Poetic Terrorism
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails.
PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.
An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.
Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.
Source
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Barbara Ehrenreich: Bosses and Bossism; Working America's "Bad Boss Contest"
(A nod to Okir for mentioning Ehrenreich's blog)
Bosses and Bossism
Barbara Ehrenreich
...
The problem isn’t particular bosses, but what I call Bossism-- the hierarchical system which governs all known bureaucracies, both public and private. Giving one person huge power over others is like a giving a three-year-old a hose: not everyone will get soaked but the chances of coming out dry are slender.
But, you may be wondering, how would anything get done without bosses and Bossism? Well, a surprising amount gets done that way all the time, as I saw in my Nickel and Dimed jobs. If the restaurant gets swamped or the nursing home residents start tossing their food around, don’t count on a manager to tell you what to do – if, indeed, there is a manager within hailing distance. In crisis situations, I again and again saw low-paid workers organize themselves, more or less spontaneously, everyone pitching in and helping each other, with no one playing the role of “boss.” As for any real boss on the scene, the best he or she could do in a crisis was to pitch in – or get out of the way.
What I was witnessing was workplace democracy in action, or, more fancily put, what French sociologists call “autogestion,” or workers’ self-determination. It may sound exotic, but it’s not just an attribute of the rare anarchist collective. In fact, it’s a notion revered in contemporary corporate culture as the team.
The rhetoric of teams, employing some sort of equality among the players, is everywhere today. You’re not an employee of Whole Foods, you’re a “team member.” You don’t work for Wal-Mart, you’re an “associate,” theoretically as capable of making a creative contribution as the Regional Manager. According to Wal-Mart folklore, for example, it was a lowly associate who came up with the brilliant idea of “people greeters.” (But whenever I, in my brief stint as a Wal-Mart associate, made a useful suggestion –like why stack so many of the women’s plus-size clothes at floor-level, where they were accessible only to the young and agile? – I was always told that such decisions were made by the big bosses in Bentonville.)
When corporations uphold the idea of “teams,” they’re grasping for the kind of ingenuity and creativity people naturally bring to a challenging situation – if they’re allowed to, i.e., if they’re treated like participants instead of like servants or subordinates. So why isn’t the team rhetoric taken more seriously, at all levels of bureaucratic endeavor?
To Read the Entire Post
Also check out Working America's:
Bad Boss Contest
Bosses and Bossism
Barbara Ehrenreich
...
The problem isn’t particular bosses, but what I call Bossism-- the hierarchical system which governs all known bureaucracies, both public and private. Giving one person huge power over others is like a giving a three-year-old a hose: not everyone will get soaked but the chances of coming out dry are slender.
But, you may be wondering, how would anything get done without bosses and Bossism? Well, a surprising amount gets done that way all the time, as I saw in my Nickel and Dimed jobs. If the restaurant gets swamped or the nursing home residents start tossing their food around, don’t count on a manager to tell you what to do – if, indeed, there is a manager within hailing distance. In crisis situations, I again and again saw low-paid workers organize themselves, more or less spontaneously, everyone pitching in and helping each other, with no one playing the role of “boss.” As for any real boss on the scene, the best he or she could do in a crisis was to pitch in – or get out of the way.
What I was witnessing was workplace democracy in action, or, more fancily put, what French sociologists call “autogestion,” or workers’ self-determination. It may sound exotic, but it’s not just an attribute of the rare anarchist collective. In fact, it’s a notion revered in contemporary corporate culture as the team.
The rhetoric of teams, employing some sort of equality among the players, is everywhere today. You’re not an employee of Whole Foods, you’re a “team member.” You don’t work for Wal-Mart, you’re an “associate,” theoretically as capable of making a creative contribution as the Regional Manager. According to Wal-Mart folklore, for example, it was a lowly associate who came up with the brilliant idea of “people greeters.” (But whenever I, in my brief stint as a Wal-Mart associate, made a useful suggestion –like why stack so many of the women’s plus-size clothes at floor-level, where they were accessible only to the young and agile? – I was always told that such decisions were made by the big bosses in Bentonville.)
When corporations uphold the idea of “teams,” they’re grasping for the kind of ingenuity and creativity people naturally bring to a challenging situation – if they’re allowed to, i.e., if they’re treated like participants instead of like servants or subordinates. So why isn’t the team rhetoric taken more seriously, at all levels of bureaucratic endeavor?
To Read the Entire Post
Also check out Working America's:
Bad Boss Contest
Jim Lehrer and Ben Bradlee: Free Speech
Free Speech
Jim Lehrer with Ben Bradlee
PBS
A discussion about the state of journalism from the Watergate era till now...
Watch/Read
Jim Lehrer with Ben Bradlee
PBS
A discussion about the state of journalism from the Watergate era till now...
Watch/Read
Nat Hentoff: Congress and Judges Gagged
Congress and Judges Gagged: Arlen Specter and a CIA torture victim know: Only the Oval Office decides what the law is
by Nat Hentoff
Village Voice
So, once again, as USA Today noted in a May 18 editorial, "Congress may as well be deaf and blind." Arlen Specter has been the only congressional chairman who keeps trying to investigate these felonies committed by the president and NSA. Now he has been blocked by the administration's escape from accountability through "state secrets." (In most of these dismissals, the lawyers for the plaintiffs are not even told what "the secrets" are.)
But what of the independent judiciary in our constitutional separation of powers? On May 12, Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Virginia killed a suit by Khaled el-Masri—Khaled el-Masri v. George Tenet, et. al—whose kidnapping and "rendition" by the CIA to be tortured has been repeatedly reported—in detail—in this country and around the world, including the Voice.
A broken man because of his ordeal, el-Masri seeks a mere $75,000 in compensation from our government for five months of torture, beginning in December 2003. Moreover, this German citizen was kidnapped by mistake. The agent in charge of the Al Qaeda division of the Counterterrorist Center screwed up because el-Masri has the same name as a person suspected of links to terrorism.
"The government is moving to dismiss this case at the outset on the basis of a fiction that discussion in this courtroom of the very same facts being discussed throughout the world will harm [this] nation." If the ruling is upheld on appeal—and it very likely will be, given the two justices Bush has placed on the Supreme Court—the total disappearance of Khaled el-Masri v. Tenet will, as the ACLU's Ben Wizner says, "give a broad immunity to the government to shield even the most egregious activities."
Judge Ellis's 17-page ruling is dramatically unusual in showing his discomfort at being shackled by the precedent of previous judges allowing the government to whisper to them, "state secrets" and usurp their roles as judges of the facts and the law.
As if to expiate his surrendering of his independence to the administration, Ellis gives a lot of space to el-Masri's claims. He calls them allegations, but they strike me as weighing on his conscience.
For example, says Judge Ellis, a "blindfolded" El-Masri—after first having been snatched to Macedonia—"was led to a building where he was beaten, stripped of his clothing, and sodomized with a foreign object [and] dragged naked to a corner of the room [where] he claims he saw seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing black ski masks.
"[El-Masri] contends that these men were members of a CIA 'black renditions' team, operating pursuant to unlawful CIA policies at the direction of defendant [then CIA director George] Tenet."
The judge continues: "After being dressed in a diaper . . . shackled and dragged to an airplane . . . his captors injected him with a sedative," and he wound up in the notorious CIA interrogation facility, the "Salt Pit," an abandoned brick factory in Afghanistan. For the next four months, "in a small, cold cell," he was repeatedly (and forcibly) interrogated. His hunger strike was broken—like those of the prisoners in Guantánamo—by force-feeding. (This brutal practice, as I have written in previous columns, locks the prisoner in a metal chair where, while being "fed" through a tube, he urinates and defecates on himself.)
At last, the CIA, knowing it had the wrong man, flew el-Masri, blindfolded, to Albania where he was dumped on the side of an abandoned road. Albanian authorities got him back to Germany where he found his wife and four children had gone to Lebanon because his wife thought he had abandoned them.
Says Judge Ellis: "El-Masri asserts he remains deeply traumatized." He hasn't been able to work. One of his children is frightened if his father goes out alone.
At the end of his decision, Judge Ellis, somewhat traumatized himself, writes: "Putting aside all the legal issues, if el-Masri's allegations are true or essentially true, then all fair-minded people, including those who believe . . . that this lawsuit cannot proceed [because it involves "state secrets"] must also agree that El-Masri has suffered injuries as a result of our country's mistake and deserves a remedy." (Emphasis added.)
The judge continued: "Yet . . . the only sources of that remedy must be the Executive Branch or the Legislative Branch, not the Judicial Branch."
But the executive branch, brandishing "state secrets," has forced this judge to dismiss the case! And the legislative branch has repeatedly refused to conduct an investigation into these "renditions" that kidnap suspects to be tortured—as has been verified in meticulously documented reports by Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, Amnesty International, and NYU's Center on Law and Security.
So there is no remedy for Khaled el-Masri in this country which holds its "values" and rule of law as a model to the world.
To Read the Entire Article
by Nat Hentoff
Village Voice
So, once again, as USA Today noted in a May 18 editorial, "Congress may as well be deaf and blind." Arlen Specter has been the only congressional chairman who keeps trying to investigate these felonies committed by the president and NSA. Now he has been blocked by the administration's escape from accountability through "state secrets." (In most of these dismissals, the lawyers for the plaintiffs are not even told what "the secrets" are.)
But what of the independent judiciary in our constitutional separation of powers? On May 12, Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Virginia killed a suit by Khaled el-Masri—Khaled el-Masri v. George Tenet, et. al—whose kidnapping and "rendition" by the CIA to be tortured has been repeatedly reported—in detail—in this country and around the world, including the Voice.
A broken man because of his ordeal, el-Masri seeks a mere $75,000 in compensation from our government for five months of torture, beginning in December 2003. Moreover, this German citizen was kidnapped by mistake. The agent in charge of the Al Qaeda division of the Counterterrorist Center screwed up because el-Masri has the same name as a person suspected of links to terrorism.
"The government is moving to dismiss this case at the outset on the basis of a fiction that discussion in this courtroom of the very same facts being discussed throughout the world will harm [this] nation." If the ruling is upheld on appeal—and it very likely will be, given the two justices Bush has placed on the Supreme Court—the total disappearance of Khaled el-Masri v. Tenet will, as the ACLU's Ben Wizner says, "give a broad immunity to the government to shield even the most egregious activities."
Judge Ellis's 17-page ruling is dramatically unusual in showing his discomfort at being shackled by the precedent of previous judges allowing the government to whisper to them, "state secrets" and usurp their roles as judges of the facts and the law.
As if to expiate his surrendering of his independence to the administration, Ellis gives a lot of space to el-Masri's claims. He calls them allegations, but they strike me as weighing on his conscience.
For example, says Judge Ellis, a "blindfolded" El-Masri—after first having been snatched to Macedonia—"was led to a building where he was beaten, stripped of his clothing, and sodomized with a foreign object [and] dragged naked to a corner of the room [where] he claims he saw seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing black ski masks.
"[El-Masri] contends that these men were members of a CIA 'black renditions' team, operating pursuant to unlawful CIA policies at the direction of defendant [then CIA director George] Tenet."
The judge continues: "After being dressed in a diaper . . . shackled and dragged to an airplane . . . his captors injected him with a sedative," and he wound up in the notorious CIA interrogation facility, the "Salt Pit," an abandoned brick factory in Afghanistan. For the next four months, "in a small, cold cell," he was repeatedly (and forcibly) interrogated. His hunger strike was broken—like those of the prisoners in Guantánamo—by force-feeding. (This brutal practice, as I have written in previous columns, locks the prisoner in a metal chair where, while being "fed" through a tube, he urinates and defecates on himself.)
At last, the CIA, knowing it had the wrong man, flew el-Masri, blindfolded, to Albania where he was dumped on the side of an abandoned road. Albanian authorities got him back to Germany where he found his wife and four children had gone to Lebanon because his wife thought he had abandoned them.
Says Judge Ellis: "El-Masri asserts he remains deeply traumatized." He hasn't been able to work. One of his children is frightened if his father goes out alone.
At the end of his decision, Judge Ellis, somewhat traumatized himself, writes: "Putting aside all the legal issues, if el-Masri's allegations are true or essentially true, then all fair-minded people, including those who believe . . . that this lawsuit cannot proceed [because it involves "state secrets"] must also agree that El-Masri has suffered injuries as a result of our country's mistake and deserves a remedy." (Emphasis added.)
The judge continued: "Yet . . . the only sources of that remedy must be the Executive Branch or the Legislative Branch, not the Judicial Branch."
But the executive branch, brandishing "state secrets," has forced this judge to dismiss the case! And the legislative branch has repeatedly refused to conduct an investigation into these "renditions" that kidnap suspects to be tortured—as has been verified in meticulously documented reports by Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, Amnesty International, and NYU's Center on Law and Security.
So there is no remedy for Khaled el-Masri in this country which holds its "values" and rule of law as a model to the world.
To Read the Entire Article
Mikhail M. Bakhtin: Life By Its Very Nature is Dialogic
Monologism at its extreme denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach…another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons. (Bakhtin: 292-93)
The dialogic nature of consciousness. The dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open- ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. (Bakhtin: 293)
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Problems of Dostoyesky’s Poetics. ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984.
The dialogic nature of consciousness. The dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open- ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. (Bakhtin: 293)
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Problems of Dostoyesky’s Poetics. ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984.
Steve Benen: High Infidelity
(Courtesy of The All Spin Zone)
High Infidelity: What if three admitted adulterers run for president and no one cares?
By Steve Benen
Washington Monthly
...
McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich." McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money. In 2000, McCain managed to deflect media questioning about his first marriage with a deft admission of responsibility for its failure. It's possible that the age of the offense and McCain's charmed relationship with the press will pull him through again, but Giuliani and Gingrich may face a more difficult challenge. Both conducted well-documented affairs in the last decade--while still in public office.
Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York's St. Patrick's Day parade, an acknowledgement of infidelity so audacious that Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer compared it with "groping in the window at Macy's." In the acrid divorce proceedings that followed, Hanover accused Giuliani of serial adultery, alleging that Nathan was just the latest in a string of mistresses, following an affair the mayor had had with his former communications director.
But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, "Let Our Family Represent Your Family." (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.
Despite the scandalous details, whether the press will air them is still an open question. When it comes to personal morality, liberal commentators have long argued that the press has one standard for Democrats and another for Republicans (and another one entirely for the Clintons). It's possible that the mainstream media will fail to apply the same scrutiny to the known transgressions of Gingrich, Giuliani and McCain as the Times did to rumors about Hillary Clinton's husband. But for that to happen, the press will have to resist four powerful political dynamics that will almost certainly be pushing to get the story out.
To Read Entire Article
High Infidelity: What if three admitted adulterers run for president and no one cares?
By Steve Benen
Washington Monthly
...
McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich." McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money. In 2000, McCain managed to deflect media questioning about his first marriage with a deft admission of responsibility for its failure. It's possible that the age of the offense and McCain's charmed relationship with the press will pull him through again, but Giuliani and Gingrich may face a more difficult challenge. Both conducted well-documented affairs in the last decade--while still in public office.
Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York's St. Patrick's Day parade, an acknowledgement of infidelity so audacious that Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer compared it with "groping in the window at Macy's." In the acrid divorce proceedings that followed, Hanover accused Giuliani of serial adultery, alleging that Nathan was just the latest in a string of mistresses, following an affair the mayor had had with his former communications director.
But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, "Let Our Family Represent Your Family." (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.
Despite the scandalous details, whether the press will air them is still an open question. When it comes to personal morality, liberal commentators have long argued that the press has one standard for Democrats and another for Republicans (and another one entirely for the Clintons). It's possible that the mainstream media will fail to apply the same scrutiny to the known transgressions of Gingrich, Giuliani and McCain as the Times did to rumors about Hillary Clinton's husband. But for that to happen, the press will have to resist four powerful political dynamics that will almost certainly be pushing to get the story out.
To Read Entire Article
United States of Amnesia, Pt. 4
Teachers try to make room for social studies: History class left behind Standard tests impair civics
by LINDA CONNER LAMBECK
The Connecticut Post
A 12-year veteran of the classroom, Barbara Reed is adept at teaching language arts and social studies at the same time. "You probably couldn't come into my classroom and say, 'She's doing social studies now,'" she said.
But the course, funded through a three-year, $982,395 federal grant, has helped her make the most of the shrinking time she has to devote to social studies.
In many elementary classrooms, history seems threatened with extinction. High-stakes tests in reading, math — and soon, science — make those subjects the ones teachers work on first and most often. The testing is required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. History gets relegated to the afternoon, and sometimes gets pushed off until the next day.
"It is easy to ignore. It's not tested," Reed said. "But easy is not what is right." Janet Corville, a teacher of sixth grade at Nichols School in Stratford, said the Egyptian pyramids sometimes take a back seat to reading, writing and math until after the Connecticut Mastery Tests are over in March.
Rest of the Article
by LINDA CONNER LAMBECK
The Connecticut Post
A 12-year veteran of the classroom, Barbara Reed is adept at teaching language arts and social studies at the same time. "You probably couldn't come into my classroom and say, 'She's doing social studies now,'" she said.
But the course, funded through a three-year, $982,395 federal grant, has helped her make the most of the shrinking time she has to devote to social studies.
In many elementary classrooms, history seems threatened with extinction. High-stakes tests in reading, math — and soon, science — make those subjects the ones teachers work on first and most often. The testing is required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. History gets relegated to the afternoon, and sometimes gets pushed off until the next day.
"It is easy to ignore. It's not tested," Reed said. "But easy is not what is right." Janet Corville, a teacher of sixth grade at Nichols School in Stratford, said the Egyptian pyramids sometimes take a back seat to reading, writing and math until after the Connecticut Mastery Tests are over in March.
Rest of the Article
Monday, June 19, 2006
Reconstruction Spring 2006 Issue and CFP for Future Issues
(Please consider submitting an essay or proposing a review for our future issues--you can leave me a message here if you are interested in doing a review, or contact the email below if you are interested in submitting an essay. Also feel free to ask any questions in the comment section below)
Reconstruction is proud to announce the publication of its Spring 2006 issue, which can be found at Reconstruction
Featured in the issue:
* Michael Vastola, "Pedagogy, Ideology, and Space in the Classical Anarchist Conception of Freedom"
* Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick, "Derrida's Deconstruction of Logocentrism: Implications for Trauma Studies"
* Rob Cover, "Producing Norms: Same-Sex Marriage, Refiguring Kinship and the Cultural Groundswell of Queer Coupledom"
* William S. Haney II, "The Phenomenology of Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence in M. Butterfly"
* Conrad William, "'If your God has really spoken to you...then all the world must hear it': The Discourses of Revelation and Satire in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses"
* Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., "'a joint rolled in toilet paper': Funkadelic's Funky Soul"
* Matthew Wolf-Meyer, "'Not only a consequence of power, but also one of its strategies': An Interview with Lorna Rhodes"
Reconstruction is now accepting submissions for its next open issue scheduled for publication in Fall 2007. Upcoming themed issues--including Blogging, Threatening Bodies, Ecocriticism, Film, and Class & Public Intellectuals--will have separate CFPs posted by our guest editors. Further information on these upcoming themed issues can be found at upcoming issues
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes one open issue and three themed issues quarterly--more or less in the third week of January, April, July, October.
Submissions may be created from a variety of perspectives, including, but not limited to: geography, cultural studies, folklore, architecture, history, sociology, psychology, communications, music, political science, semiotics, theology, art history, queer theory, literature, criminology, urban planning, gender studies, graphic design, etc. Both theoretical and empirical approaches are welcomed.
As a peer reviewed journal, submissions to Reconstruction are read in traditional double-blind fashion, critiqued, and subsequently either returned to the author for revision or accepted for publication. In the case of disputed articles, the readers unable to come to a consensus, the article will be read by an additional reader and then, again, decided upon for future publication.
Articles accepted for publication are done so under the following conditions: 1) If the article has not appeared in English previously, the article will not appear in publication before its publication in Reconstruction. 2) The author of said article is responsible for any and all legal complaints made against the work, and is thus financially responsible for any legal actions. 3) Any subsequent publication of the article, in any form, must acknowledge its earlier publication in Reconstruction. The author is responsible for gaining permission to use any copyrighted images or other materials.
In matters of citation, it is assumed that the proper MLA format will be followed. Other citation formats are acceptable in respect to the disciplinary concerns of the author. For further information, please consult our Submission Guidelines
Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.
All submissions and submission queries should be written care of submissions@reconstruction.ws
Reconstruction is proud to announce the publication of its Spring 2006 issue, which can be found at Reconstruction
Featured in the issue:
* Michael Vastola, "Pedagogy, Ideology, and Space in the Classical Anarchist Conception of Freedom"
* Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick, "Derrida's Deconstruction of Logocentrism: Implications for Trauma Studies"
* Rob Cover, "Producing Norms: Same-Sex Marriage, Refiguring Kinship and the Cultural Groundswell of Queer Coupledom"
* William S. Haney II, "The Phenomenology of Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence in M. Butterfly"
* Conrad William, "'If your God has really spoken to you...then all the world must hear it': The Discourses of Revelation and Satire in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses"
* Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., "'a joint rolled in toilet paper': Funkadelic's Funky Soul"
* Matthew Wolf-Meyer, "'Not only a consequence of power, but also one of its strategies': An Interview with Lorna Rhodes"
Reconstruction is now accepting submissions for its next open issue scheduled for publication in Fall 2007. Upcoming themed issues--including Blogging, Threatening Bodies, Ecocriticism, Film, and Class & Public Intellectuals--will have separate CFPs posted by our guest editors. Further information on these upcoming themed issues can be found at upcoming issues
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes one open issue and three themed issues quarterly--more or less in the third week of January, April, July, October.
Submissions may be created from a variety of perspectives, including, but not limited to: geography, cultural studies, folklore, architecture, history, sociology, psychology, communications, music, political science, semiotics, theology, art history, queer theory, literature, criminology, urban planning, gender studies, graphic design, etc. Both theoretical and empirical approaches are welcomed.
As a peer reviewed journal, submissions to Reconstruction are read in traditional double-blind fashion, critiqued, and subsequently either returned to the author for revision or accepted for publication. In the case of disputed articles, the readers unable to come to a consensus, the article will be read by an additional reader and then, again, decided upon for future publication.
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Sunday, June 18, 2006
Recommended Readings, Part Two
I'm currently reading Ronald Hayman's biography of Jean-Paul Sartre. I've always been interested in psychology and philosophy--particularly in developing insights along those lines to put into pedagogical/political practice. Sartre was one of the leading late-20th century public intellectuals so I figured I might get some insights--what a fascinating, obssessive, bold, arrogant man... hopefully I don't sound to bourgeois when I say I am alternately abhorred and amazed by the story of his life. I've always been interested in the application of the intellect (will) in the world-at-large... how did this strange, little (5'2"), ugly (his description and others) make such a far-reaching impact on the global intellectual scene? His relation/collaboration with Simone De Beauvoir is also a fascinating story... I'm still on the pre-WWII part of his life...
Another recent read that has had a big impact on me is C. Douglas Lummis' book "Radical Democracy." I'm worried about the direction of our country and its current conception of democracy (especially in its passive sense), so I'm trying to develop a more active conception of the possibilities engendered by radical democratic action. Lummis' book is one the best I have read on this subject and has inspired in me new lines of thought that I will be mapping out over the next week--as I re-read it.
Finally, a powerful, short, affirmation of my own theories of dialogical intersubjectivity as the basis of knowledge--the individual developing in direct relation to the broader social landscape. So obvious to those of us that already think this way, but brilliantly explained and mapped out in Eviatar Zerubavel's "Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology" This book is revolutionizing my conception of education and what I should be doing in the classroom.
Another recent read that has had a big impact on me is C. Douglas Lummis' book "Radical Democracy." I'm worried about the direction of our country and its current conception of democracy (especially in its passive sense), so I'm trying to develop a more active conception of the possibilities engendered by radical democratic action. Lummis' book is one the best I have read on this subject and has inspired in me new lines of thought that I will be mapping out over the next week--as I re-read it.
Finally, a powerful, short, affirmation of my own theories of dialogical intersubjectivity as the basis of knowledge--the individual developing in direct relation to the broader social landscape. So obvious to those of us that already think this way, but brilliantly explained and mapped out in Eviatar Zerubavel's "Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology" This book is revolutionizing my conception of education and what I should be doing in the classroom.
Some Questions About the Possibility of Changing Minds
(This essay on the importance of questions provoked some of my own)
-What prevents us from changing our opinions? What encourages us to reassess our previous positions?
-Does debate truly encourage people to change their minds, or does it actually prevent the formation of new opinions? Is there a difference between argument and persuasion--if so, what is it?
-Can we attempt to understand the opinions of others without examining our own assumptions? How do I walk a mile in another's shoes?
-What is the role of mainstream media in the formation of public opinion? Is media-influenced opinions beneficial or dangerous, or a bit of both/and/or...
-How do we encourage critical citizenship that includes response-ability to the demands of social life and political engagement?
-Is action necessary to prove an opinion has truly changed; is saying one has changed enough? Is experience necessary for the development of a theory?
-Is violence an option in changing opinions?
-What effect does an absence of imagination have on the possibilities for change?
-Does academia serve to foster or prevent the changing of minds?
-Does experience override education (or vice versa) in the formation of beliefs, values, and opinions?
-Is education inherently conforming and confirming, reinforcing traditional conclusions, or, can it be radical in the sense of "dreaming the impossible"?
-What prevents us from changing our opinions? What encourages us to reassess our previous positions?
-Does debate truly encourage people to change their minds, or does it actually prevent the formation of new opinions? Is there a difference between argument and persuasion--if so, what is it?
-Can we attempt to understand the opinions of others without examining our own assumptions? How do I walk a mile in another's shoes?
-What is the role of mainstream media in the formation of public opinion? Is media-influenced opinions beneficial or dangerous, or a bit of both/and/or...
-How do we encourage critical citizenship that includes response-ability to the demands of social life and political engagement?
-Is action necessary to prove an opinion has truly changed; is saying one has changed enough? Is experience necessary for the development of a theory?
-Is violence an option in changing opinions?
-What effect does an absence of imagination have on the possibilities for change?
-Does academia serve to foster or prevent the changing of minds?
-Does experience override education (or vice versa) in the formation of beliefs, values, and opinions?
-Is education inherently conforming and confirming, reinforcing traditional conclusions, or, can it be radical in the sense of "dreaming the impossible"?
End of a Brief Hiatus
A tumultous academic and personal year left me exhausted and demoralized...
My first year as a tenure-track professor, a divorce, moving, lost love and new friends, left me little time to write/communicate. To add to the problems I was recently hurt in a biking accident in which the SUV won (adding to my continuing distaste for those monstrous denizens of my local streets) and my ribs lost out (I am walking again, but have a cracked/separated rib--I never knew a hiccup could hurt so much!)
