clearly written, this book provides essential reading for all those in the social and behavioral sciences.

Women's Growth In Diversity: More Writings from the Stone Center


Judith V. Jordan - 1997
    Striving toward a more accurate representation of women's psychological development, the Stone Center at Wellesley College has become well known for its exploration of women's ways of defining themselves in relation to others. This new collection builds on the foundations laid by the widely acclaimed Women's Growth In Connection to further describe the relational perspective, devoting special attention to the diversity of women's experience. Its 15 thoughtful and clearly written chapters offer fresh insights on vital issues including sexuality, shame, anger, depression, power relations between women, and women's experiences in therapy, and make engaging reading for anyone/m-/female or male/m-/interested in increasing connectedness at a personal and societal level.

Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles


Chandra Mukerji - 1997
    A sequestered aristocracy promenaded in formal gardens while the military moved across the landscape, marking state boundaries with fortresses and refiguring the interior with canals and forests. Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design, showing how the gardens at Versailles showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality.

Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting


Harald Weinrich - 1997
    . . . We find that cultural history provides a helpful perspective in which the value of the art of forgetting emerges. . . . That is the subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the meandering stream of forgetfulness) will try to represent and discuss by means of many concrete examples, taken primarily from literature." from LetheLethe is an exploration of the art of forgetting as the counterpart of the rhetorical art of memory in Western culture from the Greeks to the present. It offers penetrating analyses of works by, among others, Augustine, Bellow, Borges, Casanova, Celan, Cervantes, Dante, Descartes, Freud, Goethe, Homer, Kant, Kleist, Levi, Locke, Mallarme, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Ovid, Pirandello, Plato, Proust, Rabelais, Rousseau, Sartre, and Wiesel. What emerges is a general view of forgetting that combines a recognition of its necessity and inevitability with a critique of forgetting (particularly in the case of the Holocaust) and the need to combat it. Harald Weinrich's epilogue considers forgetting in the present age of information overflow, particularly in the area of the natural sciences.This magisterial book was first published in German in 1997 and has already been translated into French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish; a Korean translation is in the works. This is the first of Weinrich's books to be translated into English and will be welcomed by scholars and students of literature, intellectual and cultural historians, classicists, historians of philosophy, and other philosophers with literary interests. The range of the book is astonishing. In Steven Rendall's skillful and fluent translation, its readability is noteworthy.

On Playing a Poor Hand Well: Insights from the Lives of Those Who Have Overcome Childhood Risks and Adversities


Mark Katz - 1997
    Drawing upon research examining life's trajectories, Mark Katz identifies sources of protection, strength, and understanding - the cards that enable some children to "beat the odds." He encourages therapists, educators, and other child caretakers to incorporate these factors into our system of care.

How to Be a Perfect Stranger: Volume 2: A Guide to Etiquette in Other People's Religious Ceremonies


Stuart M. Matlins - 1997
    It is not a guide to theology, nor is it presented from the perspective of any particular faith. These easy-to-use guidebooks help the well-meaning guest of any other faith to feel at ease, participate to the fullest extent possible, and avoid violating anyone's religious principles or hurting their feelings.

Mind as Action


James V. Wertsch - 1997
    But today, the social sciences have fragmented into isolated disciplines lacking a common language, and analyses of social problems have polarized into approaches that focus on an individual's mental functioning over social settings, or vice versa. In Mind as Action, James V. Wertsch argues that current approaches to social issues have been blinded by the narrow confines of increasing specialization in the social sciences. In response to this conceptual blindness, he proposes a method of sociocultural analysis that connects the various perspectives of the social sciences in an integrated, nonreductive fashion. Wertsch maintains that we can use mediated action, which he defines as the irreducible tension between active agents and cultural tools, as a productive method of explicating the complicated relationships between human action and its manifold cultural, institutional, and historical contexts. Drawing on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke, as well as research from various fields, this book traces the implications of mediated action for a sociocultural analysis of the mind, as well as for some of today's most pressing social issues. Wertsch's investigation of forms of mediated action such as stereotypes and historical narratives provide valuable new insights into issues such as the mastery, appropriation, and resistance of culture. By providing an analytic unit that has the possibility of operating at the crossroads of various disciplines, Mind as Action will be important reading for academics, students, and researchers in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, literary analysis, and philosophy.

