""Class Issues" reminds us that university intellectuals work in knowledge factories; that the factories produce engines of dominance; and that, therfore, sabotage has to be the order of the day. The essays state their cases with elegance, with thoroughness, and with economical precision. No one interested in addressing his or her mite of effort to transforming the world can afford to ingore this book."
--Wahneema Lubiano
Duke University

The university classroom has been turned into an intensely bitter battlefield. Conservatives are attacking the academy's ability to teach, and at times its very right to educate. As the dust begins to settle, the contributors to this volume weigh in with a constructive and wide-ranging statement on the progressive possibilities of teaching. This is, in many ways, a book for the morning after the PC Wars, when the shouting dies down and the imperatives of pedagogy remain.

Asserting a complex, inter-related agenda for teachers and students, "Class Issues" is an anthology of essays on radical teaching. Leading scholars of literary and cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and working-class literature examine the challenges that confront progressive pedagogy, as well as the histories that lie behind the achievements of cultural studies. "Class Issues" offers a plan for the construction of an alternative public sphere in the rapidly changing space of the classroom in the academy.

"Class Issues" is a compilation of important new work on the tradition of radical teaching as well as forceful suggestions for the mobilization of radical consciousness.
Contributers:
Goerge Lipsitz, Bruce Robbins, Maria Damon, John Mowitt, DonaldK. Hedrick, Neil larsen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Hitchcock, Alan Wald, Mike Hill, Ronald Strickland, Henry A. Giroux, Rachel Buff, Jason Loviglio, Carol Stabile, Timothy Brennan, Jeffrey R. di Leo, Christian Moraru, Vijay Prashad, Judith halberstam, Gregory L. Ulmer, John P. Leavey, Jr., Jeffrey Williams.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"Way and Judy Chu have put together an excellent book on explorations into the lives of adolescent boys. The essays are rich in diversity, not only in the populations of boys studied, but also in research methodology and theoretical perspective."--"Choice"

"Empirical research on the lives and behavior of adolescent boys from a variety of ethnic and class backgrounds."
--"The Chronicle"

"The volume explores the experiences of boys who have been excluded from previous developmental research and also challenges the existing stereotypes about boys."
--"NYU Today"

"Brings together a coherent and consistent body of literature on a topic that is often relegated to a single chapter or afterthought in similar books and edited volumes...."Adolescent Boys" challenges the limited and often skewed male images perpetuated by the media, superordinant male groupings, and Western men by giving voice to adolexcent boys growing up in diverse cultures of boyhood."
--"Harvard Educational Review"

A flurry of best-selling works has recently urged us to rescue and protect boys. They have described how boys are failing at school, acting out, or shutting down emotionally. Lost in much of the ensuing public conversation are the boys themselves--the texture of their lives and the ways in which they resist stereotypical representations of them.

Most of this work on boys is based primarily on middle class, white boys. Yet boys from poor and working class families as well as those from African American, Latino, and Asian American backgrounds need to be understood in their own terms and not just as a contrast to white or middle classboys. Adolescent Boys brings together the most up-to-date empirical research focused on understanding the development of boys from diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

The authors show how the contexts of boys' lives, such as the schools they attend shape their identities and relationships. The research in this book will help professionals and parents understand the diversity and richness of boys' experiences.

In Private Affairs, Phillip Brian Harper explores the social and cultural significance of the private, proposing that, far from a universal right, privacy is limited by one's racial-and sexual-minority status. Ranging across cinema, literature, sculpture, and lived encounters-from Rodin's "The Kiss "to Jenny Livingston's "Paris is Burning"-Private Affairs demonstrates how the very concept of privacy creates personal and sociopolitical hierarchies in contemporary America.

This book offers the first comparative discussion of variation in selected areas of structure in the dialects of Kurdish. The contributions draw on data collected as part of the project on Structural and Typological Variation in Kurdish and stored in the Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects online resource, as well as on additional data sources. The chapters address issues in lexicon, phonology, and morpho-syntax including nominal case, tense and aspect categories, pronominal clitics, adpositions, word order (with special reference to post-predicate constituents) and connectivity and complex clauses. The materials that inform the analysis consist of a systematic questionnaire-based elicitation covering key features of variation in lexicon and morpho-syntax, and an accompanying corpus of free speech recordings, collected in over 120 locations across the Kurdish-speaking regions in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and covering mainly the dialects of Northern and Central Kurdish (Kurmani-Bahdini and Sorani), with some consideration of Southern Kurdish. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as linguistics, linguistic typology, Iranian linguistics and linguistics of the Middle East, and dialectology.