I needed some time to disconnect and recharge. This coming week I will be rehooking up the Internet and plan to start regularly writing again (not just posting articles) to develop thoughts and mapping out perceptions.
I look forward to continuing our conversations my friends of the (im)possible...
My first year as a tenure-track professor, a divorce, moving, lost love and new friends, left me little time to write/communicate. To add to the problems I was recently hurt in a biking accident in which the SUV won (adding to my continuing distaste for those monstrous denizens of my local streets) and my ribs lost out (I am walking again, but have a cracked/separated rib--I never knew a hiccup could hurt so much!)
I needed some time to disconnect and recharge. This coming week I will be rehooking up the Internet and plan to start regularly writing again (not just posting articles) to develop thoughts and mapping out perceptions.
I look forward to continuing our conversations my friends of the (im)possible...
Daniel Shugerensky: A History of 20th Century Education
A chronological outline and descriptions of major moments in the education theory and practice during the 20th century:
A History of Education
Also check out:
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies
Instituto Paulo Freire
A History of Education
Also check out:
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies
Instituto Paulo Freire
Monday, June 05, 2006
David C. Korten: The Great Turning; Earth Community Dialogues and Regional Sustainability
David C. Korten
THE GREAT TURNING Empire to Earth Community
Monday, June 26 7:00pm
David Korten's best-selling books When Corporations Rule the World and The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism have had global impact. In his new book, The Great Turning, Korten writes that a mounting perfect economic storm is fast approaching and discusses the impact of climate change, peak oil, and financial instability on modern life. Come envision with David how sustainable bioregional economic systems and grassroots networking efforts, and a revitalizing of the international movement for peace and justice provide strong promise for a different future. The Great Turning suggests that humans are at a defining moment and face both the opportunity and the imperative to choose our future.
Earth Community Dialogues and Regional Sustainability Tuesday, June 27 9am Earth Community Dialogue #1
7pm Earth Community Dialogue #2
David Korten will facilitate discussion of the best practices around the world to create sustainable communities. Representatives from local government, educational institutions, civil society organizations and businesses will be on hand to describe the best sustainability practices currently in use in the Bluegrass region. Discussion will include projections to create even greater regional sustainability in central Kentucky.
All events are free, open to the public and will be held at the:
Lexington Public Library 140 East Main St Lexington KY
For information call or contact: 859-312-7024, jgembr0@cs.com
Supporting organizations: Sustainable Communities, Kentucky Solar Partnerships, Peace Action Committee, Kentucky Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, Appalachia - Science in the Public Interest and others
Persons attending these events are asked to read the Summer 2006 issue of YES! Magazine available at Wild Oats or on-line at Yes!, and/or read The Great Turning
THE GREAT TURNING Empire to Earth Community
Monday, June 26 7:00pm
David Korten's best-selling books When Corporations Rule the World and The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism have had global impact. In his new book, The Great Turning, Korten writes that a mounting perfect economic storm is fast approaching and discusses the impact of climate change, peak oil, and financial instability on modern life. Come envision with David how sustainable bioregional economic systems and grassroots networking efforts, and a revitalizing of the international movement for peace and justice provide strong promise for a different future. The Great Turning suggests that humans are at a defining moment and face both the opportunity and the imperative to choose our future.
Earth Community Dialogues and Regional Sustainability Tuesday, June 27 9am Earth Community Dialogue #1
7pm Earth Community Dialogue #2
David Korten will facilitate discussion of the best practices around the world to create sustainable communities. Representatives from local government, educational institutions, civil society organizations and businesses will be on hand to describe the best sustainability practices currently in use in the Bluegrass region. Discussion will include projections to create even greater regional sustainability in central Kentucky.
All events are free, open to the public and will be held at the:
Lexington Public Library 140 East Main St Lexington KY
For information call or contact: 859-312-7024, jgembr0@cs.com
Supporting organizations: Sustainable Communities, Kentucky Solar Partnerships, Peace Action Committee, Kentucky Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, Appalachia - Science in the Public Interest and others
Persons attending these events are asked to read the Summer 2006 issue of YES! Magazine available at Wild Oats or on-line at Yes!, and/or read The Great Turning
Ava Lowery: Peace Takes Courage
(From Dale Fitzgibbons)
Ava Lowery is a fifteen-year-old who lives in Alabama. She calls herself a peace activist, and for the past year, she’s been producing her own short animations on her website, Peace Takes Courage. All in all, she’s made about seventy of them, she says, and most of them oppose Bush and his Iraq War.
“I was just so mad about it,” she explains. “And the media are not showing the real images of the war, so I did a lot research and started my own website.”
Powerful stuff for a fifteen year old
Ava Lowery is a fifteen-year-old who lives in Alabama. She calls herself a peace activist, and for the past year, she’s been producing her own short animations on her website, Peace Takes Courage. All in all, she’s made about seventy of them, she says, and most of them oppose Bush and his Iraq War.
“I was just so mad about it,” she explains. “And the media are not showing the real images of the war, so I did a lot research and started my own website.”
Powerful stuff for a fifteen year old
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Melinda Fulmer: Living Wage?
Living wage: How about $9 an hour?
by Melinda Fulmer
MSN: Money
Donna Riley never liked taking handouts. The 49-year-old parking lot attendant had for years subsisted on disability payments for her injured back and $6-an-hour part-time work, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2003 because of her mounting medical debts.
In 2004, when the city of Buffalo, N.Y., passed its last living-wage ordinance, raising city contractors' minimum pay to $9.03 plus benefits, she saw the opportunity to finally get off disability and work full time.
Now, Riley and her husband, who also works for a city parking company, make $6 more an hour combined -- enough to pay all of their bills and buy their first new car.
"Driving out of the car lot at the dealer with a brand new car was a total blow-away," Riley said. "Now we are working on buying a house."
With federal minimum wage stuck at $5.15 since 1997, many cities and states are taking matters in their own hands. They are enacting minimum wages for city contractors and, increasingly, mandatory minimums for all area businesses in an attempt to lift the fortunes of workers on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
The floor has sunk
As it stands now, a worker making the federal minimum wage would make $10,712 a year, or less than $1,000 above the 2006 poverty line of $9,800 for an individual.
"If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, it would be more like $9 right now. We've let the floor sink so low, it's historically less than we were paying back in the 1960s," said Jen Kern, director of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an advocacy group that has led the "living-wage" movement.
...
Twenty states, the District of Columbia and 140 cities and counties have now voted in new living-wage laws. Washington state's minimum wage is $7.63 an hour, highest of any state. And several cities have set their own rates much, much higher: Santa Cruz, Calif., for example, requires that city contractors pay more than $12 an hour, plus health benefits. Lawrence, Kan., sets minimum pay for all workers in the city at 130% of the federal poverty threshold.
Link to Read the Rest of the Article
by Melinda Fulmer
MSN: Money
Donna Riley never liked taking handouts. The 49-year-old parking lot attendant had for years subsisted on disability payments for her injured back and $6-an-hour part-time work, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2003 because of her mounting medical debts.
In 2004, when the city of Buffalo, N.Y., passed its last living-wage ordinance, raising city contractors' minimum pay to $9.03 plus benefits, she saw the opportunity to finally get off disability and work full time.
Now, Riley and her husband, who also works for a city parking company, make $6 more an hour combined -- enough to pay all of their bills and buy their first new car.
"Driving out of the car lot at the dealer with a brand new car was a total blow-away," Riley said. "Now we are working on buying a house."
With federal minimum wage stuck at $5.15 since 1997, many cities and states are taking matters in their own hands. They are enacting minimum wages for city contractors and, increasingly, mandatory minimums for all area businesses in an attempt to lift the fortunes of workers on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
The floor has sunk
As it stands now, a worker making the federal minimum wage would make $10,712 a year, or less than $1,000 above the 2006 poverty line of $9,800 for an individual.
"If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, it would be more like $9 right now. We've let the floor sink so low, it's historically less than we were paying back in the 1960s," said Jen Kern, director of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an advocacy group that has led the "living-wage" movement.
...
Twenty states, the District of Columbia and 140 cities and counties have now voted in new living-wage laws. Washington state's minimum wage is $7.63 an hour, highest of any state. And several cities have set their own rates much, much higher: Santa Cruz, Calif., for example, requires that city contractors pay more than $12 an hour, plus health benefits. Lawrence, Kan., sets minimum pay for all workers in the city at 130% of the federal poverty threshold.
Link to Read the Rest of the Article
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Theodore W. Allen: The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1 and 2
(I'm currently moving residences so I have had my Internet service turned off--thus my silence these days, plus I have been enjoying the beautiful spring days we have been gifted with, very important to take advantage of them before the dog days of summer hit Kentucky. Lots of bike riding and reading in parks/coffee shops...)
Theodore W. Allen's book The Invention of the White Race (Summary of Volume 1 and Summary of Volume 2), which I first read as an assigment in Dr. Ronald Strickland's course on Marxism, was paradigm-shifting in moving me past the last vestiges of my early indocrination into tribal allegiances based upon skin/ethnicity. His book, along with my later reading of Many-Headed Hydra and The Wages of Whiteness, outlined how the construction and naturalization of a superior white race had served to keep the working classes from recognizing their true power in numbers, effectively fragmenting them through petty, destructive hatreds.
I was never the same after reading Theodore W. Allen. He pushed me to a higher level, and when I think upon these issues, I am standing on his shoulders.
Michael Dean Benton
In Memoriam: Theodore W. Allen
by Jeffrey B. Perry
Cultural Logic
Theodore W. Allen, a working class intellectual and activist and author of the influential two-volume history The Invention of the White Race (Verso:1994, 1997), died on January 19, 2005, surrounded by friends in his apartment at 97 Brooklyn Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He was 85. The cause of death was cancer, which he had battled for 15 years. Announcement of the death was made by his close friend Linda Vidinha.
Allen, an ardent opponent of white supremacy, spent much of his last forty years researching the role of white supremacy in United States history and examining records of colonial Virginia as he documented and analyzed the development of the "white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth century. His main thesis, that the "white race" developed as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor unrest as manifest in Bacon's Rebellion of 1676-77, was first articulated in February 1974 in a talk he delivered at a Union of Radical Political Economists meeting in New Haven. Versions of that talk were published in 1975 in Radical America and in pamphlet form as "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race."
In the 1960s "Ted" Allen significantly influenced the direction of the student movement and the new left with an article entitled "Can White Radicals Be Radicalized?" which developed the argument that white supremacy, reinforced among European Americans by the "white skin privilege," was the main retardant of working class consciousness in the United States and that efforts at radical social change should direct principal efforts at challenging the system of white supremacy and urging "repudiation of white skin privilege" by European Americans.
Allen was in the forefront in challenging phenotypical (physical appearance-based) definitions of race, in challenging "racism is innate" arguments, in challenging theories that the working class benefits from white supremacy, in calling attention to the crucial role of the buffer social control group in racial oppression, in documenting and analyzing the development of the "white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and in clarifying how "this all-class association of European-Americans held together by 'racial' privileges conferred on laboring class European-Americans relative to African-Americans--[has served] as the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination of national life" in the United States. These contributions differentiate his work from many writers in the rapidly growing white race as "a social and cultural construction" ranks, which his writings helped to spawn.
In The Invention of the White Race Allen focused on Virginia, the first and pattern-setting continental colony. He emphasized that "When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no white people there" and he added that he found "no instance of the official use of the word 'white' as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691." He also found, similar to historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., that throughout most of the seventeenth century conditions for African-American and European-American laborers and bond-servants were very similar. Under such conditions solidarity among the laboring classes reached a peak during Bacon's Rebellion: the capitol (Jamestown) was burned; two thousand rebels forced the governor to flee across the Chesapeake Bay and controlled 6/7 of Virginia's land; and, in the latter stages of the struggle, "foure hundred English and Negroes in Arms" demanded their freedom from bondage.
To Allen, the social control problems highlighted by Bacon's Rebellion "demonstrated beyond question the lack of a sufficient intermediate stratum to stand between the ruling plantation elite and the mass of European-American and African-American laboring people, free and bond." He then detailed how, in the period after Bacon's Rebellion the white race was invented as "a bourgeois social control formation in response to [such] laboring class unrest." He described systematic ruling class policies, which extended privileges to European laborers and bond-servants and imposed and extended harsher disabilities and blocked normal class mobility for African-Americans. Thus, for example, when African-Americans were deprived of their long-held right to vote in Virginia and Governor William Gooch explained in 1735 that the Virginia Assembly had decided upon this curtailment of the franchise in order "to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos," Allen emphasized that this was not an "unthinking decision"! "Rather, it was a deliberate act by the plantation bourgeoisie; it proceeded from a conscious decision in the process of establishing a system of racial oppression, even though it meant repealing an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a century."
For Allen, "The hallmark, the informing principle, of racial oppression in its colonial origins and as it has persisted in subsequent historical contexts, is the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, beneath that of any member of the oppressor group." The key to understanding racial oppression, he wrote, is the social control buffer -- that group in society, which helps to control the poor for the rich. Under racial oppression in Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European ancestry in colonial Virginia after Bacon's Rebellion were denied a role in the social control buffer group, the bulk of which was made up of working-class "whites." In contrast, Allen explained, in the Caribbean "Mulattos" were included in the social control group and were promoted into middle-class status. For him, this was "the key to the understanding the difference between Virginia ruling-class policy of 'fixing a perpetual brand' on African-Americans" and "the policy of the West Indian planters of formally recognizing the middle-class status 'colored' descendant (and other Afro-Caribbeans who earned special merit by their service to the regime)." The difference "was rooted in the objective fact that in the West Indies there were too few laboring-class Europeans to embody an adequate petit bourgeoisie, while in the continental colonies there were too many to be accommodated in the ranks of that class." (In 1676 in Virginia, for example, there were approximately 6,000 European-American bond-laborers and 2,000 African-American bond-laborers.)
