Forgotten African American Firsts provides students with resources for learning and conducting research about African American innovators and their contributions to art, entertainment, sports, politics, religion, business, and popular culture. While the achievements of such individuals as Barack Obama, Toni Morrison, and Thurgood Marshall are well known, many accomplished African Americans have been largely forgotten or deliberately erased from the historical record in America. This volume introduces students to those African Americans whose successes in entertainment, business, sports, politics, and other fields remain poorly understood. Dr. Charles Drew, whose pioneering research on blood transfusions saved thousands of lives during World War II; Mae Jemison, an engineer who in 1992 became the first African American woman to travel in outer space; and Ethel Waters, the first African American to star in her own television show, are among those chronicled in Forgotten African American Firsts. With nearly 150 entries across 17 categories, this book has been carefully curated to showcase the inspiring stories of African Americans whose hard work, courage, and talent have led the course of history in the United States and around the world. Introduces students to the pioneering achievements of African American artists, inventors, leaders, and scholars Orients readers to historical, biographical, contextual, and theoretical approaches to understanding and appraising the work of African American innovators Documents the critical but often unrecognized role that African Americans in every generation have played in transforming American culture Models major avenues for investigating, assessing, and writing about African American trailblazers and the significance and continuing influence of their accomplishments

In this book, a leading French social thinker grapples with the gap between the tendency toward globalization of economic relations and mass culture and the increasingly sectarian nature of our social identities as members of ethnic, religious, or national groups. Though at first glance, it might seem as if the answer to the question "Can we live together?" is that we already do live together--watching the same television programs, buying the same clothes, and even using the same language to communicate from one country to another--the author argues that in important ways, we are farther than ever from belonging to the same society or the same culture.
Our small societies are not gradually merging into one vast global society; instead, the simultaneously political, territorial, and cultural entities that we once called societies or countries are breaking up before our eyes in the wake of ethnic, political, and religious conflict. The result is that we live together only to the extent that we make the same gestures and use the same objects--we do not communicate with one another in a meaningful way or govern ourselves together.
What power can now reconcile a transnational economy with the disturbing reality of introverted communities? The author argues against the idea that all we can do is agree on some social rules of mutual tolerance and respect for personal freedom, and forgo the attempt to forge deeper bonds. He argues instead that we can use a focus on the personal life-project--the construction of an active self or "subject"--ultimately to form meaningful social and political institutions.
The book concludes by exploring how social institutions might be retooled to safeguard the development of the personal subject and communication between subjects, and by sketching out what these new social institutions might look like in terms of social relations, politics, and education.

This essential volume provides an overview of and introduction to African American writers and literary periods from their beginnings through the 21st century. This compact encyclopedia, aimed at students, selects the most important authors, literary movements, and key topics for them to know. Entries cover the most influential and highly regarded African American writers, including novelists, playwrights, poets, and nonfiction writers. The book covers key periods of African American literature-such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the Civil Rights Era-and touches on the influence of the vernacular, including blues and hip hop. The volume provides historical context for critical viewpoints including feminism, social class, and racial politics. Entries are organized A to Z and provide biographies that focus on the contributions of key literary figures as well as overviews, background information, and definitions for key subjects. Provides an essential introduction to African American writers and topics, from the beginning of the 20th century into the 21st Covers the major authors and key topics in African American literature Gives students an accessible and approachable overview of African American literature

In this book, a leading French social thinker grapples with the gap between the tendency toward globalization of economic relations and mass culture and the increasingly sectarian nature of our social identities as members of ethnic, religious, or national groups. Though at first glance, it might seem as if the answer to the question "Can we live together?" is that we already do live together--watching the same television programs, buying the same clothes, and even using the same language to communicate from one country to another--the author argues that in important ways, we are farther than ever from belonging to the same society or the same culture.
Our small societies are not gradually merging into one vast global society; instead, the simultaneously political, territorial, and cultural entities that we once called societies or countries are breaking up before our eyes in the wake of ethnic, political, and religious conflict. The result is that we live together only to the extent that we make the same gestures and use the same objects--we do not communicate with one another in a meaningful way or govern ourselves together.
What power can now reconcile a transnational economy with the disturbing reality of introverted communities? The author argues against the idea that all we can do is agree on some social rules of mutual tolerance and respect for personal freedom, and forgo the attempt to forge deeper bonds. He argues instead that we can use a focus on the personal life-project--the construction of an active self or "subject"--ultimately to form meaningful social and political institutions.
The book concludes by exploring how social institutions might be retooled to safeguard the development of the personal subject and communication between subjects, and by sketching out what these new social institutions might look like in terms of social relations, politics, and education.

Critical theory now underpins numerous academic disciplines, but, for the uninitiated, it can seem a bewildering maze of conflicting schools of thought, complex theories and endless jargon. David Macey's new dictionary cuts through the complexities to give a clear and straightforward account of all the key terms and concepts the average student is likely to encounter.