Complete ready reference covering Chinese history, economics, politics, culture, and prevalent social problems ... a "must-have" addition to any global studies collection. Throughout its imperial golden ages, China was the world's most developed nation, home to advanced technologies, a robust economy, and thriving cities. Its thousands of years of cultural and artistic achievements combined with its vastness and ethnic complexity have made China both fascinating and forbidding for those encountering it for the first time. This new volume offers readers a concise, single-stop introduction to Chinese history, culture, economics, politics, and social issues. As they trace China's history from the creation stories of ancient Chinese myths to the Communist upheaval of the 20th century, readers will learn how the country has changed-and not changed-from early to modern times, and what life throughout China is like today. Chronology of key historical developments, which details the most important people, places, and events A directory of business, cultural, government, and tourist organizations to help facilitate further research and study

'German militarism' has long been understood to be a central element of German society. Considering the role of militarism, this book investigates how conscription has contributed to instilling a strong sense of military commitment amongst the German public.A Nation in Barracks tells the story of how military-civil relations have evolved in Germany during the last two hundred years. Focusing on the introduction and development of military conscription, the author looks at its relationship to state citizenship, nation building, gender formation and the concept of violence. She begins with the early nineteenth century, when conscription was first used in Prussia and initially met with harsh criticism from all aspects of society, and continues through to the two Germanies of the post-1949 period. The book covers the Prussian model used during World War I, the Weimar Republic when no conscription was enforced and the mass military mobilization of the Third Reich.Throughout this comprehensive account, acclaimed historian Ute Frevert examines how civil society deals with institutionalized violence and how this affects models of citizenship and gender relations.

The Carolina, Mariana and Marshall Islands have experienced world war, atomic weapons testing and varying brands of colonialism in the 20th century. Following the seizure of the islands from Japan, agencies of the US government sought to better possess and control the area through a series of developmental initiatives. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this text goes beyond the liberal discourse surrounding modernity to examine what economic development actually entailed. It explores in ethnographic terms how different groups of island people responded to development programmes in multiple, complex, layered and sometimes conflicting ways that reflected their own historical experiences and cultural understandings.

Since Toy Story, its first feature in 1995, Pixar Animation Studios has produced a string of commercial and critical successes including Monsters, Inc.; WALL-E; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; and Up. In nearly all of these films, male characters are prominently featured, usually as protagonists. Despite obvious surface differences, these figures often follow similar narratives toward domestic fulfillment and civic engagement. However, these characters are also hypermasculine types whose paths lead to postmodern social roles more revelatory of the current "crisis" that sociologists and others have noted in boy culture. In Pixar's Boy Stories: Masculinity in a Postmodern Age, Shannon R. Wooden and Ken Gillam examine how boys become men and how men measure up in films produced by the animation giant. Offering counterintuitive readings of boy culture, this book describes how the films quietly but forcefully reiterate traditional masculine norms in terms of what they praise and what they condemn. Whether toys or ants, monsters or cars, Pixar's males succeed or fail according to the "boy code," the relentlessly policed gender standards rampant in American boyhood. Structured thematically around major issues in contemporary boy culture, the book discusses conformity, hypermasculinity, social hierarchies, disability, bullying, and an implicit critique of postmodern parenting. Unprecedented in its focus on Pixar and boys in its films, this book offers a valuable perspective to current conversations about gender and cinema. Providing a critical discourse about masculine roles in animated features, Pixar's Boy Stories will be of interest to scholars of film, media, and gender studies and to parents.

In the struggle for democratic reform, and in its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution represented a broad humanistic spirit that swept across Europe at the close of the 18th century. The Revolution fostered one of the largest and broadest debates in literary and cultural history, a war of ideas that encompassed philosophy, theories of history, the study of language, and the history of art. This debate is reflected in a large body of literature that extends well into the 19th century. The debate in England was particularly strong, and in 1789, the London Corresponding Society remarked that the French Revolution was the topic to which all thinking minds were drawn. During the 20th century, scholars have given much attention to the link between the Revolution and Romanticism.