In 1996, on radio station WBAI in New York, Allen discussed the subject of "American Exceptionalism" and the much-vaunted "immunity" of the United States to proletarian class-consciousness and its effects. His explanation for the relatively low level of class consciousness was that social control in the United States was guaranteed, not primarily by the class privileges of a petit bourgeoisie, but by the white-skin privileges of laboring class whites; that the ruling class co-opts European-American workers into the buffer social control system against the interests of the working class to which they belong; and that the "white race" by its all-class form, conceals the operation of the ruling class social control system by providing it with a majoritarian "democratic" facade.
Entire Essay
Cultural Logic Interview of Allen
Allen's "In Defense of Affirmative Action in Employment Policy"
Allen's "'Race' and 'Ethnicity': History and the 2000 Census"
Allen's "Be Fair: Reverse Discrimination"
Theodore W. Allen's book The Invention of the White Race (Summary of Volume 1 and Summary of Volume 2), which I first read as an assigment in Dr. Ronald Strickland's course on Marxism, was paradigm-shifting in moving me past the last vestiges of my early indocrination into tribal allegiances based upon skin/ethnicity. His book, along with my later reading of Many-Headed Hydra and The Wages of Whiteness, outlined how the construction and naturalization of a superior white race had served to keep the working classes from recognizing their true power in numbers, effectively fragmenting them through petty, destructive hatreds.
I was never the same after reading Theodore W. Allen. He pushed me to a higher level, and when I think upon these issues, I am standing on his shoulders.
Michael Dean Benton
In Memoriam: Theodore W. Allen
by Jeffrey B. Perry
Cultural Logic
Theodore W. Allen, a working class intellectual and activist and author of the influential two-volume history The Invention of the White Race (Verso:1994, 1997), died on January 19, 2005, surrounded by friends in his apartment at 97 Brooklyn Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He was 85. The cause of death was cancer, which he had battled for 15 years. Announcement of the death was made by his close friend Linda Vidinha.
Allen, an ardent opponent of white supremacy, spent much of his last forty years researching the role of white supremacy in United States history and examining records of colonial Virginia as he documented and analyzed the development of the "white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth century. His main thesis, that the "white race" developed as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor unrest as manifest in Bacon's Rebellion of 1676-77, was first articulated in February 1974 in a talk he delivered at a Union of Radical Political Economists meeting in New Haven. Versions of that talk were published in 1975 in Radical America and in pamphlet form as "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race."
In the 1960s "Ted" Allen significantly influenced the direction of the student movement and the new left with an article entitled "Can White Radicals Be Radicalized?" which developed the argument that white supremacy, reinforced among European Americans by the "white skin privilege," was the main retardant of working class consciousness in the United States and that efforts at radical social change should direct principal efforts at challenging the system of white supremacy and urging "repudiation of white skin privilege" by European Americans.
Allen was in the forefront in challenging phenotypical (physical appearance-based) definitions of race, in challenging "racism is innate" arguments, in challenging theories that the working class benefits from white supremacy, in calling attention to the crucial role of the buffer social control group in racial oppression, in documenting and analyzing the development of the "white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and in clarifying how "this all-class association of European-Americans held together by 'racial' privileges conferred on laboring class European-Americans relative to African-Americans--[has served] as the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination of national life" in the United States. These contributions differentiate his work from many writers in the rapidly growing white race as "a social and cultural construction" ranks, which his writings helped to spawn.
In The Invention of the White Race Allen focused on Virginia, the first and pattern-setting continental colony. He emphasized that "When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no white people there" and he added that he found "no instance of the official use of the word 'white' as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691." He also found, similar to historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., that throughout most of the seventeenth century conditions for African-American and European-American laborers and bond-servants were very similar. Under such conditions solidarity among the laboring classes reached a peak during Bacon's Rebellion: the capitol (Jamestown) was burned; two thousand rebels forced the governor to flee across the Chesapeake Bay and controlled 6/7 of Virginia's land; and, in the latter stages of the struggle, "foure hundred English and Negroes in Arms" demanded their freedom from bondage.
To Allen, the social control problems highlighted by Bacon's Rebellion "demonstrated beyond question the lack of a sufficient intermediate stratum to stand between the ruling plantation elite and the mass of European-American and African-American laboring people, free and bond." He then detailed how, in the period after Bacon's Rebellion the white race was invented as "a bourgeois social control formation in response to [such] laboring class unrest." He described systematic ruling class policies, which extended privileges to European laborers and bond-servants and imposed and extended harsher disabilities and blocked normal class mobility for African-Americans. Thus, for example, when African-Americans were deprived of their long-held right to vote in Virginia and Governor William Gooch explained in 1735 that the Virginia Assembly had decided upon this curtailment of the franchise in order "to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos," Allen emphasized that this was not an "unthinking decision"! "Rather, it was a deliberate act by the plantation bourgeoisie; it proceeded from a conscious decision in the process of establishing a system of racial oppression, even though it meant repealing an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a century."
For Allen, "The hallmark, the informing principle, of racial oppression in its colonial origins and as it has persisted in subsequent historical contexts, is the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, beneath that of any member of the oppressor group." The key to understanding racial oppression, he wrote, is the social control buffer -- that group in society, which helps to control the poor for the rich. Under racial oppression in Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European ancestry in colonial Virginia after Bacon's Rebellion were denied a role in the social control buffer group, the bulk of which was made up of working-class "whites." In contrast, Allen explained, in the Caribbean "Mulattos" were included in the social control group and were promoted into middle-class status. For him, this was "the key to the understanding the difference between Virginia ruling-class policy of 'fixing a perpetual brand' on African-Americans" and "the policy of the West Indian planters of formally recognizing the middle-class status 'colored' descendant (and other Afro-Caribbeans who earned special merit by their service to the regime)." The difference "was rooted in the objective fact that in the West Indies there were too few laboring-class Europeans to embody an adequate petit bourgeoisie, while in the continental colonies there were too many to be accommodated in the ranks of that class." (In 1676 in Virginia, for example, there were approximately 6,000 European-American bond-laborers and 2,000 African-American bond-laborers.)
In 1996, on radio station WBAI in New York, Allen discussed the subject of "American Exceptionalism" and the much-vaunted "immunity" of the United States to proletarian class-consciousness and its effects. His explanation for the relatively low level of class consciousness was that social control in the United States was guaranteed, not primarily by the class privileges of a petit bourgeoisie, but by the white-skin privileges of laboring class whites; that the ruling class co-opts European-American workers into the buffer social control system against the interests of the working class to which they belong; and that the "white race" by its all-class form, conceals the operation of the ruling class social control system by providing it with a majoritarian "democratic" facade.
Entire Essay
Cultural Logic Interview of Allen
Allen's "In Defense of Affirmative Action in Employment Policy"
Allen's "'Race' and 'Ethnicity': History and the 2000 Census"
Allen's "Be Fair: Reverse Discrimination"
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
First Annual Lexington Peace Fair: May 20th
Peace Fair Planned for Lexington
Our Little World:
The First Annual Lexington Peace Fair
May 20, 2006
11 a.m. until 7 p.m.
north of Commonwealth Stadium at the BCTC Campus
Sponsors and organizers include Bluegrass Community and Technical College’s (BCTC) Peace and Justice Coalition, Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Community Farm Alliance, BCTC’s Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Franciscan Peace Center, and the Clergy and Laity Network of Kentucky.
The stated purpose of the event is to model a joyful alternative to exploitation, corporatization, and consumerism. Emphasis will be placed on valuing global knowledge and understanding as well as valuing local production, community, and knowledge of place. Music, art, locally grown food, workshops, and themed booths will be aimed at raising awareness of the peaceful possibilities for a socially, ecologically, and economically sustainable future.
Music:
The beauty of Kentucky music will be showcased alongside regional and global music. The lineup is:
12:00 - 12:15: Introduction and singing of theme song "Our Little World"
12:15 - 1:15: Paula Mannie Nelson, a Cherokee woman from North Carolina, who teaches the Cherokee language as she performs
1:30 - 2:30: Reel World String Band, a Lexington favorite
2:45 - 3:15: La Banda, a Latino band
3:30 - 5:30: Born Cross-Eyed, another Lexington favorite
5:30 - 6:00: Water, Latin jazz and African soul
6:00 - 6:30: Pangaea Drums, headed by Tripp Bratton, drummer extraordinaire
6:30 - 7:00: The event will close with a collective chanting for peace, with accompaniment from the drummers
Booths:
Appalachia Science in the Public Interest
BCTC International Students, Multicultural Affairs
Bluegrass Cycling Club
Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice
Clergy and Laity Network of Kentucky
Four Key Wellness
Franciscan Peace Center, Inc.
Home at Last
International booth - Japan
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth
Kentucky Environmental Education Council (games)
Kentucky Fairness Alliance
Kentucky Heartwood
Kentucky State Nature Preserves
Leaf for Life
MACED
Mexico Solidarity Network
Mountain Summer Justice
NELI
ONE
PeaceCraft
Providence Montessori
Quaker Kids
School of Metaphysics
Sierra Club
UK Greenthumb
UK Nursing
UK Task Force on Sustainability
Unitarian Universalist kids
and others …
Local and global products:
scrap art
handmade cloth diapers
comic books on war and peace
hand-dyed yarns
items recycled from old clothes
jewelry made from clay
homemade animal treats
handmade bags
artwork
African art
and others …
Food and Farm:
Good Foods Coop will provide vegan, vegetarian, and meat dishes, with a focus on locally sourced food
Home Pickins
Community Farm Alliance
Shooting Star Nursery
Terrapin Hill Farm
UK Organic Agriculture
Bluegrass Farmers Market
and others …
Workshops:
Workshops highlighting various perspectives on peaceful living will be offered. The schedule includes:
11:00 a.m. until noon: Peace...Let it begin with me, taught by Anita Courtney, Certified Kripalu Yoga Instructor. Come and practice the art of cultivating inner peace through yoga postures, breathing and visualization. You’ll feel relaxed and energized for the rest of the day and learn some tools for incorporating relaxation into your daily life. Suitable for those who have never tried yoga, as well as experienced practitioners.
12:10-1:10: The Hidden Destruction of the Appalachian Mountains, by Dave Cooper, mechanical engineer turned social/environmental activist. The program includes a 22-minute slide show featuring traditional Appalachian mountain music and aerial photographs of Eastern Kentucky mountains. After discussing the impacts of mountaintop removal on coalfield communities, attention will focus on ways to reduce personal consumption of electricity from coal-fired power plants.
1:20-2:20: Towards a Justice that Heals, by Marilyn Huegerich, OSF, and Patricia Griffin, Franciscan Peace Center. In the face of crime or conflict, restorative justice is a philosophy and approach that views these matters as primarily harm done to people and relationships. Restorative justice is a process that offers support and provides opportunities for voluntary participation and communication between those affected (victims, offenders, community). The process strives towards a conversion from the spirit of punishment to the spirit of healing.
2:30-3:30: Living in a Sustainability-Oriented Community, by Mary Ann Ghosal and Thyne Rutrough, Curtis Pike Community, Richmond, KY. At this time, when human impact on the environment is increasingly harmful, a small group of Christians has come together to pray and to work for environmental sustainability and peace. Members of the community will share information about their identity and their current environmental efforts, accomplishments, and future goals.
3:40-4:45: Small-scale Urban Gardening, by Derek Law, UK Horticulture Research Analyst. Production of vegetable crops in densely populated urban areas to supplement our diets will be the focus of this presentation. Topics to be discussed will be site evaluation, container gardening, composting, Bio-intensive gardening techniques, and edible landscaping. Examples of containers and gardening tools will be on display and free vegetable starts will be given to participants.
5:00-6:30: Organizing 101, by Dave Newton, Organizer for Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. This workshop is designed to help us understand how to use our collective power for positive change in our community. We'll identify problems in our community, examine the root causes of those problems, and explore several different approaches to change.
Children for Peace:
The Children for Peace entries will be displayed. There will be ribbons, four $50 prizes, and a commemorative booklet.
May 20th is also Bike Lexington day. Consider participating in that biking event and then riding (or walking) to the BCTC campus (directly north of Commonwealth Stadium) for a day of peace and possibilities. For more information or to reserve table space, please call Rebecca Glasscock at (859) 246-6319 or email rebecca.glasscock@kctcs.edu. For updates, go to BCTC Peace and Justice Coalition
Monday, May 15, 2006
Searching for Wolf Boy: The Art of Jimmy Gordon
Contact:
Patrick McNeese / 859.254.2270
pmmcneese@juno.com
122 North Upper St.
Lexington, KY. 40507
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Patrick McNeese’s most recent documentary film, Searching for Wolf Boy: The Art of Jimmy Gordon, will be shown Saturday, May 20th at the Lexington Public Library Theater located downtown. The screening is free and open to the public.
Showtime is 4:00 pm.
The 26-minute film is an impressionistic portrait of Lexington surrealist painter and musician Jimmy Gordon and was completed in 2005. McNeese, a musician and a filmmaker, describes the work as a highly improvisational and approximate biography of the artist. “We set out to make a documentary about being a creative person in this society but I think the film ended up functioning more like a poem.” he said. The film features Gordon’s surrealistic paintings, art cars and his unusual musical compositions. It includes interviews with fellow artist Bob Morgan and Lexington arts patron, Marian “Mike” Broadus. Philip High composed and performed much of the original music for the film.
