The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience.A joyous affirmation of literature that brings to mind Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Joyce, Texaco is a work of rare power and ambition, a masterpiece.

    Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.

    World History

    Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "West." Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism—including citizenship and equality—were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.

    Black Bolshevik is the autobiography of Harry Haywood, the son of former slaves who became a leading member of the Communist Part USA and a pioneering theoretician on the Afro-American struggle.The author’s first-hand accounts of the Chicago race riot of 1919, the Scottsboro Boys’ defense, communist work in the South, the Spanish Civil War, the battle against the revisionist betrayal of the Party, and other history-shaping events are must reading for all who are interested in Black history and the working class struggle.

    But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.Beginning in the 1870s when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.

    Covering everything from adventure, war, murder and slavery to espionage, including the stories of the real war horse, who killed Rasputin, Agatha Christie's greatest mystery and Hitler's English girlfriend, these tales deserve to be told.

    Examines Black pre-Civil War culture and the slave family, detailing sexual attitudes, courtship practices and wedding ceremonies, childrearing, familial roles, language, and discipline.

    She lived under virtual house arrest & was forbidden to address public gatherings or meet with more than one person at a time. She endured a forced separation of 27 years from her husband, Nelson Mandela. Here, in interviews & letters, she tells the story of her life & political development.A Tribute to Nomzamo Winnie Mandela/Bishop Manas Buthelezi My Little Siberia: Banished to Brandfort When My Father Taught Me History I Began to Understand: Growing up in the Countryside (Pondoland) Life with Him was Always a Life without Him: Meeting Nelson Mandela I Always Waited for that Sacred Knock: Life UndergroundHe was a Pillar of Strength to Me: Being Alone No Human Being Can Go On Taking those Humiliations without Reaction: In Prison We Couldn't Stop Our Children: The Soweto Uprising, 1976The Chapter of Dialogue is Finally Closed: The Political Situation Part of My Soul Went with Him: Visits to Robben Island & PollsmoorFreedom CharterWinnie Mandela's Banning OrderConditions of Visit to Nelson Mandela on Robben IslandConditions with which Winnie Mandela Had to Comply to Travel from Brandfort to Robben Island & Back

    At its apogee in the 1930s, 42 million Britons governed 500 million foreign subjects. Britannia ruled the waves and a quarter of the earth's surface was painted red on the map. Where Britain's writ did not run directly, its influence, sustained by matchless industrial and commercial sinews, was often paramount.Yet no empire (except the Russian) disappeared more swiftly. Within a generation this mighty structure sank almost without trace, leaving behind a scatter of sea-girt dependencies and a ghost of empire, the British Commonwealth of nations. Equally, it can be claimed that Britain bequeathed its former colonies economic foundations, a cultural legacy, a sporting spirit, a legal code and a language more ubiquitous than Latin ever was.In a book of unparalleled scholarship, Piers Brendon presents the story of the decline and eclipse of British might, the major historical event in the closing stages of the second millennium. Full of vivid particulars, brief lives, telling anecdotes, comic episodes, symbolic moments and illustrative vignettes, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire evokes remote places as well as distant times. From the war for American independence, the end of the Raj, the 'scram out of Africa' and the unfinished business of the Falklands and Hong Kong to the new 'informal' empire of the United States, this is a comprehensive and engaging account.

    Running roughshod over the place, they have viewed these islands and their inhabitants as exotic allure to be consumed or conquered. The Caribbean stood at the center of the transatlantic slave trade for more than three hundred years, with societies shaped by mass migrations and forced labor. But its people, scattered across a vast archipelago and separated by the languages of their colonizers, have nonetheless together helped make the modern world—its politics, religion, economics, music, and culture. Jelly-Schapiro gives a sweeping account of how these islands’ inhabitants have searched and fought for better lives. With wit and erudition, he chronicles this “place where globalization began,” and introduces us to its forty million people who continue to decisively shape our world.

    As China embraces capitalism, the Mao era is being surgically denigrated by the Chinese political and intellectual elite. This book tackles the extremely negative depiction of China under Mao in recent publications and argues most people in China, including the rural poor and the urban working class, actually benefited from Mao's policy of a comprehensive welfare system for the urban and basic health and education provision for the rural, which is being reversed in the current rush towards capitalism.By a critical analysis of the mainstream account of the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution and by revealing what is offered in the unofficial e-media debates this book sets the record straight, making a convincing argument for the positive effects of Mao's policies on the well-being of the Chinese people.

    hegemony, and the need for a revolutionary movement of the oppressed to overthrow it all.From Night-Vision: "The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as drastic, as disorienting a change as was the original european colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart & restructuring the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race, not nation, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to have. Now you have outcast groups as diverse as the Aryan Nation and the Queer Nation and the Hip Hop Nation publicly rejecting the right of the u.s. government to rule them. All the building blocks of human culture—race, gender, nation, and especially class—are being transformed under great pressure to embody the spirit of this neo-colonial age."

    [and contends] that the alleged mental and behavioral maladaptiveness of oppressed Afrikan peoples is a political-economic necessity for the maintenance of White domination and imperialism."--Back cover.

    and the EU governments among them -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is no more than a terrorist organization.  Moreover, they claim that the FARC is only engaged in criminal activities and no longer maintains an ideology.  But does this tell the whole story? Or can terrorism be a strategy for furthering ideological objectives -- irrespective of how the terrorist actions may appear to contradict stated political and ideological beliefs? As the UN's special envoy to Colombia noted in 2003, it would be "a mistake to think that the FARC members are only drug traffickers and terrorists." Part of Zed's groundbreaking Rebels series, Garry Leech has written the definitive introduction to the FARC, examining the group's origins, aims and ideology, and looking at its organizational and operational structures. The book also investigates the FARC's impact on local, regional and global politics and explores its future direction. As someone who reported from the frontline in Colombia for many years and was himself kidnapped by the FARC, Leech offers an unparalled insight into one of the world's most high-profile armed revolutionary organizations.