Within this volume, expert contributors examine the centrality of the French Revolution to English culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. The book offers a sweeping exploration of the diverse effects of the Revolution in verbal and visual art, poetry and prose, history and fiction, politics and religion, and philosophy and language theory. Among the figures discussed are Edmund Burke, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. By analyzing a broad range of writers and artists who shaped and were shaped by the French Revolution, the volume dramatizes the scope and diversity of the debate, thus offering an interdisciplinary analysis of the debate as a whole and an emphasis on the extent to which all thinking minds were drawn to the topic.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment saw the birth of an era which sought legitimacy not from the past but from the future. No longer would human beings invoke the authority of tradition; instead, modern societies emerging in the West justified themselves by their success at increasing, through the application of scientific knowledge, human control over the world. Ever since this notion of modernity was formulated it has provoked intense debate.

In this wide-ranging historical introduction to social theory, Alex Callinicos explores the controversies over modernity and examines the connections between social theory and modern philosophy, political economy and evolutionary biology. He offers clear and accesssible treatments of the thought of Montesquieu, Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Maistre, Gobineau, Darwin, Spencer, Kautsky, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Freud, Lukacs, Gramsci, Heidegger, Keynes, Hayek, Parsons, the Frankfurt School, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Habermas and Bourdieu, and concludes by surveying the state of contemporary social thought.

A remarkably comprehensive and lucid primer, Social Theoryis essential reading for students of politics, sociology and social and political thought.

Inspired by both Daniel Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year' (1722) and 'The King', an anthology of the witty and provocative chess columns of the Dutch Grandmaster, Jan Hein Donner, Ray Keene here collects his thoughts and writings on the year 2020 - both in chess and the wider world. His reflections include the impact of Covid-19 on the popularity of chess, the remarkable influence of the Netflix series 'The Queen's Gambit', the growing army of teenage Grandmasters, the online pivot of chess competition and the emergence of chess entrepreneurs, such as World Champion Magnus Carlsen and Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura.. Like Donner, Ray uses chess as a metaphor for observations on art, culture and civilisation.

In this broad condemnation of multiculturalism, the author works to uncover pernicious errors in the arguments of diversity's proponents and to sound a warning against the dire consequences for American culture if the tenets of political correctness are incorporated into our social structure. Schmidt begins by exposing multiculturalism, not as a movement aimed at expanding democratic ideals, but rather as a crypto-Marxist political ideology that seeks to import Marxist concepts into social and cultural institutions. Subsequent chapters then illuminate a number of dismaying trends: a tendency toward historical revisionism in multiculturalist arguments, the sly linguistic maneuvering and limits on speech that characterize political correctness, and the dismantling of the traditional image of the family unit-the primary building block of American society. Schmidt concludes with a rousing admonition to expel from our midst the latter-day Trojan horse that is multiculturalism. Casting a troubled glance over the list of social ills plaguing America today-besieged inner cities, divisive racial politics, diminishing educational standards, and rampant divorce and illegitimacy-we have cause to wonder whether the advocates of multiculturalism represent the solution or the source of the problem. In this rousing condemnation of the multiculturalist agenda, the author fixes an unflinching critical gaze on the subtle deceptions and wrongheaded conclusions at work in the arguments for cultural pluralism, moral relativism, and political correctness. An exhaustive and damning account of multiculturalism's wages and a compelling argument for the importance of traditional American values make this book essential reading for anyone concerned about our country's present plight and future prospects.

Phillips assesses prospects for post-national social coherence transcending the traditional nation-state, with a focus on events in Germany. European institutional integration has been seen as a stabilizing alternative to the nation-state system, a system that resulted in two devastating world wars. However, economic interests appear to have been more effective instruments of transnational integration in Europe. Further, until 1989, part of this alternative vision was a divided Germany.

He explicitly links a focus upon the Federal Republic, central to post-Cold War Europe's future, with a study of private business, perhaps the most indispensable agent of Germany's post-1945 rehabilitation. Business support has been imperative to European integration. Nonetheless, if the European Union is attractive to members or potential members only for economic reasons, then no matter how wealthy its constituent parts may be, potential harmful effects of interstate competition will continue to pose a threat to social coherence of the EU, the Continent, and the world beyond. With the aid of analysis of companies largely perceived as being German, but which are increasingly transnational, Phillips shows how interdependent business needs may overcome nationalist and institutional conceptions in the transnational integration processes. For scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with European integration, international relations, and German Studies.