The production was awarded a Director’s Citation Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival last February at the New Jersey City University. A project of the Thomas A. Edison Media Arts Consortium, the Black Maria festival takes its name from the world’s first motion picture studio built in 1893 at Thomas Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey laboratory and is committed to Edison’s legacy of thinking “outside the box”. Now in its 25th year, the festival’s supporters include; The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Eastman Kodak Corporation.
Previous documentary films produced and directed by Mr. McNeese include; Of Myth and Muse: Stephen Foster and My Old Kentucky Home (2003), Hemplands (1999), Duke Madison: Life and Music (1992). He has also collaborated on two narrative films,
serving as production designer and art director on The Congress of Wonders (1995) and also on 100 Proof (1997), which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. For more information go to patrickmcneese.com
--------------------------
-pH
Philip High
--------------------------
graphic design & illustration
--------------------------
Website
Lexington, KY
Patrick McNeese / 859.254.2270
pmmcneese@juno.com
122 North Upper St.
Lexington, KY. 40507
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Patrick McNeese’s most recent documentary film, Searching for Wolf Boy: The Art of Jimmy Gordon, will be shown Saturday, May 20th at the Lexington Public Library Theater located downtown. The screening is free and open to the public.
Showtime is 4:00 pm.
The 26-minute film is an impressionistic portrait of Lexington surrealist painter and musician Jimmy Gordon and was completed in 2005. McNeese, a musician and a filmmaker, describes the work as a highly improvisational and approximate biography of the artist. “We set out to make a documentary about being a creative person in this society but I think the film ended up functioning more like a poem.” he said. The film features Gordon’s surrealistic paintings, art cars and his unusual musical compositions. It includes interviews with fellow artist Bob Morgan and Lexington arts patron, Marian “Mike” Broadus. Philip High composed and performed much of the original music for the film.
The production was awarded a Director’s Citation Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival last February at the New Jersey City University. A project of the Thomas A. Edison Media Arts Consortium, the Black Maria festival takes its name from the world’s first motion picture studio built in 1893 at Thomas Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey laboratory and is committed to Edison’s legacy of thinking “outside the box”. Now in its 25th year, the festival’s supporters include; The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Eastman Kodak Corporation.
Previous documentary films produced and directed by Mr. McNeese include; Of Myth and Muse: Stephen Foster and My Old Kentucky Home (2003), Hemplands (1999), Duke Madison: Life and Music (1992). He has also collaborated on two narrative films,
serving as production designer and art director on The Congress of Wonders (1995) and also on 100 Proof (1997), which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. For more information go to patrickmcneese.com
--------------------------
-pH
Philip High
--------------------------
graphic design & illustration
--------------------------
Website
Lexington, KY
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Gregory Colbert: Ashes and Snow
(I just got a comment from Velvet Babe on a past post about Colbert and how much she recently enjoyed seeing the exhibit--so I thought I would repost it since it is still traveling arounf the country)
Ashes and Snow
Exhibition by Gregory Colbert
Orion
The Creation of Myth
by Susanna Helm
More Images From the Exhibit
The Nomadic Museum
Ashes and Snow
Exhibition by Gregory Colbert
Orion
The Creation of Myth
by Susanna Helm
Myths are allegories that illuminate sacred truths. Creation. Prometheus and Pandora. Adam and Eve. Central to our interpretation of not only the numinous, but of the world around us, they are meant, partly, to instruct, to "teach us how to conduct ourselves during the stages of our lives," in the words of Joseph Campbell, powering all our actions and beliefs.
Myths awaken in us the wonder of the child within. Children experience an innate bond with the natural world, a bond supported by the stories and ancient legends passed down through cultures. As we age, the bond is gradually diminished -- stories forgotten and myths untold -- and replaced with logic and pragmatism. The myths that once validated a social order based on interconnectedness have been supplanted by newer ones -- the myth of individualism, of cultural superiority, of progress and prosperity. And the social order they now support is one that seems ever farther removed from the numinous. The belief systems they engender lead us farther and farther from the still-necessary underlying truths of the old stories. Our separation extends across time to religion, geopolitics, race, class, and even species. The old bond broken, our mindless self-interests range across the globe, treading more and more cruelly and carelessly upon the natural world in a dangerous dance of dissolution.
Creation myths often spoke of sacred animals that played integral parts in the formation of the natural world, but these beliefs no longer seem essential to our industrialized consciousness. Animals are no longer esteemed as the sacred basis for existence, but rather as resources to be employed in our service. At a time when respect for our environment and the creatures living within it appears largely absent from our actions, it is worrisome to have strayed so far from the mythology of our cultures.
If humanity is to tread more carefully, to guard that its footprint does not irreparably mar that on which it depends, it is in desperate need of a new mythology -- one that transcends the artificial boundaries of culture, nation, religion, and species; a mythology that carries with it the innocence of childhood, the compassion born of a connection to all living things, the shared recollection of oneness.
Gregory Colbert's timeless epic of serenity, grace, and poetic connectedness bestows this new mythology upon an age in need. In Colbert's images, humans and animals are woven together into a tender and majestic tapestry, each thread connected to the other. Speaking to us through the layers of our logic and reason, he reaches out to the innocent children we might still become.
And not a moment too soon.
More Images From the Exhibit
The Nomadic Museum
Hard-core conservatives fleeing Bush’s side
Hard-core conservatives fleeing Bush’s side: Concerns over spending, immigration policy running high, experts say
By Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker
Washington Post, Reposted on MSNBC
Disaffection over spending and immigration have caused conservatives to take flight from President Bush and the Republican Congress at a rapid pace in recent weeks, sending Bush's approval ratings to record lows and presenting a new threat to the GOP's 12-year reign on Capitol Hill, according to White House officials, lawmakers and new polling data.
Bush and Congress have suffered a decline in support from almost every part of the conservative coalition over the past year, a trend that has accelerated with alarming implications for Bush's governing strategy.
The Gallup polling organization recorded a 13-percentage-point drop in Republican support for Bush in the past couple of weeks. These usually reliable voters are telling pollsters and lawmakers they are fed up with what they see as out-of-control spending by Washington and, more generally, an abandonment of core conservative principles.
To Read the Entire Article
By Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker
Washington Post, Reposted on MSNBC
Disaffection over spending and immigration have caused conservatives to take flight from President Bush and the Republican Congress at a rapid pace in recent weeks, sending Bush's approval ratings to record lows and presenting a new threat to the GOP's 12-year reign on Capitol Hill, according to White House officials, lawmakers and new polling data.
Bush and Congress have suffered a decline in support from almost every part of the conservative coalition over the past year, a trend that has accelerated with alarming implications for Bush's governing strategy.
The Gallup polling organization recorded a 13-percentage-point drop in Republican support for Bush in the past couple of weeks. These usually reliable voters are telling pollsters and lawmakers they are fed up with what they see as out-of-control spending by Washington and, more generally, an abandonment of core conservative principles.
To Read the Entire Article
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
***CALLIN' ALL CALI STUDENT LEADERS AND ORGANIZERS!***
Wire Tap
***CALLIN' ALL CALI STUDENT LEADERS AND ORGANIZERS!***
2006 California Campus Leadership Project NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS!
The League of Pissed Off Voters is looking for 12 student organizers from across the state who will receive stipends to mobilize voters on their campuses in the Fall of 2006. Participating students will receive on-the ground training in Los Angeles, working with community based organizations including Bus Riders' Union, SCOPE/AGENDA, ALERT, and SEIU. Student Organizers will receive ongoing mentorship and support from the League and will be paired up with local community-based
organizations near their campus.
We welcome creative and fun approaches to engage students; these organizers will have the opportunity to shape this work fit for their campus community. We are looking to identify strong leaders who are organizing on their campuses, are interested in electoral organizing, want to further develop their skills, and need support.
We also want to take this off-campus and will be linking these student organizers with community-based organizations in the area as mentors in hopes that these leaders will continue to do social justice community work after graduation.
The deadline for applications is May 31st, 2006.
For more info or to apply contact: Marianne Cariaso at marianne@indyvoter.org or
call (415) 606-9193.
***CALLIN' ALL CALI STUDENT LEADERS AND ORGANIZERS!***
2006 California Campus Leadership Project NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS!
The League of Pissed Off Voters is looking for 12 student organizers from across the state who will receive stipends to mobilize voters on their campuses in the Fall of 2006. Participating students will receive on-the ground training in Los Angeles, working with community based organizations including Bus Riders' Union, SCOPE/AGENDA, ALERT, and SEIU. Student Organizers will receive ongoing mentorship and support from the League and will be paired up with local community-based
organizations near their campus.
We welcome creative and fun approaches to engage students; these organizers will have the opportunity to shape this work fit for their campus community. We are looking to identify strong leaders who are organizing on their campuses, are interested in electoral organizing, want to further develop their skills, and need support.
We also want to take this off-campus and will be linking these student organizers with community-based organizations in the area as mentors in hopes that these leaders will continue to do social justice community work after graduation.
The deadline for applications is May 31st, 2006.
For more info or to apply contact: Marianne Cariaso at marianne@indyvoter.org or
call (415) 606-9193.
Amnesty International Concert: May 12th
Amnesty International Concert
The show is put on to benefit and raise awareness for Amnesty International. It will be in the Southgate House Ballroom, the date is Friday, May 12, door open 8:00 and the show is 8:30, the cost is only $6. The bands are Campfire Crush, Chocolate Horse, Image Afrobeat Band, The Minni-Thins, Philosopher's Stone, The Frankl Project and John Parker's Blinge 9.
for more information
513-582-9978
The show is put on to benefit and raise awareness for Amnesty International. It will be in the Southgate House Ballroom, the date is Friday, May 12, door open 8:00 and the show is 8:30, the cost is only $6. The bands are Campfire Crush, Chocolate Horse, Image Afrobeat Band, The Minni-Thins, Philosopher's Stone, The Frankl Project and John Parker's Blinge 9.
for more information
513-582-9978
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Thoughts on Blogging by a Poorly Masked Academic
Excerpt of an interview Craig Saper conducted with me for his upcoming essay on blogging:
1. How long have you had a blog? When did you start producing it?
My first blog was Dialogic which I started in January of 2004. It is my only personal blog. I have a blog for a film society and one I run for an activist group. I have approximately 10 blogs for various classes. Of course because Dialogic is political and I haven't received tenure yet, it is the only one I do not operate under my birth name--although it is very easy to figure out who I am and many of my students/colleagues know about the site.
2. How did you choose the title of your blog?
I'm frustrated by the monologic tendencies (across the political spectrum) of American culture and was feeling kind of isolated in my conservative environment (I'm in Kentucky, a red state, and was teaching then at the conservative University of Kentucky). I was reading a lot of Bakhtin, Foucault and Habermas when I started Dialogic and was wondering how I could encourage dialogic or polylogic communication/engagement (as opposed to monologic controlling tendencies or cacophonic disorder) in academia, and even more importantly, beyond its limited world. It was my anguished howl into the dark abyss... wondering whether there was anything/anyone who might startle me by looking/talking back from the stygian blackness. My anguish was over the second time I had lost faith in a religion, the first time when I was a teen I had lost my deeply held Christian faith as a result of being exposed to its hypocrisies and illusions, this time, in a similar way, it was the loss of faith in the myths of American democracy (as practiced in a corporate-capitalist state).
3. Do you know many academics who have blogs? Are there any that you read regularly? Any that are of particularly high quality, or provocatively insightful?
At this moment some of my regular stops are Jodi Dean, Ariadne's Labyrinth, Beppeblog, Bitch PHD, Bluegrass Roots (collective), Daimonic Reality, Elenamary, Feral Scholar, Habermasian Reflections, Impetus Green Room, Impetus Java House, Jeffrey Caldwell, Jill/TXT, Lawrence Lessig, Long Sunday (collective), Mahzood (for his links which provide me with amazing intellectual derives--he writes on the blog in a language I can't read--but we email from time to time), Majikthise, Mark Dery, Michael Berube, New Teacher (collective), Progressive Blog Alliance (collective which includes many academics), Pas-au-Dela, Prarie Mary, Prophet or Madman, Red Harvest, Thebewilderness, WhereProject
These are just the ones I "know" (or assume) are in academia ... I'm sure there are more that I have left out, there are also a huge number of former-academics blogging.
4. Do you think blogs represent a supplement to academia?
I'm kind of resistant to this form of classification, or the need for it, because if we do this then blogging will become much more formalized, regulated and restricted for academics. I'm skeptical whether the academy will ever accept "personal" blogging as a form of professional credit (and wonder whether they should?)
5. Do you think blogs have changed academic pursuits?
Yes, they can be very beneficial in extending the range of one's interests, but at the same time they can be distracting and destructive (of one's writing time in particular)
6. Reading some blogs by academics, including yours, I get the sense that blogs could serve something like the progress of knowledge or an alternative to traditional research. Do you think blogs have changed academia?
Very little so far because most academics do not blog--the list I provided is scattered (I don't think any of them are in the same city). What it is doing is making knowledge and learning more public. This is why academia has an anxiety in regards to blogging. They have had a monopoly over knowledge-production/dissemination and this is changing. At the same time I am very skeptical about online learning, my college, like most institutions of higher learning, are seizing upon the Internet as the wave of future-learning... my experience is that online forums, like blogs, are best at exposing people to knew ideas and making connections across spaces. What worries me about these forums is when people solely rely on the Internet for learning and communicating... a simple walk outdoors, a visit to a library, participating in a community/activist/artistic event, is much more powerful and progressive than all the blogging or sifting we do on the Internet. Once again, though, this in no way is a dismissive gesture on my part--we live in a social situation in which the Mainstream Media have been consolidated and censored to a point where we need open, independent voices... the most inexpensive and open place these days in which people can communicate across vast distances and peoples is the Internet.