Limits of Art


Huntington Cairns - 1997
    This is an anthology of works in Western literature which competent critics believe have touched the limits of art; that is, selections of prose and poetry that have been pronounced perfect or the best of their kind.

Disarmed And Dangerous: The Radical Lives And Times Of Daniel And Philip Berrigan


Murray Polner - 1997
    Edgar Hoover's FBI? And how did they evolve from their traditionally pious, second-generation immigrant beginnings to become the most famous (some would say notorious) religious rebels of their day?Disarmed and Dangerous, the first full-length unauthorized biography of the Berrigans, answers these questions with an incisive and illuminating account of their rise to prominence as civil rights and antiwar activists. It also traces the brothers' careers as constant thorns in the side of church authority as well as their leadership of the ongoing Plowshares movement?a highly controversial campaign of civil disobedience against the contemporary arms trade and nuclear weapons.Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady plumb the Berrigans' contradictions: among them, Philip's secret marriage, while he was still a Josephite priest, to Elizabeth McAlister, then a Catholic nun, which led to their dismissals by their respective religious orders and Philip's excommunication from the church; and Daniel's speech faulting Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and the resulting criticism loosed upon him from pro-Israeli Americans and many of his allies on the left.Disarmed and Dangerous is a fascinating study of brothers linked by faith and the dreams of peace and social justice in a century bloodied by war, mass murders, and weapons of immense destructive power. It is, above all, an original contribution to modern American history that is sure to be widely read and discussed.

Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work


Kathryn J. Edin - 1997
    Reformers across the political spectrum advocate moving these women off the welfare rolls and into the labor force as the solution to their problems. Making Ends Meet offers dramatic evidence toward a different conclusion: In the present labor market, unskilled single mothers who hold jobs are frequently worse off than those on welfare, and neither welfare nor low-wage employment alone will support a family at subsistence levels.Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein interviewed nearly four hundred welfare and low-income single mothers from cities in Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois, and South Carolina over a six year period. They learned the reality of these mothers' struggles to provide for their families: where their money comes from, what they spend it on, how they cope with their children's needs, and what hardships they suffer. Edin and Lein's careful budgetary analyses reveal that even a full range of welfare benefits—AFDC payments, food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies—typically meet only three-fifths of a family's needs, and that funds for adequate food, clothing and other necessities are often lacking. Leaving welfare for work offers little hope for improvement, and in many cases threatens even greater hardship. Jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled women provide meager salaries, irregular or uncertain hours, frequent layoffs, and no promise of advancement. Mothers who work not only assume extra child care, medical, and transportation expenses but are also deprived of many of the housing and educational subsidies available to those on welfare. Regardless of whether they are on welfare or employed, virtually all these single mothers need to supplement their income with menial, off-the-books work and intermittent contributions from family, live-in boyfriends, their children's fathers, and local charities. In doing so, they pay a heavy price. Welfare mothers must work covertly to avoid losing benefits, while working mothers are forced to sacrifice even more time with their children.Making Ends Meet demonstrates compellingly why the choice between welfare and work is more complex and risky than is commonly recognized by politicians, the media, or the public. Almost all the welfare-reliant women interviewed by Edin and Lein made repeated efforts to leave welfare for work, only to be forced to return when they lost their jobs, a child became ill, or they could not cover their bills with their wages. Mothers who managed more stable employment usually benefited from a variety of mitigating circumstances such as having a relative willing to watch their children for free, regular child support payments, or very low housing, medical, or commuting costs.With first hand accounts and detailed financial data, Making Ends Meet tells the real story of the challenges, hardships, and survival strategies of America's poorest families. If this country's efforts to improve the self-sufficiency of female-headed families is to succeed, reformers will need to move beyond the myths of welfare dependency and deal with the hard realities of an unrewarding American labor market, the lack of affordable health insurance and child care for single mothers who work, and the true cost of subsistence living. Making Ends Meet is a realistic look at a world that so many would change and so few understand.