Experts from five continents provide a thorough exploration of cultural studies, looking at different ideas, places and problems addressed by the field.
Brings together the latest work in cultural studies and provides a synopsis of critical trends
Showcases thirty contributors from five continents
Addresses the key topics in the field, the relationship of cultural studies to other disciplines, and cultural studies around the world
Offers a gritty introduction for the neophyte who is keen to find out what cultural studies is, and covers in-depth debates to satisfy the appetite of the advanced scholar
Includes a comprehensive bibliography and a listing of cultural studies websites
Now available in paperback for the course market.

An in-depth examination of the different forms of privilege perpetuating inequality within American society In this era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, inequality is at the forefront of American thought like never before. Yet many of the systems of privilege upholding the status quo remain unchanged. Many Americans who advocate a merit-based, race-free worldview do not acknowledge the systems of privilege which benefit them. Men remain at the top of the gender wage gap and white people are five times less likely to be stopped by police than their Black neighbors. White families can build lives using social and financial inheritances that have been denied to Black Americans and immigrants for centuries. Individual chapters focus on language, the workplace, the implications of comparing racism and sexism, race-based housing privilege, the dream of diversity and the cycle of exclusion, the rule of law and invisible systems of privilege, and the power of law to transform society. Twenty-five years since its first publication, Privilege Revealed is more relevant than ever. With a new preface and substantive foreword, this book offers readers important insight into the inequalities still pervading American society and encourages us all to confront our own relationship to these too often invisible privileges.

Are women fighting over the same issues and for the same rights all around the world? What are the gains that have been made for women in different cultures over the past 200 years? Students will find answers to these and similar questions in this unique resource of fifteen case studies exploring the problems surrounding the fight for women's rights in different countries, ranging from Argentina to Zimbabwe. The history, the public perceptions, contemporary problems, the future of women's rights, and the roles of activists concerning these rights are examined. The detailed explorations provide readers with the opportunity to discover the different cultural attitudes toward women.

In order to facilitate comparisons, each chapter follows a similar outcome. The countries were chosen to represent every region of the world and to provide as broad a picture as possible of the issues presented by women's struggles for equality. Each case study asks how national, cultural, class, racial, and religious differences have influenced women's rights. These different views of ways in which women have sought their rights around the world will help students to understand the fight for women's rights in a broad sense as a social issue that affects all of humanity.

During World War II the Japanese were stereotyped in the European imagination as fanatical, cruel, almost inhuman - an image reflected in most books and films about prisoner of war in the Far East. While the Japanese cetainly treated those they captured badly, behaving far worse to Chinese and native captives than to Europeans, the conventional view of the Japanese is unhistorical and simplistic. It fails to recognize that hte Japanese were acting at a time of supreme national crisis trial, at a particular period of their history, and that their attitudes were influenced by a combination of their perception of their own racial identity mixed with a powerful historical tradition. This collection of essays, by both western and Japanese scholars, aims to see the question from a historical viewpoint, and from both a western and Japanese perspective, looking at it in the light of both longer-term influences, notably the Japanese attempt to establish themselves as an honorary white race. The essays also examine particular instances. Conditions in the almost self-run camp at Changi contrasted remarkably with those on the Burma Railway, where disease and a failure to provide supplies caused terrible suffering. The book also addresses the other side of the question, looking at the treatment of Japanese prisoners in Allied captivity.

Jean Baudrillard's work on how contemporary society is dominated by the mass media has become extraordinarily influential. He is notorious for arguing that there is no real world, only simulations which have altered what events mean, and that only violent symbolic exchange can prevent the world becoming a total simulation. An ideal introduction to this most singular cultural critic and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard: live theory offers a comprehensive, critical account of Baudrillard's unsettling, visionary and often prescient work. Baudrillard's relation to a range of theorists as diverse as Nietzsche, Marx, McLuhan, Foucault and Lyotard is explained, and the impact of his thought on contemporary politics, popular culture and art is analyzed. Finally, in the new interview included here, Baudrillard outlines his own position and responds to his critics.

Although many studies have been done of individual authors, at present few works exist which compare different immigrant literatures from the past and present. This work draws broad conclusions about the changes in American attitudes toward immigration and diverse cultures that are reflected in the literature. This book examines the representation of the immigrant experience in North American literature. Most of the chapters discuss the portrayal of particular ethnic groups by specific authors during a century of American and Canadian history. One essay highlights controversies among recent writers and critics concerning how their cultures should be portrayed, and the introductory and concluding essays provide historical, cultural, and literary contexts for a comparative approach to North American immigrant literature.