7. Could one build a curriculum based on a group of blogs by cultural critics (associated with academia)?
Definitely... I use blogs and websites in my courses. Last year I experimented and taught a course that used websites/blogs (the students also created their own blogs). It is very helpful in thinking about "voice" and visual aspects of compositions--and, of course, there is the wonderful diversity of voices online, for instance, check out Global Voices
8. Your blog, in particular, suggests an alternative (at least in its title) to higher learning -- do certain blogs offer an alternative and/or parallel type of academia?
Yes, this is my hope. Increase access to knowledge/information... provide easy access to cultural capital for those outside the confines of academia... strengthen our public culture. Now I realize that it will not do any good to have countless voices shouting out into the cyber-wilderness, but we are seeing positive moves toward collective action and this is but the early days of blogging. This is a vital moment in the development of blogging (and the Internet) will we allow it to remain open to the free distribution of information/knowledge in the hopes that we will reverse the trends towards apathy/silence in our public culture(s) or, are we going to allow the corporate-industrial-academic-military industries to move in and claim these open spaces as private property to be regulated, classified and controlled?
A big question we all should be concerned about...
----------------------------------------------------
I'm very interested in hearing what others have to say in regards to these questions, or if you have other questions that you think are important... if you post your own answers (or new questions) please let me know...
Thanks,
Michael Benton
1. How long have you had a blog? When did you start producing it?
My first blog was Dialogic which I started in January of 2004. It is my only personal blog. I have a blog for a film society and one I run for an activist group. I have approximately 10 blogs for various classes. Of course because Dialogic is political and I haven't received tenure yet, it is the only one I do not operate under my birth name--although it is very easy to figure out who I am and many of my students/colleagues know about the site.
2. How did you choose the title of your blog?
I'm frustrated by the monologic tendencies (across the political spectrum) of American culture and was feeling kind of isolated in my conservative environment (I'm in Kentucky, a red state, and was teaching then at the conservative University of Kentucky). I was reading a lot of Bakhtin, Foucault and Habermas when I started Dialogic and was wondering how I could encourage dialogic or polylogic communication/engagement (as opposed to monologic controlling tendencies or cacophonic disorder) in academia, and even more importantly, beyond its limited world. It was my anguished howl into the dark abyss... wondering whether there was anything/anyone who might startle me by looking/talking back from the stygian blackness. My anguish was over the second time I had lost faith in a religion, the first time when I was a teen I had lost my deeply held Christian faith as a result of being exposed to its hypocrisies and illusions, this time, in a similar way, it was the loss of faith in the myths of American democracy (as practiced in a corporate-capitalist state).
3. Do you know many academics who have blogs? Are there any that you read regularly? Any that are of particularly high quality, or provocatively insightful?
At this moment some of my regular stops are Jodi Dean, Ariadne's Labyrinth, Beppeblog, Bitch PHD, Bluegrass Roots (collective), Daimonic Reality, Elenamary, Feral Scholar, Habermasian Reflections, Impetus Green Room, Impetus Java House, Jeffrey Caldwell, Jill/TXT, Lawrence Lessig, Long Sunday (collective), Mahzood (for his links which provide me with amazing intellectual derives--he writes on the blog in a language I can't read--but we email from time to time), Majikthise, Mark Dery, Michael Berube, New Teacher (collective), Progressive Blog Alliance (collective which includes many academics), Pas-au-Dela, Prarie Mary, Prophet or Madman, Red Harvest, Thebewilderness, WhereProject
These are just the ones I "know" (or assume) are in academia ... I'm sure there are more that I have left out, there are also a huge number of former-academics blogging.
4. Do you think blogs represent a supplement to academia?
I'm kind of resistant to this form of classification, or the need for it, because if we do this then blogging will become much more formalized, regulated and restricted for academics. I'm skeptical whether the academy will ever accept "personal" blogging as a form of professional credit (and wonder whether they should?)
5. Do you think blogs have changed academic pursuits?
Yes, they can be very beneficial in extending the range of one's interests, but at the same time they can be distracting and destructive (of one's writing time in particular)
6. Reading some blogs by academics, including yours, I get the sense that blogs could serve something like the progress of knowledge or an alternative to traditional research. Do you think blogs have changed academia?
Very little so far because most academics do not blog--the list I provided is scattered (I don't think any of them are in the same city). What it is doing is making knowledge and learning more public. This is why academia has an anxiety in regards to blogging. They have had a monopoly over knowledge-production/dissemination and this is changing. At the same time I am very skeptical about online learning, my college, like most institutions of higher learning, are seizing upon the Internet as the wave of future-learning... my experience is that online forums, like blogs, are best at exposing people to knew ideas and making connections across spaces. What worries me about these forums is when people solely rely on the Internet for learning and communicating... a simple walk outdoors, a visit to a library, participating in a community/activist/artistic event, is much more powerful and progressive than all the blogging or sifting we do on the Internet. Once again, though, this in no way is a dismissive gesture on my part--we live in a social situation in which the Mainstream Media have been consolidated and censored to a point where we need open, independent voices... the most inexpensive and open place these days in which people can communicate across vast distances and peoples is the Internet.
7. Could one build a curriculum based on a group of blogs by cultural critics (associated with academia)?
Definitely... I use blogs and websites in my courses. Last year I experimented and taught a course that used websites/blogs (the students also created their own blogs). It is very helpful in thinking about "voice" and visual aspects of compositions--and, of course, there is the wonderful diversity of voices online, for instance, check out Global Voices
8. Your blog, in particular, suggests an alternative (at least in its title) to higher learning -- do certain blogs offer an alternative and/or parallel type of academia?
Yes, this is my hope. Increase access to knowledge/information... provide easy access to cultural capital for those outside the confines of academia... strengthen our public culture. Now I realize that it will not do any good to have countless voices shouting out into the cyber-wilderness, but we are seeing positive moves toward collective action and this is but the early days of blogging. This is a vital moment in the development of blogging (and the Internet) will we allow it to remain open to the free distribution of information/knowledge in the hopes that we will reverse the trends towards apathy/silence in our public culture(s) or, are we going to allow the corporate-industrial-academic-military industries to move in and claim these open spaces as private property to be regulated, classified and controlled?
A big question we all should be concerned about...
----------------------------------------------------
I'm very interested in hearing what others have to say in regards to these questions, or if you have other questions that you think are important... if you post your own answers (or new questions) please let me know...
Thanks,
Michael Benton
Friday, May 05, 2006
Stephen Colbert: White House Correspondents Dinner
Stephen Colbert skewers the president, his cabinet, and the Washington lackeys (including the Washington press). I heard this is getting no play on mainstream TV (I don't have TV, so I have no idea). Interesting the effect comedy has on people.
Colbert Smart Bomb: Opening Monologue
Dining on the Press Corps
Colbert Smart Bomb: Opening Monologue
Dining on the Press Corps
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Kemet: You Make Me Wet... But I Don't Want You
(Thanks to Nila and Satan Mcnugget who encouraged me to visit this site again. The title of this poem caught my attention at Saul William's poetry posting board, and, having caught my attention, the poem blew me away with its honesty and power. Original link for the poem--Kemet I hope you don't mind me posting it here, if so, let me know and I will take it down.)
He sipped his merlot as if he were sipping the wine of violence
“ So… can I taste you?”
Come again???
I wanted to bow thine ears to his understandings
So many come in sheep’s clothing
Smelling good and looking fine
This brotha had his shit together
And he was given me what I needed
Mental Stimulation…… DAMN
How good does it feel to your ears
To have someone speak and know what the fuck they are talking about
I mean… We all try to sound important
Read a few books and take a few classes to encourage the plight of knowledge
Defeating the odds as to how many professional minorities you can say that you know
He is intelligent
Good Looking
And he did his homework on me
He gets points for that
Anyone who pays attention to my vowels and consonants
knows what words they will make
“Proud Single Mother “
Three words in agreement as to who I am
“I’m not looking for anything serious right now”
That’s ok
Neither am I
My schedule can get pretty crazed. Most women can’t handle that
You would think that with me being a doctor, they would understand
They should be so lucky
: Anoyance#1: AROGANCE
“”” voice in head -
“Who in da hell does he think he is?”
They should be so lucky.
AS if he were God almighty himself
*******************
Kind of cocky there aren’t we?
“Not at all.” Most women complain about not having a good man
but when he shows up, they still complain.
He pulls me closer to him as we Salsa
My breasts lean up against his chest
He views my motherhood delights like he wants me to nurse him
The music changes paces
It gets slower
“I think I want to sit this one O*#@!!!ut.”
Before I could finish, he pushes his tongue in my mouth
He grabs the back of my head
Pushing my tongue further into his
Damn… I think my mouth just got rapped
I walk back slowly to our table in a trance
Not that I didn’t want to give this man some wet love
This was our second date
He deserved that much
But the fact that he took it like that…..
: Anoyance#2: GREED
”voice in head-
Ok..Ok…
no this mutha fucka didn’t just do that shit!!!!
Calm down
Calm down
breathe
*************
“Excuse me. I have to go to the ladies room.”
I rush off towards the bathroom
Thinking to myself, did I do anything to lead him on?
We were just kicking it
We both agreed that’s all it would be
Nothing more
If it ever came to a point where we thought sex was needed
We both would agree upon it and handle our business like adults
Shit
I’m not gonna lie
It’s been a minute since I’ve had some good sex
But I know for a fact I didn’t conduct my ways towards that insight
Damn
Why in the world did he do that?
Where is my phone?
I dial the only reasonable person who would tell me I am over reacting
I drop the phone and begin to cry
“Are you ok Miss?”
“She isn’t there!”
Who?
Do You need a ride somewhere?
No
No. I’m ok
I look at my cell phone
Staring at the number
“Akeelah’s cell”
I wipe my face and head out of the rest room
“I ordered you another glass of Merlot”
I’m good
He slips me this plastic card
“What’s this?”
I rented us a suite for the night
“You rented what?”
I figured we both could relax and unwind a bit
I have had a tiresome week and I know you have as well
We both need to chill and relax
I look at the card. And then back at him
I sit
Contemplating the idea of a man wanting to pleasure me all night
Should have been a mutual insolent
That way, my mind wouldn’t be telling the dick craving that I have been having
To presume position
Spread and receive
I have never been that damn easy
Nor am I a tease
He already had 2 strikes against him this afternoon
And hell, this is 3
: Anoyance#3: CONTROLLING
”voice in head-
Shit
It wasn’t mutually planed
I love spontaneity
But this is getting to be overbearing
He assumes that I would go
Let’s keep it real
I need some sex
If he would have played his cards right……
*****************
sure...you make me wet
but I don't want you
Kemet
© 2006 Kennethia Jacobs
--------------------
Intermediate Sphere
Kemet's My Space
Kemet's Blog
Kemet's Music
He sipped his merlot as if he were sipping the wine of violence
“ So… can I taste you?”
Come again???
I wanted to bow thine ears to his understandings
So many come in sheep’s clothing
Smelling good and looking fine
This brotha had his shit together
And he was given me what I needed
Mental Stimulation…… DAMN
How good does it feel to your ears
To have someone speak and know what the fuck they are talking about
I mean… We all try to sound important
Read a few books and take a few classes to encourage the plight of knowledge
Defeating the odds as to how many professional minorities you can say that you know
He is intelligent
Good Looking
And he did his homework on me
He gets points for that
Anyone who pays attention to my vowels and consonants
knows what words they will make
“Proud Single Mother “
Three words in agreement as to who I am
“I’m not looking for anything serious right now”
That’s ok
Neither am I
My schedule can get pretty crazed. Most women can’t handle that
You would think that with me being a doctor, they would understand
They should be so lucky
: Anoyance#1: AROGANCE
“”” voice in head -
“Who in da hell does he think he is?”
They should be so lucky.
AS if he were God almighty himself
*******************
Kind of cocky there aren’t we?
“Not at all.” Most women complain about not having a good man
but when he shows up, they still complain.
He pulls me closer to him as we Salsa
My breasts lean up against his chest
He views my motherhood delights like he wants me to nurse him
The music changes paces
It gets slower
“I think I want to sit this one O*#@!!!ut.”
Before I could finish, he pushes his tongue in my mouth
He grabs the back of my head
Pushing my tongue further into his
Damn… I think my mouth just got rapped
I walk back slowly to our table in a trance
Not that I didn’t want to give this man some wet love
This was our second date
He deserved that much
But the fact that he took it like that…..
: Anoyance#2: GREED
”voice in head-
Ok..Ok…
no this mutha fucka didn’t just do that shit!!!!
Calm down
Calm down
breathe
*************
“Excuse me. I have to go to the ladies room.”
I rush off towards the bathroom
Thinking to myself, did I do anything to lead him on?
We were just kicking it
We both agreed that’s all it would be
Nothing more
If it ever came to a point where we thought sex was needed
We both would agree upon it and handle our business like adults
Shit
I’m not gonna lie
It’s been a minute since I’ve had some good sex
But I know for a fact I didn’t conduct my ways towards that insight
Damn
Why in the world did he do that?
Where is my phone?
I dial the only reasonable person who would tell me I am over reacting
I drop the phone and begin to cry
“Are you ok Miss?”
