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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies
South Carolina's Indian-American governor Nikki Haley recently
dismissed one of her principal advisors when his membership to the
ultra-conservative Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) came to
light. Among the CCC's many concerns is intermarriage and race
mixing. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2001 the
CCC website included a message that read "God is the one who
divided mankind into different races.... Mixing the races is
rebelliousness against God. " Beyond the irony of a CCC member
working for an Indian-American, the episode reveals America's
continuing struggle with race, racial integration, and race mixing.
The Color Factor shows that the emergent twenty-first-century
recognition of race mixing and the relative advantages of
light-skinned, mixed-race people represents a "back to the future "
moment--a re-emergence of one salient feature of race in America
that dates to its founding. Each chapter addresses from a
historical perspective a topic in the current literature on
mixed-race and color. The approach is economic and empirical, but
the text is accessible to social scientists more generally. The
historical evidence concludes that we will not really understand
race until we understand how American attitudes toward race were
shaped by race mixing.
Islam and feminism are often thought of as incompatible. Through a
vivid ethnography of Muslim and secular women activists in Jakarta,
Indonesia, Rachel Rinaldo shows that this is not always the case.
Examining a feminist NGO, Muslim women's organizations, and a
Muslim political party, Rinaldo reveals that democratization and
the Islamic revival in Indonesia are shaping new forms of personal
and political agency for women. These unexpected kinds of agency
draw on different approaches to interpreting religious texts and
facilitate different repertoires of collective action - one
oriented toward rights and equality, the other toward more public
moral regulation. As Islam becomes a primary source of meaning and
identity in Indonesia, some women activists draw on Islam to argue
for women's empowerment and equality, while others use Islam to
advocate for a more Islamic nation. Mobilizing Piety demonstrates
that religious and feminist agency can coexist and even overlap,
often in creative ways. "Rachel Rinaldo gives us a richly
documented and path-breaking study of how Muslim women in Indonesia
draw on both Islam and feminism to argue and imagine political and
social changes. Her findings go against a pervasive view of the
incompatibility of Islam and feminism: she finds that these very
diverse global discourses can in fact work together towards
desirable political outcomes."-Saskia Sassen, Columbia University,
and author of A Sociology of Globalization "This original study
conducted in the world's largest Muslim-majority country strikes me
as one of the most interesting and important works on Islam and
women in recent years. Rather than pit secularists against
religious-minded activists in debates over women's rights, Rachel
Rinaldo shows that the major divide in contemporary Indonesia - as
in much of the Muslim world - is more complex, and centers on
struggles over what it means to be a Muslim, a woman, and an
Indonesian."-Robert Hefner, Professor of Anthropology, Boston
University
This timely memoir-cum-guide includes the insights of black women at various stages of their career as they navigate the pitfalls of the corporate world.
A performance review of the working world introduced to the young women reveals issues such as racism, sexism, ethnic chauvinism, ageism, and sexual harassment that many encounter with naivety.
When technical expertise and hard work are not the issue, how do black women make the most of their efforts and support each other to success?
Black Print Unbound explores the development of the Christian
Recorder during and just after the American Civil War. As a study
of the official African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper (a
periodical of national reach and scope among free African
Americans), Black Print Unbound is thus at once a massive recovery
effort of a publication by African Americans for African Americans,
a consideration of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and
print culture studies, and an intervention in the study of
literatures of the Civil War, faith communities, and periodicals.
The book pairs a longitudinal sense of the Recorder's ideological,
political, and aesthetic development with the fullest account
available of how the physical paper moved from composition to real,
traceable subscribers. It builds from this cultural and material
history to recover and analyze diverse and often unknown texts
published in the Recorder including letters, poems, and a
serialized novel-texts that were crucial to the development of
African American literature and culture and that challenge our
senses of genre, authorship, and community. In this, Black Print
Unbound offers a case study for understanding how African Americans
inserted themselves in an often-hostile American print culture in
the midst of the most complex conflict the young nation had yet
seen, and it thus calls for a significant rewriting of our senses
of African American-and so American-literary history.
This is fundamentally a text about race and antiblack racism and their subsequent production of the problem of alienation (separation) of human beings from one another, from their bodies, and from themselves, globally, but with distinct and conscious focus on the historical context of apartheid and “post”-apartheid South Africa through the psychological lens of one of the country’s first and distinguished clinical psychologists, Noel Chabani Manganyi.