The expert contributors expose the reader to a variety of immigrant experiences in the literature of past and present, experiences in which the characters attempt to reconcile their ancestral heritage with that of their adopted land. Variations of three basic stances can be found in these works: the essentialist, rejecting the values of the dominant culture and resisting assimilation; the assimilationist, embracing the attitudes and behaviors of the new culture; and the hybridist, incorporating the old and new. The book additionally explores such topics as race, class, and gender, as well as the intergenerational conflict found in much immigrant literature.

This book is a meticulous argument for the contemporary value of Marx's democratic theory as an interpretive key for the postmodernism debates. Landry uses the works of Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard to represent the poststructuralist camp and the writings of Habermas to represent the rationalist camp. Viable social critique, argues Landry, mediates between pure social constructivist and pure realist metaphysics. Postmodernism, although critical of Marx, aided the broader project of critical social theory, particularly Marx's critique of social-material contexts of oppression. Indeed, significant positive affiliations among Marx, Habermas, and the poststructuralists are found in their commitment to criticizing ideological aspects of bourgeois Enlightenment rationality and modernity.

Landry employs a fruitful tension strategy as seeking rapprochement among the modern and postmodern positions on hotly debated contemporary issues such as subjectivity, criticism, and the nature of reason. Marxism continues to provide critical tools for articulating productive conflict within the postmodernism debates, advancing of strategies of critique beyond identity politics toward a more self-reflective ideological discussion of the multiple axes of power and oppression in political struggles over democracy. In this unique study, complex philosophical issues are described lucidly and their relevance for today is established compellingly.

This collection examines the ways in which religion and literature are capable of renewing what the eminent German philosopher Jurgen Habermas refers to as 'the public sphere'. The essays range from close commentaries on particular texts ( King Lear, The Brothers Karamazov, 'Bartleby the Scrivener') to surveys of the careers of selected writers who have entered the public sphere (Elizabeth Gaskell, W.H. Auden, Raymond Carver, Sherman Alexie), to historical and theoretical examinations of various national and international public spheres.

Alerting readers to a body of recent work that has gone under-examined, Tania Modleski redraws in Old Wives' Tales the perimeter of popular culture. A critical analysis of films such as "The Ballad of Little Jo, The Piano" and "Dogfight, Old Wives' Tales" also takes up performance, autobiographical experience, and contemporary social issues to illustrate how women's genres mediate between us and reality. Modelski examines the changes occurring in traditional women's genres, such as romances and melodrama, and explores the phenomenon of female authors and performers who "cross-dress"--women, that is, who are moving into male genres and staking out territory declared off-limits by men and by many feminists.

Botswana's large deposits of diamonds have made it one of the richest African countries on a per capita basis. However, more than wealth, what has made Botswana a model country in southern Africa is its long tradition of democratic rule, respect for ethnic and racial differences, freedom of the press, and governmental programs to support its citizens. Even though Botswana has had its share of problems--including ecological disasters such as drought-- the spirit of its people and their willingness, despite cultural differences, to work together to overcome such setbacks make this country exceptional. General readers will find a wealth of up-to-date information on such topics as the legacy of Christian missionaries, especially the famous David Livingstone, society post Independence, the unique blend of Christianity and ancestral spiritual practices, the AIDS crisis, initiation rites, community rule by chiefs, polygamy, cattle raising, food and beer, betrothal customs, education, unique games, the integral music and dance, and much more. The authors provide a thorough, one-stop resource for learning about a significant country that has stayed peaceful despite the strife of neighboring South Africa and Angola, for example. Narrative chapters by these insiders cover the land, people, languages, education, economy, history, religion and worldview, literature and media, art and architecture, cuisine and traditional dress, gender roles, marriage, and family, social customs and lifestyle, and music and dance. Photos, a chronology, and a glossary complement the narrative.

In contrast to the dispersion of slaves across the Atlantic, African movement to Asia has received scant attention. However, Britain's commemoration in 2007 of the bicentennial of its abolishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade has now stimulated interest in other African migrations.In a book that encompasses the strong military impact made by even first-generation African migrants in Asia, as well as the descendants of the royal Africans who governed Sachin and Janjira (India), Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya further demonstrates that African music and dance have not only survived the brutalities of forced migration but have also contributed to the local Middle Eastern and South Asian arts scene. Combining historical accounts, both documented and oral, this groundbreaking work explores - through case studies, and through the processes of assimilation, social mobility, and marginalization - the silent history and conflicting identity of Asia's Africans.