“She isn’t there!”
Who?
Do You need a ride somewhere?
No
No. I’m ok
I look at my cell phone
Staring at the number
“Akeelah’s cell”
I wipe my face and head out of the rest room
“I ordered you another glass of Merlot”
I’m good
He slips me this plastic card
“What’s this?”
I rented us a suite for the night
“You rented what?”
I figured we both could relax and unwind a bit
I have had a tiresome week and I know you have as well
We both need to chill and relax
I look at the card. And then back at him
I sit
Contemplating the idea of a man wanting to pleasure me all night
Should have been a mutual insolent
That way, my mind wouldn’t be telling the dick craving that I have been having
To presume position
Spread and receive
I have never been that damn easy
Nor am I a tease
He already had 2 strikes against him this afternoon
And hell, this is 3
: Anoyance#3: CONTROLLING
”voice in head-
Shit
It wasn’t mutually planed
I love spontaneity
But this is getting to be overbearing
He assumes that I would go
Let’s keep it real
I need some sex
If he would have played his cards right……
*****************
sure...you make me wet
but I don't want you
Kemet
© 2006 Kennethia Jacobs
--------------------
Intermediate Sphere
Kemet's My Space
Kemet's Blog
Kemet's Music
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Thinking About Ways to Research, Write and Teach About Social Movements, Human Rights and Collective Actions (Progressive and Regressive)
(OK, I'm developing a course on contemporary social movements... as is typical I'm diving into the deep end, and will probably flounder around a bit ... so anyone want to throw me something to float on, in the form of suggestions of books, essays, films, websites, please do, and I will make this post a revolving resource, as I come across stuff, and people give me suggestions, I will add them to the list)
30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle [Documentary on the 1999 WTO Street Protests]
ACLU Freedom Files: Dissent
Acting on Faith: Women's New Religious Activism in America
Adbusters [Canadian magazine that is at the center of a cultural jammers movement—Kall Lasn is the publisher]
African American Art and Political Dissent During the Harlem Renaissance
The African American Odyssey: The Quest for Full Citizenship
Ali, Tariq and Susan Watkins. 1968: Marching in the Streets. NY: Free Press, 1998.
Alinsky, Saul. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. NY: Vintage, 1989.
Allen, Robert C. Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003.
Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Andriolo, Karin. "The Twice Killed: Imaging Protest Suicide." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 66-76.
Armstrong, Charles K. The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2004.
Art Crimes
Art of the Street: Time Photo Essay (2005)
Avni, Ronit. "Mobilizing Hope: Beyond the Shame-Based Model in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 205-214.
Bacon, David. The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border. Berkeley: University of California Press 2004.
Bakan, Joel. The Corporation — The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power NY: Viking 2004
Battle for the Minds
Beckerman, Gal. "Indymedia: Between Passion and Pragmatism." Columbia Review of Journalism (reposted on AlterNet: September 17, 2003)
Bigelow, Bill and Bob Peterson, eds. Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in An Unjust World. Rethinking Schools Press, 2002.
The Bill of Rights (U.S.)
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Biology Professor Resigns Over Government Use of Plant Research (Martha Crouch: Democracy Now Profile)
Blight, David, ed. The Underground Railroad in History and Memory: Passages to Freedom. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004
Branford, Sue and Jan Rocha. Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil. London: Latin American Bureau, 2002.
Brazil's Landless Workers Movement: Friends of the MST
Brecher, Jeremy, et al. Globalization From Below. Boston: South End Press, 2000.
Brief History of Political Cartooning
Bringing Down a Dictator
A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Camp, Stephanie M.H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. University of North Carolina P, 2004.
Carrigan, William D. The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916. U of Illinois P, 2004.
Carson, Clayborne, et al, eds. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle. NY: Penguin, 1991.
Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity. Volume II: The Information Age. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Cities, Art, and Recovery: What Comes After?
Civil Rights Movement Timeline
Coates, Ken S. A Global History of Indigenous Peoples: Struggles and Survival Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
Cohn, Elizabeth. Wal-Mart: An Interdisciplinary College Curriculum
Coleman, Kate. The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First! San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005.
The Corporation (Documentary)
Cox, Oliver C. Capitalism as a System. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1964.
Croucher, Sheila. Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Cunningham, David. There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. University of California Press, 2005.
Davis, Colin J. Waterfront Revolts: New York and London Dockworkers, 1946–61. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2003.
The Design of Dissent
Difficult Dialogues: Promoting Pluralism and Academic Freedom on Campus (Ford Foundation)
Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
---. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Duncombe, Stephen. Cultural Resistance Reader. NY: Verso, 2002.
Eastman, W. Dean and Kevin McGrath. "These Names Had Life and Meaning: Students document antebellum African American civic engagement." Common-Place 5.3 (April 2005)
Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975.
European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour and Migration
Evans, Sara M., ed. Journeys That Opened the World: Women, Student Christian Movements, and Social Justice, 1955–1975. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
Eyes Wide Open: An Exhibition on the Human Cost of the Iraq War
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. NY: Grove Press, 1966.
Feenberg, Andrew and Jim Freedman. When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2001.
A Force More Powerful: Using Nonviolent Conflict to Achieve Democracy and Human Rights
Freedom on My Mind [Documentary]
Freeway Blogger
Galano, Ann Maria and Sebastio Salgado. Land Hungry in Brazil (UNESCO Photo Essay)
Gandhi's Salt March (History Channel: also an archive of 50 of Gandhi's speeches)
Gardner, Morgan. Linking Activism: Ecology, Social Justice, and Education for Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2005.
Gelinas, Jacques B. Juggernaut Politics: Understanding Predatory Globalization. London & New York: Zed Books 2003.
Giraffe Heroes Project
Glasbeek, Harry. Wealth by Stealth — Corporate Crime, Corporate Law and the Perversion of Democracy Toronto: Between the Lines 2002.
The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It
Government Accountability Project
Graffiti & Street Art (European)
Granville, Johanna. "'Caught With Jam On Our Fingers': Radio Free Europe and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956." Diplomatic History 29.5 (November 2005): 811-840.
Gray, Patty A. The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement: Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far-North. Cambridge UP, 2005.
Gregory, Sam. "Transnational Storytelling: Human Rights, WITNESS, and Video Advocacy." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 195-204.
Halper, Stefan and Jonathan Clarke. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Halstead, Fred. Out Now: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War. Achor Foundation, 1991.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. NY: The Penguin Press, 2004.
Harlan County, U.S.A.
Hearts and Minds
Hellin, John and Sophie Higman. Feeding the Market: South American Farmers, Trade and Globalization. London: ITDG Publishing 2003.
Heywood, Leslie, ed. The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism. Greenwood Press, 2005.
Horn, Jeff. "Machine-breaking in England and France during the Age of Revolution." Labour/Le Travail #55 (Spring 2005)
How the Terminator (Gene) Terminates: An explanation for the non-scientist of a remarkable patent for killing second generation seeds of crop plants
Human & Constitutional Rights: U.S. States and Territories
Human & Constitutional Rights: U.S. Documents
Human Rights in Brazil Reports 2003/2004>
Humphrey, Thomas J. Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution. Northern Illinois UP, 2004.
International Union of Sex Workers
Iron Jawed Angels
Important Documents about Liberty
Jacobs, Dale, ed. The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.
Justice John Marshall Harlan's Great Dissent
Kaplan, Temma. Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868-1903. Princeton University Press, 1977.
---. Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements. NY: Routledge, 1996.
---. Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso's Barcelona Berkeley: University of California, 1993.
---. Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 2004.
Kaufman, Cynthia. Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change. Boston: South End Press, 2003.
Kentucky Fairness Campaign
King, Martin Luther, Jr. I Have a Dream (1963)
Klein, Naomi. No Fences, No Borders: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. NY: Picador, 2002.
Kunstler, William. Politics on Trial: Five Famous Trials of the 20th Century. Ocean Press, 2003: 130 pages.
Kurlansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. NY: Ballantine Books, 2003.
Labour/Le Travail [Journal: Available Online]
Land: And How It Gets That Way
Larmer, Miles. "Unrealistic Expectations?: Zambia'z Mineworkers From Independence to the One-Party State, 1964-1972." Journal of Historical Sociology 18.4 (December 2005): 318-352.
Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam. Quill, 2000: 215 pages
Last Chance for Animals
Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli, eds. The Globalization Reader. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Leistyna, Pepi, ed. Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
LiP Magazine (Summer 2005 issue) “The ‘Constructively Negative’ Sacred Cows Issue [Constructive critiques of social movements]
Martinez-Alier, Joan. “’Environmental Justice’ (Local and Global).” The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998: 312-326.
Matewan
McCarthy, Timothy Patrick and John McMillian, eds. The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the Radical American Tradition. NY: The New Press, 2003.
McKeen, Wendy. Money in Their Own Name: The Feminist Voice in Poverty Debate in Canada, 1970–1995. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004.
McLagan, Meg. "Introduction: Making Human Rights Claims Public." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 191-195.
Media Coalition
Merry, Sally Engle. "Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 38-51.
Mertes, Tom. A Movements of Movements: Is Another World Possible? NY: Verso, 2004.
Meyer, David S. Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and the State. NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty (1860)
Mitchell, Don and Lynn A. Stahelli. "Permitting Dissent: Parsing the Fine Geography of Dissent in America." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (December 2005): 796-813
Mixon, Gregory. The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City. UP of Florida, 2005.
Munck, Ronaldo, ed., Labour and Globalisation: Results and Prospects Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2004.
MST
Nash, John C., ed. Social Movements: An Athropological Reader. Blackwell, 2005.
National Coalition Against Censorship
National Whistleblower Center
Network of Sex Work Projects
Newman, Paul Douglas. Fries Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution. U of Pennsylvania P, 2004.
Noddings, Nel. “Global Citizenship: Promises and Problems” and “Place-Based Education to Preserve the Earth and Its People” Educating Citizens for Global Awareness. Ed. Nel Noddings. NY: Columbia University Press/Teachers College Press, 2005: 1-22; 57-69.
Notes From Nowhere Collective. We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. NY: Verso, 2003. [Available online]
Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony
Orwell Rolls in His Grave
Peace: Historical Movements
Peace: Theory and Action
Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Petras, James and Henry Veltmeyer. System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free Market Capitalism Fernwood, 2003.
Pojmann, Wendy. "Emancipation or Liberation?: Women's Associations and the Italian Liberation Movement." The Historian 67.1 (March 2005): 73-96.
Pope, Jim. "Worker Lawmaking, Sit-Down Strikes, and the Shaping of American Industrial Relations, 1935–1958." Law and History Review 24.1 (Spring 2006)
Project on Government Oversight
Public Citizen
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
Rael, Patrick. "Free Black Activism in the Antebellum North." The History Teacher 39.2 (February 2006)
Roddick, Anita. Take It Personally: How To Make Conscious Choices to Change the World. Red Wheel/Weiser, 2002.
Roots of Resistance: The Story of the Underground Railroad
Rowlands, Mark. Animals Like Us. Verso, 2002
Roy, Arundhati. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Boston: South End Press, 2004.
Rudnick, Lois P., et al. American Identities: An Introductory Textbook. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. [Source documents of American 20th Century social movements.]
Sakolsky, Ron and Fred Wei-Han Ho. Sounding Off: Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1995.
Shaw, Randy. The Activist’s Handbook. Berkely: University of California Press, 2001.
Sierra Club
Sir, No Sir
Sklair, Leslie. “Social Movements and Global Capital.” The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998: 291-311.
Snodgrass, Michael. Deference and Defiance in Monterrey: Workers, Paternalism, and Revolution in Mexico, 1890–1950. New York: Cambridge University Press 2003.
Snow, David A. The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Solnit, David. Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2003.
Sowards, Adam M. "William O. Douglas's Wilderness Politics: Public Protest and Committees of Correspondence in the Pacific Northwest" The Western Historical Quarterly 37.1 (Spring 2006)
Speed, Shannon. "At the Crossroads of Human Rights and Anthropology: Toward a Critically Engaged Activist Research." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 66-76.
Stone, Daniel ed. Jewish Radicalism In Winnipeg, 1905–1960: Jewish Life and Times, Volume VIII Winnipeg: Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada 2002.
Stonebanks, Roger. Fighting for Dignity: The Ginger Goodwin Story. St. John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History 2004.
Streetsy
Striffler, Steve. In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2002.
Sunstein, Cass. Why Societies Need Dissent. Harvard UP, 2003.
Tétreault, Mary Ann and Robin L. Teske, eds. Partial Truths and the Politics of Community. (Feminist Approaches to Social Movements, Community, and Power: Volume II) Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
They Created the First Modern Agenda for Liberty: The "Levellers" in 17th Century England
Thirst (documentary)
Thoreau, Henry David. Civil Disobedience (1849)
Tilly, Charles. Social Movements, 1768-2004. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004.
Torchin, Leshu. "Ravished Armenia: Visual Media, Humanitarian Advocacy, and the Formation of Witnessing Publics." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 214-220.
Twain, Mark. The Mysterious Stranger
---. To the Person Sitting in Darkness...
---. The War Prayer
Vienet, Rene. Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, 1968. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1992.
Wage Peace Campaign
Wal-Mart Watch
The War At Home
Wasn't That a Time: A Century of Struggle (Photo-Essay)
We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement
Wesolowsky, Tony. Fear of the Polish Plumber In These Times (April 13, 2006) [Protests of European Union labor policies]
Winter Soldier
Wooster Collective
Wright, Angus and Wendy Wolford. To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil. Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2003.