A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader


Martin Duberman - 1997
    Thousands have attended its events, featuring hundreds of scholars, activists, and cultural workers; many thousands more have lamented how they would have liked to have been there. With this book, they finally, vicariously, can be.Divided into five parts--on identities as they revolve around gender and sexuality; on the terrains of homosexual history; on mind-body relations; on laws and economics; and on policy issues related to gay youth, AIDS, and aging--A Queer World offers a compelling panorama of gay and lesbian life. Featuring the work, among others, of such figures as Yukiko Hanawa, Will Roscoe, Jewelle L. Gomez, Jonathan Ned Katz, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Jeffrey Escoffier, Janice M. Irvine, Kendall Thomas, Gilbert Herdt, Vivien Ng, Douglas Crimp, Walt Odets, Serena Nanda, Cindy Patton, Michael Moon, William Byne, and Randolph Trumback, A Queer World is distinctive in its focus on the social sciences and issues relating to public policy. Consisting largely of previously unpublished essays, this volume--and its companion volume Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures--is an invaluable addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in the study of sexuality.

Busted Tractors and Rusty Knuckles: Norwegian Torque Wrench Techniques and Other Fine Points of Tractor Restoration


Roger Welsch - 1997
    In this hilarious follow-up to his bestselling Old Tractors and the Men Who Love Them, he chronicles the unlikely restoration of an Allis Chalmers tractor nicknamed Woodpecker.

Writing Superheroes (Language and Literacy)


Anne Haas Dyson - 1997
    In one sense, the book is about children "writing superheroes" - about children appropriating superhero stories in their fiction writing and dramatic play on the playground and in the classroom. These stories offer children identities as powerful people who do battle against evil and win, but they also reveal limiting ideological assumptions about relations between people - boys and girls, adults and children, people of varied heritages, physical demeanors, and social classes. The book, then, is also about children as "writing superheroes." With the assistance of their teacher, the observed children became superheroes of another sort, able to take on powerful cultural storylines. In this book, Anne Dyson examines how the children's interest in and conflicts about commercial culture give rise to both literacy and social learning, including learning how to participate in a community of differences.

A Companion to the Philosophy of Language


Bob Hale - 1997
    As well as providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, each essay makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate.

Teotihuacan: An Experiment in Living


Esther Pasztory - 1997
    Comparing the arts of Teotihuacan - not previously judged "artistic" - with those of other ancient civilizations, Ester Pasztory demonstrates how they created and reflected the community’s ideals.Most people associate the pyramids of central Mexico with the Aztecs, but these colossal constructions antedate the Aztecs by more than a thousand years. The people of Teotihuacan, who built the pyramids as part of a city of unprecedented size, remain a mystery.

Macrohistory And Macrohistorians: Perspectives On Individual, Social, And Civilizational Change


Johan Galtung - 1997
    The authors move toward a general theory of grand social change based on the writings of these macrohistorians and provide a comparative view of macrohistory and sociology.The book brings a cross-cultural and transhistorical perspective to the study of social change, analyzing macrohistorians and macrohistory comparatively and synthetically, from the traditional linear-cyclical divide as well as including broader transcendental and feminist approaches. Like a road map par excellence for the study of civilizational change, the book captures the panoramic sweep of history and helps readers learn to appreciate, and henceforth include in the circle of greats, those non-Western thinkers whose work they may until now have neglected.^L ^L Johan Galtung, Sohail Inayatullah, and the other contributors to ^IMacrohistory and Macrohistorians^R demonstrate that each generation may give new perspectives to ideas that we thought we understood. The book covers the vital perspective out of which the 21st century emerges, and in the cases of Sorokin, Toynbee, and Eisler, deals with theories directly bearing on the potential shape of the next thousand years. It brings a cross-cultural and transhistorical perspective to the study of social change and will be of considerable interest to historians and sociologists as well as students of philosophy, historiography, and political science.

City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950


Richard W. Longstreth - 1997
    From the 1920s to the 1950s, Los Angeles did for the shopping center what New York and Chicago had done for the skyscraper. In a single generation, the American retail center shifted from the downtown core to the regional shopping center. This rise of the regional shopping center is one of the most significant changes to the American city in the twentieth century, and no other American city has done as much as Los Angeles to spur that change. Ten years in the making, City Center to Regional Mall is a sweeping yet detailed account of the development of the regional shopping center. Richard Longstreth takes an historical perspective, relating retail development to broader architectural, urban, and cultural issues. His story is far from linear; the topics he covers include the emergence of Hollywood as a downtown in miniature, experiments with the shopping center as an amenity of planned residential developments, the branch department store as a landmark of decentralization, the evolution of off-street parking facilities, and the obscure origins of the pedestrian mall as a spine for retail complexes. Longstreth takes seriously the task of looking at retail buildings--one of the most neglected yet common building types--and the economics of real estate in the American city. He shows that Los Angeles in the period covered was a harbinger of American metropolitan trends during the second half of this century. Over 250 illustrations, culled from a wide variety of sources, constitute one of the best collections of old LA photographs published anywhere.