With" Michel Foucault," Reaktion Books introduces an exciting new series that brings the work of major intellectual figures to general readers, illuminating their groundbreaking ideas through concise biographies and cogent readings.
There is no better thinker than Foucault with which to begin the "Critical Lives" series. Though reticent about his personal life for most of his career, Foucault, in the last years of his life, changed his stance on the relationship between the personal and the intellectual and began to speak of an "aesthetics of existence" in which "the life" and "the work" become one. David Macey, a renowned expert on Foucault, demonstrates that these contradictions make it possible to relate Foucault's work to his life in an original and exciting way. Exploring the complex intellectual and political world in which Foucault lived and worked, and how that world is reflected in his seminal works, Macey paints a portrait of Foucault in which the thinker emerges as a brilliant strategist, one who-while fiercely promoting himself as a maverick-aligned himself with particular intellectual camps at precisely the right moments.
"Michel Foucault" traces the philosopher's career from his comfortable provincial
background to the pinnacle of the French academic system, paying careful attention to
the networks of friendships and the relations of power that sustained Foucault's
prominence in the academy. In an interview in 1966, Foucault said, "One ought to read
everything, study everything. In other words, one must have at one's disposal the general
archive of a period at a given moment." It is precisely this archive that Macey restores
here, accessiblyrelating Foucault's works to the particular context in which they were
given form.

Many of us experience pain in our childhoods, and young people face trauma all over the world. How is it possible to recover? Do those abused always go on to hurt others? This incredible bestseller has overturned the way we view trauma, by showing how the extraordinary power of resilience can heal damaged lives. Renowned psychoanalyst Boris Cyrulnik has dealt with many young victims of distress and he relates stories of children who have been abused, orphaned, fought in wars and escaped genocide, yet who have not only survived, but grown in the face of adversity. By the way we deal with our memories and emotions, he shows, we can reshape our lives and transform pain into something stronger - just as a grain of sand in an oyster becomes a pearl. Resilience is not just about resisting; it is about learning to live. This life-changing book points the way towards hope and happiness.

When he died of an AIDS-related condition in 1984, Michel Foucault had become the most influential French philosopher since the end of World War II. His powerful studies of the creation of modern medicine, prisons, psychiatry, and other methods of classification have had a lasting impact on philosophers, historians, critics, and novelists the world over. But as public as he was in his militant campaigns on behalf of prisoners, dissidents, and homosexuals, he shrouded his personal life in mystery.
In The Lives of Michel Foucault -- written with the full cooperation of Daniel Defert, Foucault's former lover -- David Macey gives the richest account to date of Foucault's life and work, informed as it is by the complex issues arising from his writings.

An examination of the relation between war and politics, by one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers

From 1971 until 1984 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures ranging freely and conversationally over the range of his research. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern.

This book examines the central questions of democracy and politics in modern societies. Through an analysis of some of the key texts of 19th and 20th century thought - from Marx, Michelet and de Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt - the author explores the ambiguities of democracy, the nature of human rights, the idea and the reality of revolution, the emergence of totalitarianism and the changing relations between politics, religion and the image of the body. While developing a highly original account of the nature of politics and power in modern societies, he links political reflection to the interpretation of history as an open, indeterminate process of which we are part. This work should interest specialists in social and political theory and philosophers.

In the most comprehensive study of Jacques Lacan yet to be published in English, David Macey challenges many of the assumptions that have come to surround Lacan's work. He shows that key elements of Lacanian thought relate not to structuralism, as is often claimed, but to surrealism, Bataille and the early French phenomenologists. The famous "return to Freud" is shown to mask Lacan's adherence to a psychiatric tradition and to trends within French psychoanalysis which were opposed by Freud himself.
A detailed and challenging reading of work by Lacan and his associates on femininity reveals its reliance upon a virulently sexist discourse and upon an iconography derived from surrealism. The view that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a positive contribution to make to feminism and to theories of gender and sexual difference is contested. As well as providing a new and provocative reading of Lacan's work, "Lacan in Contexts" is an important contribution to psychoanalytic history and to the history of French intellectual life.

Ibn Khaldun, the most celebrated thinker of the Muslim Middle Ages, is the subject of this intriguing study. Lacoste opens with a general description of the Maghreb in the later Middle Ages, focusing primarily on mercantile trade, especially in gold, and the social and economic structures of tribal life. He unravels Khaldun's fascinating biography--born of an aristocratic family in Tunis in 1332, he had an extraordinary diplomatic and military career in the turbulent wars and politics of Western Islam in the fourteenth century; withdrew to a desert retreat in 1375, and finally emigrated to Egypt. Lacoste then turns his attention to Ibn Khaldun's majestic Universal History, arguably the greatest single synthesis produced by medieval thought anywhere. His account of Ibn Khaldun's thought is a remarkable, sympathetic work of recovery, not only uncovering its basic categories but exploring its contemporary relevance to an understanding of the Arab world. Thinkers as diverse as Ernest Gellner and Arnold Toynbee have paid tribute to the lasting fertility of Ibn Khaldun's work. English-speaking readers now have an opportunity to appreciate some of the richness and diversity of the Arab intellectual heritage.

Born in Martinique, Frantz Fanon (1925-61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a volunteer in the Free French Army, in which he saw combat at the end of the Second World War. In Algeria, Fanon came into contact with the Front de Liberation Nationale, whose ruthless struggle for independence was met with exceptional violence from the French forces. He identified closely with the liberation movement, and his political sympathies eventually forced him out the country, whereupon he became a propagandist and ambassador for the FLN, as well as a seminal anticolonial theorist. David Macey's eloquent life of Fanon provides a comprehensive account of a complex individual's personal, intellectual and political development. It is also a richly detailed depiction of postwar French culture. Fanon is revealed as a flawed and passionate humanist deeply committed to eradicating colonialism. Now updated with new historical material, Frantz Fanon remains the definitive biography of a truly revolutionary thinker.