The book is a philosophically critical engagement with his work, and it constitutes, as it were, part of the author’s overarching project of attempting to reclaim and retrieve hitherto overlooked, ignored and invisibilised Black thinkers of the past and present. Although Manganyi has written over 10 books, the most important and popular being Being-Black-in-the-World (1973) and Alienation and the Body in Racist Society (1977), his ideas and work have, for one reason or another, been disregarded by mainstream South African psychology, let alone philosophy. The author foregrounds philosophy as also a culprit because Manganyi himself describes his work as that of “a psychologist who thinks and conceptualises psychological reality in a phenomenological way”.
Manganyi has the distinction of being the first Black clinical psychologist trained in South Africa as the title of his latest book, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist (2016) indicates. His body of published work reveals that from the beginning he has been involved in an attempt to contextualise his discipline, psychology, to the lived realities of his country, that is, apartheid racism and the alienation it produced on Black people. In other words, his main concern has been to utilise psychological discourse to address issues relevant to what can broadly be called “the Black lived-experience” in an antiblack racist society and their experience of the condition of alienation. As such he stood as a solitary figure whose voice was pushed to the margins of the psychological establishment, which was either silent about or complicit in the oppression of Blacks by the apartheid regime.
By exploring Manganyi’s serious concerns about apartheid racism and its attendant devastating production of alienation among Black people, the author argues that the problem of alienation produced by continuing rampant antiblack racism (even from the hands of a Black government) constitutes itself as a lingering problem of “post”-apartheid South Africa.
The author demonstrates that apartheid and alienation are not only conceptually synonymous but experientially related because what connects antiblack racism (apartheid) and alienation is the fact of our embodied existence in the world and that Black alienation manifests itself through the body. After all, antiblack racism is predicated on bodily appearance and body differences among human beings. Manganyi himself places a high premium on the body precisely because, in his view, the Black subjects have inherited a negative sociological schema of their black bodies as a result of which most of them experience themselves as somethings or objects outside of themselves, that is.
The value of revisiting Manganyi’s contribution can be underlined by reference to imperatives posed in recent incidents of antiblack racism and contemporary approaches to race and embodiment in disciplines such as philosophy (Black existentialism), psychology, sociology, cultural studies and identity politics.
This book's focus spans a wide variety of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, political philosophy, critical race studies and post-colonialism, and therefore will be of interest to a broad cross-section of undergraduate and graduate students, scholars and activists.
The Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo the full
rigours of European colonisation. By the early nineteenth century,
they had largely been brought under colonial rule, dispossessed of
their land and stock, and forced to work as labourers for farmers
of European descent. Nevertheless, a portion of them were able to
regain a degree of freedom and maintain their independence by
taking refuge in the mission stations of the Western and Eastern
Cape, most notably in the Kat River valley. For much of the
nineteenth century, these Khoesan people kept up a steady
commentary on, and intervention in, the course of politics in the
Cape Colony. Through petitions, speeches at meetings, letters to
the newspapers and correspondence between themselves, the Cape
Khoesan articulated a continuous critique of the oppressions of
colonialism, always stressing the need for equality before the law,
as well as their opposition to attempts to limit their freedom of
movement through vagrancy legislation and related measures. This
was accompanied by a well-grounded distrust, in particular, of the
British settlers of the Eastern Cape and a concomitant hope, rarely
realised, in the benevolence of the British government in London.
Comprising 98 of these texts, These Oppressions Won't Cease - an
utterance expressed by Willem Uithaalder, commander of Khoe rebel
forces in the war of 1850-3 - contains the essential documents of
Khoesan political thought in the nineteenth century. These texts of
the Khoesan provide a history of resistance to colonial oppression
which has largely faded from view. Robert Ross, the eminent
historian of precolonial South Africa, brings back their voices
from the annals of the archive, voices which were formative in the
establishment of black nationalism in South Africa, but which have
long been silenced.
A key study on writer and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile that presents a new approach to studying the radicalism of Africa and its diaspora, and makes a major contribution to the histories of Black lives, gender studies, jazz studies, politics, and creativity.
The cultural configurations of the Black Atlantic cannot be fully understood without recognising the significant presence of writers and artists from the African continent itself. Among the most influential was South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, or Bra Willie, as he was affectionately known. Yet, until now, there has been no full-length study of his work.
Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s wide-ranging book reveals the foundational influence of Kgositsile’s mother and grandmother on his craft and unveils the importance of Tswana oral andaural traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, and cosmologies he carried with him into and after exile. It illuminates a southern African modernity that was strongly gendered and expressed robust anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and civil rights struggles. Using the original concept of ‘elsewhere’, the author maps the sources of Kgositsile’s transformative verse, which in turn generated ‘poetics of possibility’ for his contemporaries in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements and beyond - among them Maya Angelou, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tom Dent, members of The Last Poets, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and rapper Earl Sweatshirt – who all looked to his work to model their identities, cultural movements and radical traditions.
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