"Color-Blind" Racism


Leslie G. Carr - 1997
    Many of the vestiges of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, including initiatives such as affirmative action, are increasingly under attack by those who assert that the Constitution is explicitly 'colorblind'.In this provocative and timely book, Leslie G Carr suggests that the Constitution can be read as racist and that the concept of colorblindness is in fact the latest in a series of racist ideologies that have been part of the fabric of the United States.

Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism


Joel A. Carpenter - 1997
    Bitterly humiliated by the famous Scopes monkey trial, this once respected movement retreated from the public forum and seemed doomed to extinction. Yet fundamentalism not only survived, but in the 1940s it reemerged as a thriving and influential public movement. And today it is impossible to read a newspaper or watch cable TV without seeing the presence of fundamentalism in American society. In Revive Us Again, Joel A. Carpenter illuminates this remarkable transformation, exploring the history of American fundamentalism from 1925 to 1950, the years when, to non-fundamentalists, the movement seemed invisible. Skillfully blending painstaking research, telling anecdotes, and astute analysis, Carpenter--a scholar who has spent twenty years studying American evangelicalism--brings this era into focus for the first time. He reveals that, contrary to the popular opinion of the day, fundamentalism was alive and well in America in the late 1920s, and used its isolation over the next two decades to build new strength from within. The book describes how fundamentalists developed a pervasive network of organizations outside of the church setting and quietly strengthened the movement by creating their own schools and organizations, many of which are prominent today, including Fuller Theological Seminary and the publishing and radio enterprises of the Moody Bible Institute. Fundamentalists also used youth movements and missionary work and, perhaps most significantly, exploited the burgeoning mass media industry to spread their message, especially through the powerful new medium of radio. Indeed, starting locally and growing to national broadcasts, evangelical preachers reached millions of listeners over the airwaves, in much the same way evangelists preach through television today. All this activity received no publicity outside of fundamentalist channels until Billy Graham burst on the scene in 1949. Carpenter vividly recounts how the charismatic preacher began packing stadiums with tens of thousands of listeners daily, drawing fundamentalism firmly back into the American consciousness after twenty years of public indifference. Alongside this vibrant history, Carpenter also offers many insights into fundamentalism during this period, and he describes many of the heated internal debates over issues of scholarship, separatism, and the role of women in leadership. Perhaps most important, he shows that the movement has never been stagnant or purely reactionary. It is based on an evolving ideology subject to debate, and dissension: a theology that adapts to changing times. Revive Us Again is more than an enlightening history of fundamentalism. Through his reasoned, objective approach to a topic that is all too often reduced to caricature, Carpenter brings fresh insight into the continuing influence of the fundamentalist movement in modern America, and its role in shaping the popular evangelical movements of today.

Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami


Thomas A. Tweed - 1997
    Drawing on a wide range of sources and using both historical and ethnographic methods, the book examines the religious life of the Cuban exiles who visit the shrine. Those pilgrims are diverse, and so are the motives that bring them. At the same time, author Thomas A. Tweed argues, Cuban devotees of the national patroness share a great deal. Most come to pray for their homeland and to recreate bonds with other Cubans, on the island and in the diaspora. The shrine is a place where they come to make sense of themselves as an exiled people. The religious symbols there link the past and present and bridge the homeland and the new land. Through rituals and artifacts at the shrine, Tweed suggests, the Cuban diaspora imaginatively constructs its collective identity and transports itself to the Cuba of memory and desire.While the book focuses on Cuban exiles in Miami, it moves beyond case study as it explores larger issues concerning religion, identity, and place. How do migrants relate to heir homeland? How do they understand themselves after they have been displaced? What role does religion play among these diasporic groups? Building on this study of one exiled group, Tweed proposes a theory of diasporic religion that promises to illuminate the experiences of other groups that have been displaced from their native land.As the first book-length analysis of Cuban-American Catholicism, Tweed's book will be an invaluable resource to scholars and students of not only Religious Studies, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, but also those who study cultural anthropology, human geography, and Latin American history.

For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria


Cheryl Johnson-Odim - 1997
    She also joined the struggle for Nigerian independence as an activist in the anticolonial movement. This book presents the story of this courageous woman.

Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms


T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting - 1997
    Sharpley-Whiting skillfully brings together approaches from a broad range of academic fields, including critical race theory, literary and cultural criticism, and psychoanalysis as she assesses the relevance of Fanon's theories of oppression to a feminist politics of resistance.

Selected Writings of Martin Luther


Martin Luther - 1997
    This selection presents works in their historical setting. It includes the variety of Luther's literary and religious writing: polemical and irenic, satirical and contemplative, academic and devotional.

Children, Schools, And Inequality


Doris R. Entwisle - 1997
    Children, Schools, and Inequality redresses that imbalance. It examines elementary school outcomes (e.g., test scores, grades, retention rates) in light of the socioeconomic variation in schools and neighborhoods, the organizational patterns across elementary schools, and the ways in which family structure intersects with children's school performance. Adding data from the Baltimore Beginning School Study to information culled from the fields of sociology, child development, and education, this book suggests why the gap between the school achievement of poor children and those who are better off has been so difficult to close. Doris Enwistle, Karl Alexander, and Linda Olson show why the first-grade transition—how children negotiate entry into full-time schooling—is a crucial period. They also show that events over that time have repercussions that echo throughout children's entire school careers. Currently the only study of this life transition to cover a comprehensive sample and to suggest straightforward remedies for urban schools, Children, Schools, and Inequality can inform educators, practitioners, and policymakers, as well as researchers in the sociology of education and child development.

Racism: Unraveling The Fear


Nathan Rutstein - 1997
    

In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda


John Bellamy Foster - 1997
    What is postmodernism? What are the reasons for its attractiveness? In Defense of History is a compelling challenge to postmodern fashion, written by new intellectuals on the left who are reviving historical materialism as an alternative.

Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System


Jerome G. Miller - 1997
    Miller contends that the drug war's racial bias has exacerbated an already present prejudice throughout the criminal justice system. In a wide-ranging survey, Miller describes widespread bias among police officers, probation officers, and courts, while social scientists, whose data form the basis for much policy toward crime, and social workers, whose responsibility is allegedly to members of the underclass, have uncritically accepted the questionable assumptions of criminal justice processing. He warns that the sudden rekindling of interest in genetics and crime along with the creation of a massive crime control industry hold even greater danger for racial minorities in their encounters with the justice system.

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference


David Harvey - 1997
    It establishes foundational concepts for understanding how space, time, place and nature - the material frames of daily life - are constituted and represented through social practices, not as separate elements but in relation to each other. It describes how geographical differences are produced, and shows how they then become fundamental to the exploration of political, economic and ecological alternatives to contemporary life. The book is divided into four parts. Part I describes the problematic nature of action and analysis at different scales of time and space, and introduces the reader to the modes of dialectical thinking and discourse which are used throughout the remainder of the work. Part II examines how "nature" and "environment" have been understood and valued in relation to processes of social change and seeks, from this basis, to make sense of contemporary environmental issues. Part III, is a wide-ranging discussion of history, geography and culture, explores the meaning of the social "production" of space and time, and clarifies problems related to "otherness" and "difference". The final part of the book deploys the foundational arguments the author has established to consider contemporary problems of social justice that have resulted from recent changes in geographical divisions of labor, in the environment, and in the pace and quality of urbanization. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference speaks to a wide readership of students of social, cultural and spatial theory and of the dynamics of contemporary life. It is a convincing demonstration that it is both possible and necessary to value difference and to seek a just social order.

Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction


David J. Hess - 1997
    In the process of bringing disparate fields together under one tent, David J. Hess realizes the full promise of science studies, long uncomfortably squeezed into traditional disciplines. He provides a clear discussion of the issues and misunderstandings that have arisen in these interdisciplinary conversations. His survey is up-to-date and includes recent developments in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, and feminist studies.By moving from the discipline-bound blinders of a sociology, history, philosophy, or anthropology of science to a transdisciplinary field, science studies, Hess argues, will be able to provide crucial conceptual tools for public discussions about the role of science and technology in a democratic society.

Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54


Rick Halpern - 1997
    Drawing on oral histories and archival materials, Halpern explores the experiences of and relationship between black and white workers in a fifty-year period that included labor actions during World War I, Armour's violent reaction to union drives in the late 1930s, and organizations like the Stockyards Labor Council and the United Packinghouse Workers of America.

The Norton History of the Human Sciences


Roger Smith - 1997
    Beginning with the Renaissance's rediscovery of Greek psychology, political philosophy, and ethics, Roger Smith recounts how the human sciences gradually organized themselves around a scientific conception of psychology, and how this trend has continued to the present day in a circle of interactions between science and ordinary life, in which the human sciences have influenced and been influenced by popular culture.

The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States


Christopher Howard - 1997
    Basing his work on histories of these four tax expenditures, Howard highlights the distinctive characteristics of all such policies. Howard helps the reader to appreciate the historic links between the hidden welfare state and U.S. tax policy, which accentuate the importance of Congress and political parties. He also focuses on the reasons why individuals, businesses, and public officials support tax expenditures. The Hidden Welfare State will appeal to anyone interested in the origins, development, and structure of the American welfare state.

The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Hari'shchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras


Vasudha Dalmia - 1997
    It examines the life and writings of one major Hindi writer of the nineteenth century--the playwright, journalist, and polemicist Bharatendu Harishchandra (often called the Father of Modern Hindi)--as its focal point for an analysis of some of the vital cultural processes through which modern north India came to be formed.

The Evolution of Love


Ada Lampert - 1997
    Assuming that our world is built of matter, she states that evolution is the change of this matter, according to the supreme criterion of success in offspring reproduction. Love evolved because of its contribution to reproduction. It first appeared in the mothers of mammals, who used the body's proximity as a main adaptation. Human love expands its borders to include the relationships between women and men, friends, and even nonhuman subjects. Lampert describes motherhood as the source of the genetic, hormonal, brain, and behavioral changes that we call love. In the sexual stage, love enters both as a way to select a partner and as a bonding force. Sexuality is built upon ancient layers of early forms of life, before humanity, and includes strong elements of aggression which interrupt our ability to experience a peaceful sexual life. Maternal love and sexual love combine in the evolution of the family. Lampert also examines homosexual love as a way to look at the fascinating process of growing sexual identity and behavior in an individual.Written in a style suited to any educated person, Lampert uses current scientific knowledge on the brain, hormones, the nervous system, ethology, psychology, and even modern physics to make her case. This book will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and Upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them


Barrington Moore Jr. - 1997
    Philosophy

Workin It


Leon E. Pettiway - 1997
    This title describes their lives, how they came to be where they are, and where they hope to go.

Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry


Sarah H. Hill - 1997
    Based in tradition and made from locally gathered materials, baskets evoke the lives and landscapes of their makers. Indeed, as Weaving New Worlds reveals, the stories of Cherokee baskets and the women who weave them are intertwined and inseparable. Incorporating written, woven, and spoken records, Hill demonstrates that changes in Cherokee basketry signal important transformations in Cherokee culture. Over the course of three centuries, Cherokees developed four major basketry traditions, each based on a different material--rivercane, white oak, honeysuckle, and maple. Hill explores how the addition of each new material occurred in the context of lived experience, ecological processes, social conditions, economic circumstances, and historical eras. Incorporating insights from written sources, interviews with contemporary Cherokee weavers, and a close examination of the baskets themselves, she presents Cherokee women as shapers and subjects of change. Even in the face of cultural assault and environmental loss, she argues, Cherokee women have continued to take what they have to make what they need, literally and metaphorically weaving new worlds from old.

Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity


Richard A. Peterson - 1997
    Peterson captures the free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit of the era, detailing the activities of the key promoters who sculpted the emerging country music scene. More than just a history of the music and its performers, this book is the first to explore what it means to be authentic within popular culture."[Peterson] restores to the music a sense of fun and diversity and possibility that more naive fans (and performers) miss. Like Buck Owens, Peterson knows there is no greater adventure or challenge than to 'act naturally.'"—Ken Emerson, Los Angeles Times Book Review"A triumphal history and theory of the country music industry between 1920 and 1953."—Robert Crowley, International Journal of Comparative Sociology"One of the most important books ever written about a popular music form."—Timothy White, Billboard Magazine

Direct Action & Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s


Elizabeth Gurley Flynn - 1997
    The activist authors of the text s in this collection challenged the prevailing stereotype....As they point out, the practice of direct action, and of sabotage, are as old as class society itself, and have been an integral part of the everyday worklife of wage-earners in all times and places. To the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) belongs the distinction of being the first workers' organization in the US to discuss these common practices openly, and to recognize their place in working class struggle. View direct action and sabotage in the spirit of creative nonviolence, Wobblies readily integrated these tactics into their struggle to build industrial unions. [From the Introduction]

Resolving Identity-Based Conflict in Nations, Organizations, and Communities


Jay Rothman - 1997
    Provides a fascinating theoretical introduction to the phenomena, detailed case study experiences, and a final training guide for practitioners...a landmark work. --Kevin Clements, director, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University Presenting a brilliant new approach to conflict resolution that will intrigue and inform practitioners and scholars alike. Writing from his remarkable range of academic and real-world experiences--including his historic work in bringing Israel and the PLO to the negotiation table--Rothman shows how identity-based conflict can be managed so that both parties reach a higher ground than either could have found on its own. His vehicle is his ARIA model, and here he traces the ARIA process through Antagonism, Resonance, Invention, and Action, demonstrating step-by-step how it can be applied in a variety of environments. Complete with field-tested assessment instruments and action plans, Resolving Identity-Based Conflict is a seamless union of theory and practice anyone seeking to turn the passion of conflict into the fuel of creativity can use.

Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo


Homa Hoodfar - 1997
    Focusing on the impact of economic liberalization policies from 1983 to 1993, she shows the crucial role of the household in survival strategies among low-income Egyptians. Hoodfar, an Iranian Muslim by birth, presents research that undermines many of the stereotypes associated with traditional Muslim women. Their apparent conservatism, she says, is based on rational calculation of the costs and benefits of working within formal and informal labor markets to secure household power. She posits that increasing adherence to Islam and taking up the veil on the part of women has been partially motivated by women's desire to protect and promote their interests both within and beyond households.

The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict


Lynn Spigel - 1997
    Opposed to these conceptions, The Revolution Wasn't Televised explores the ways in which prime-time television was centrally involved in the social conflicts of the 1960s. It was then that television became a ubiquitous element in American homes. The contributors in this volume argue that due to TV's constant presence in everyday life, it became the object of intense debates over childraising, education, racism, gender, technology, politics, violence, and Vietnam. These essays explore the minutia of TV in relation to the macro-structure of sixties politics and society, attempting to understand the struggles that took place over representation the nation's most popular communications media during the 1960s.

Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada's Prairie West


Sarah Carter - 1997
    One of Carter's overarching themes is that women are seldom in a position to invent or project their own images, identities, or ideas of themselves, nor are they free to fully author their own texts. Focusing on captivity narratives, a popular genre in the United States that has received little attention in Canada, Carter looks at depictions of white women as victims of Aboriginal aggressors and explores the veracity of a number of accounts, including those of Fanny Kelly and Big Bear captives Theresa Delaney and Theresa Gowanlock, Canada's most famous captives. Carter also examines depictions of Aboriginal women as sinister and dangerous that appeared in the press as well as in government and some missionary publications. These representations of women, and the race and gender hierarchies created by them, endured in the Canadian West long after the last decades of the nineteenth century. Capturing Women fits into a growing body of literature on the question of women, race, and imperialism. Carter adopts a colonial framework, arguing that while the Prairies do not readily conjure up the powerful images of Empire, fundamental features of colonialism are clearly present in the extension of the power of the Canadian state and the maintenance of sharp social, economic, and spatial distinctions between the dominant and subordinate populations. She highlights similarities between images of women on the Prairies and symbols of women in other colonial cultures, such as the memsahib in Britain and the Indian captive in the United States.

Varieties Of Environmentalism: Essays North And South


Ramachandra Guha - 1997
    An attempt to highlight the values and orientation of the environmentalism of the poor and explore conflicting priorites of the rich and poor nations.

Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide


Michael Burleigh - 1997
    The collection includes important and wholly new contributions to the German-Soviet war and other national tragedies; to the controversial question of whether the Nazi analogy has any relevance to contemporary ethical discussions; and to the contemporary historiography, including works of fiction and literary criticism, of the Holocaust.

Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka


Harry J. Elam Jr. - 1997
    The performances of these groups linked the political, the cultural, and the spiritual, while agitating against the dominant power structure and for the transformation of social and theatrical practices in the U.S. Founded during the Delano Grape Pickers' Strike and Black Power rebellions of the mid-1960s, both El Teatro and the BRT professed cultural pride and group unity as critical corollaries to self-determination and revolutionary social action. Taking It to the Streets compares the performance methodologies, theories, and practices of the two groups, highlighting their cross-cultural commonalties, and providing insights into the complex genre of social protest performance and its interchange with its audience. It examines the ways in which ritual can be seen to operate within the productions of El Teatro and the BRT, uniting audience and performers in subversive, celebratory protest by transforming spectators into active participants within the theater walls --and into revolutionary activists outside. During this critical historical period, these performances not only encouraged community empowerment, but they inculcated a spirit of collective faith and revolutionary optimism. Elam's critical reexamination and recontextualization of the ideologies and practices of El Teatro and the BRT aid in our understanding of contemporary manipulations of identity politics, as well as current strategies for racial representation and cultural resistance."A major contribution to our understanding of how social protest came to be so strong and how Black and Chicano theatre contributed to the synergy of those times." --Janelle Reinelt, University of California, DavisHarry J. Elam, Jr., is Associate Professor of Drama and Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts, Stanford University.

Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations


Andrew Whiten - 1997
    In 1988, Machiavellian Intelligence was the first book to assemble the early evidence suggesting a new answer: that the evolution of intellect was primarily driven by selection for manipulative, social expertise within groups where the most challenging problem faced by individuals was dealing with their companions. Since then a wealth of new information and ideas has accumulated. This new book will bring readers up to date with the most important developments, extending the scope of the original ideas and evaluating them empirically from different perspectives. It is essential reading for reseachers and students in many different branches of evolution and behavioral sciences, primatology and philosophy.

After 1989: Morals, Revolution, and Civil Society


Ralf Dahrendorf - 1997
    Certainly, the open society has its own problems, not least that of citizens in search of meaning. The Good Society has to square the circle of prosperity, civility and liberty. Social science can help us understand what needs to be done, and intellectuals have a responsibility to initiate and accompany change. All this raises questions for Europe which extend far beyond the all too narrow confines of the European Union.

What Evil Means to Us


C. Fred Alford - 1997
    Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students to discover how we experience evil - in ourselves, in others, and in the world. What his informants meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves. A leather-jacketed emergency medical technician, for example, one of the many young people for whom vampires are oddly seductive icons of evil, said he would "give anything to be a vampire." Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Alford argues that the primary experience of evil is not moral but existential. The problems of evil are complicated by the terror it evokes, a threat to the self so profound it tends to be isolated deep in the mind. Alford suggests an alternative to this bleak vision. The exercise of imagination - in particular, imagination that takes the form of a shared narrative - offers an active and practical alternative to the contemporary experience of evil.

National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China


Ann Anagnost - 1997
    In essays revealing the particular temporality of the modern Chinese nation-state, Anagnost examines the disparate eras of its recent past and its propensity for continually looking backward in order to face the future. Using interviews and participant observation as well as close readings of official documents, propaganda materials, and popular media, Anagnost notes the discontinuities in the nation’s narrative—moments where this narrative has been radically reorganized at critical junctures in China’s modern history. Covering a broad range of issues relating to representation and power—issues that have presented themselves with particular clarity in the years since the violent crackdown on the student movement of 1989—National Past-Times critiques the ambiguous possibilities produced by the market, as well as new opportunities for "unfreedom" in the discipline of labor and the commodification of women. Anagnost begins with a retrospective reflection on the practice of "speaking bitterness" in socialist revolutionary practice. Subsequent essays discuss the culture debates of the 1980s, the discourse of social disorder, the issue of population control, the film The Story of Qiu Ju, and anomalies at the theme park "Splendid China."