---. "Now It is Time: The MST and Grassroots Land Reform in Brazil"
Wrigley, Chris. British Trade Unions since 1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002.
Yates, Michael D. Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press 2003.
---. Why Unions Matter. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1998.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. Social Mindscapes. Harvard UP, 1998
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. NY: Perennial Classics, 1999.
Zinn, Howard and Anthony Arnove, ed. Voices of a People’s History of the United States. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2004. [Original source documents of the histories from Zinn’s landmark history.]
30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle [Documentary on the 1999 WTO Street Protests]
ACLU Freedom Files: Dissent
Acting on Faith: Women's New Religious Activism in America
Adbusters [Canadian magazine that is at the center of a cultural jammers movement—Kall Lasn is the publisher]
African American Art and Political Dissent During the Harlem Renaissance
The African American Odyssey: The Quest for Full Citizenship
Ali, Tariq and Susan Watkins. 1968: Marching in the Streets. NY: Free Press, 1998.
Alinsky, Saul. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. NY: Vintage, 1989.
Allen, Robert C. Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003.
Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Andriolo, Karin. "The Twice Killed: Imaging Protest Suicide." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 66-76.
Armstrong, Charles K. The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2004.
Art Crimes
Art of the Street: Time Photo Essay (2005)
Avni, Ronit. "Mobilizing Hope: Beyond the Shame-Based Model in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 205-214.
Bacon, David. The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border. Berkeley: University of California Press 2004.
Bakan, Joel. The Corporation — The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power NY: Viking 2004
Battle for the Minds
Beckerman, Gal. "Indymedia: Between Passion and Pragmatism." Columbia Review of Journalism (reposted on AlterNet: September 17, 2003)
Bigelow, Bill and Bob Peterson, eds. Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in An Unjust World. Rethinking Schools Press, 2002.
The Bill of Rights (U.S.)
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Biology Professor Resigns Over Government Use of Plant Research (Martha Crouch: Democracy Now Profile)
Blight, David, ed. The Underground Railroad in History and Memory: Passages to Freedom. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004
Branford, Sue and Jan Rocha. Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil. London: Latin American Bureau, 2002.
Brazil's Landless Workers Movement: Friends of the MST
Brecher, Jeremy, et al. Globalization From Below. Boston: South End Press, 2000.
Brief History of Political Cartooning
Bringing Down a Dictator
A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Camp, Stephanie M.H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. University of North Carolina P, 2004.
Carrigan, William D. The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916. U of Illinois P, 2004.
Carson, Clayborne, et al, eds. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle. NY: Penguin, 1991.
Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity. Volume II: The Information Age. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Cities, Art, and Recovery: What Comes After?
Civil Rights Movement Timeline
Coates, Ken S. A Global History of Indigenous Peoples: Struggles and Survival Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
Cohn, Elizabeth. Wal-Mart: An Interdisciplinary College Curriculum
Coleman, Kate. The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First! San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005.
The Corporation (Documentary)
Cox, Oliver C. Capitalism as a System. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1964.
Croucher, Sheila. Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Cunningham, David. There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. University of California Press, 2005.
Davis, Colin J. Waterfront Revolts: New York and London Dockworkers, 1946–61. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2003.
The Design of Dissent
Difficult Dialogues: Promoting Pluralism and Academic Freedom on Campus (Ford Foundation)
Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
---. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Duncombe, Stephen. Cultural Resistance Reader. NY: Verso, 2002.
Eastman, W. Dean and Kevin McGrath. "These Names Had Life and Meaning: Students document antebellum African American civic engagement." Common-Place 5.3 (April 2005)
Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975.
European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour and Migration
Evans, Sara M., ed. Journeys That Opened the World: Women, Student Christian Movements, and Social Justice, 1955–1975. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
Eyes Wide Open: An Exhibition on the Human Cost of the Iraq War
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. NY: Grove Press, 1966.
Feenberg, Andrew and Jim Freedman. When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2001.
A Force More Powerful: Using Nonviolent Conflict to Achieve Democracy and Human Rights
Freedom on My Mind [Documentary]
Freeway Blogger
Galano, Ann Maria and Sebastio Salgado. Land Hungry in Brazil (UNESCO Photo Essay)
Gandhi's Salt March (History Channel: also an archive of 50 of Gandhi's speeches)
Gardner, Morgan. Linking Activism: Ecology, Social Justice, and Education for Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2005.
Gelinas, Jacques B. Juggernaut Politics: Understanding Predatory Globalization. London & New York: Zed Books 2003.
Giraffe Heroes Project
Glasbeek, Harry. Wealth by Stealth — Corporate Crime, Corporate Law and the Perversion of Democracy Toronto: Between the Lines 2002.
The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It
Government Accountability Project
Graffiti & Street Art (European)
Granville, Johanna. "'Caught With Jam On Our Fingers': Radio Free Europe and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956." Diplomatic History 29.5 (November 2005): 811-840.
Gray, Patty A. The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement: Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far-North. Cambridge UP, 2005.
Gregory, Sam. "Transnational Storytelling: Human Rights, WITNESS, and Video Advocacy." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 195-204.
Halper, Stefan and Jonathan Clarke. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Halstead, Fred. Out Now: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War. Achor Foundation, 1991.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. NY: The Penguin Press, 2004.
Harlan County, U.S.A.
Hearts and Minds
Hellin, John and Sophie Higman. Feeding the Market: South American Farmers, Trade and Globalization. London: ITDG Publishing 2003.
Heywood, Leslie, ed. The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism. Greenwood Press, 2005.
Horn, Jeff. "Machine-breaking in England and France during the Age of Revolution." Labour/Le Travail #55 (Spring 2005)
How the Terminator (Gene) Terminates: An explanation for the non-scientist of a remarkable patent for killing second generation seeds of crop plants
Human & Constitutional Rights: U.S. States and Territories
Human & Constitutional Rights: U.S. Documents
Human Rights in Brazil Reports 2003/2004>
Humphrey, Thomas J. Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution. Northern Illinois UP, 2004.
International Union of Sex Workers
Iron Jawed Angels
Important Documents about Liberty
Jacobs, Dale, ed. The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.
Justice John Marshall Harlan's Great Dissent
Kaplan, Temma. Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868-1903. Princeton University Press, 1977.
---. Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements. NY: Routledge, 1996.
---. Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso's Barcelona Berkeley: University of California, 1993.
---. Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 2004.
Kaufman, Cynthia. Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change. Boston: South End Press, 2003.
Kentucky Fairness Campaign
King, Martin Luther, Jr. I Have a Dream (1963)
Klein, Naomi. No Fences, No Borders: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. NY: Picador, 2002.
Kunstler, William. Politics on Trial: Five Famous Trials of the 20th Century. Ocean Press, 2003: 130 pages.
Kurlansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. NY: Ballantine Books, 2003.
Labour/Le Travail [Journal: Available Online]
Land: And How It Gets That Way
Larmer, Miles. "Unrealistic Expectations?: Zambia'z Mineworkers From Independence to the One-Party State, 1964-1972." Journal of Historical Sociology 18.4 (December 2005): 318-352.
Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam. Quill, 2000: 215 pages
Last Chance for Animals
Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli, eds. The Globalization Reader. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Leistyna, Pepi, ed. Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
LiP Magazine (Summer 2005 issue) “The ‘Constructively Negative’ Sacred Cows Issue [Constructive critiques of social movements]
Martinez-Alier, Joan. “’Environmental Justice’ (Local and Global).” The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998: 312-326.
Matewan
McCarthy, Timothy Patrick and John McMillian, eds. The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the Radical American Tradition. NY: The New Press, 2003.
McKeen, Wendy. Money in Their Own Name: The Feminist Voice in Poverty Debate in Canada, 1970–1995. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004.
McLagan, Meg. "Introduction: Making Human Rights Claims Public." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 191-195.
Media Coalition
Merry, Sally Engle. "Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 38-51.
Mertes, Tom. A Movements of Movements: Is Another World Possible? NY: Verso, 2004.
Meyer, David S. Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and the State. NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty (1860)
Mitchell, Don and Lynn A. Stahelli. "Permitting Dissent: Parsing the Fine Geography of Dissent in America." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (December 2005): 796-813
Mixon, Gregory. The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City. UP of Florida, 2005.
Munck, Ronaldo, ed., Labour and Globalisation: Results and Prospects Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2004.
MST
Nash, John C., ed. Social Movements: An Athropological Reader. Blackwell, 2005.
National Coalition Against Censorship
National Whistleblower Center
Network of Sex Work Projects
Newman, Paul Douglas. Fries Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution. U of Pennsylvania P, 2004.
Noddings, Nel. “Global Citizenship: Promises and Problems” and “Place-Based Education to Preserve the Earth and Its People” Educating Citizens for Global Awareness. Ed. Nel Noddings. NY: Columbia University Press/Teachers College Press, 2005: 1-22; 57-69.
Notes From Nowhere Collective. We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. NY: Verso, 2003. [Available online]
Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony
Orwell Rolls in His Grave
Peace: Historical Movements
Peace: Theory and Action
Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Petras, James and Henry Veltmeyer. System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free Market Capitalism Fernwood, 2003.
Pojmann, Wendy. "Emancipation or Liberation?: Women's Associations and the Italian Liberation Movement." The Historian 67.1 (March 2005): 73-96.
Pope, Jim. "Worker Lawmaking, Sit-Down Strikes, and the Shaping of American Industrial Relations, 1935–1958." Law and History Review 24.1 (Spring 2006)
Project on Government Oversight
Public Citizen
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
Rael, Patrick. "Free Black Activism in the Antebellum North." The History Teacher 39.2 (February 2006)
Roddick, Anita. Take It Personally: How To Make Conscious Choices to Change the World. Red Wheel/Weiser, 2002.
Roots of Resistance: The Story of the Underground Railroad
Rowlands, Mark. Animals Like Us. Verso, 2002
Roy, Arundhati. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Boston: South End Press, 2004.
Rudnick, Lois P., et al. American Identities: An Introductory Textbook. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. [Source documents of American 20th Century social movements.]
Sakolsky, Ron and Fred Wei-Han Ho. Sounding Off: Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1995.
Shaw, Randy. The Activist’s Handbook. Berkely: University of California Press, 2001.
Sierra Club
Sir, No Sir
Sklair, Leslie. “Social Movements and Global Capital.” The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998: 291-311.
Snodgrass, Michael. Deference and Defiance in Monterrey: Workers, Paternalism, and Revolution in Mexico, 1890–1950. New York: Cambridge University Press 2003.
Snow, David A. The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Solnit, David. Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2003.
Sowards, Adam M. "William O. Douglas's Wilderness Politics: Public Protest and Committees of Correspondence in the Pacific Northwest" The Western Historical Quarterly 37.1 (Spring 2006)
Speed, Shannon. "At the Crossroads of Human Rights and Anthropology: Toward a Critically Engaged Activist Research." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 66-76.
Stone, Daniel ed. Jewish Radicalism In Winnipeg, 1905–1960: Jewish Life and Times, Volume VIII Winnipeg: Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada 2002.
Stonebanks, Roger. Fighting for Dignity: The Ginger Goodwin Story. St. John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History 2004.
Streetsy
Striffler, Steve. In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2002.
Sunstein, Cass. Why Societies Need Dissent. Harvard UP, 2003.
Tétreault, Mary Ann and Robin L. Teske, eds. Partial Truths and the Politics of Community. (Feminist Approaches to Social Movements, Community, and Power: Volume II) Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
They Created the First Modern Agenda for Liberty: The "Levellers" in 17th Century England
Thirst (documentary)
Thoreau, Henry David. Civil Disobedience (1849)
Tilly, Charles. Social Movements, 1768-2004. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004.
Torchin, Leshu. "Ravished Armenia: Visual Media, Humanitarian Advocacy, and the Formation of Witnessing Publics." American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 214-220.
Twain, Mark. The Mysterious Stranger
---. To the Person Sitting in Darkness...
---. The War Prayer
Vienet, Rene. Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, 1968. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1992.
Wage Peace Campaign
Wal-Mart Watch
The War At Home
Wasn't That a Time: A Century of Struggle (Photo-Essay)
We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement
Wesolowsky, Tony. Fear of the Polish Plumber In These Times (April 13, 2006) [Protests of European Union labor policies]
Winter Soldier
Wooster Collective
Wright, Angus and Wendy Wolford. To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil. Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2003.
---. "Now It is Time: The MST and Grassroots Land Reform in Brazil"
Wrigley, Chris. British Trade Unions since 1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002.
Yates, Michael D. Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press 2003.
---. Why Unions Matter. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1998.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. Social Mindscapes. Harvard UP, 1998
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. NY: Perennial Classics, 1999.
Zinn, Howard and Anthony Arnove, ed. Voices of a People’s History of the United States. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2004. [Original source documents of the histories from Zinn’s landmark history.]
Erik Reece: Moving Mountains
Orion
NOT SINCE THE GLACIERS PUSHED toward these ridgelines a million years ago have the Appalachian Mountains been as threatened as they are today. But the coal-extraction process decimating this landscape, known as mountaintop removal, has generated little press beyond the region. The problem, in many ways, is one of perspective. From interstates and lowlands, where most communities are clustered, one simply doesn't see what is happening up there. Only from the air can you fully grasp the magnitude of the devastation. If you were to board, say, a small prop plane at Zeb Mountain, Tennessee, and follow the spine of the Appalachian Mountains up through Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, you would be struck not by the beauty of a densely forested range older than the Himalayas, but rather by inescapable images of ecological violence. Near Pine Mountain, Kentucky, you'd see an unfolding series of staggered green hills quickly give way to a wide expanse of gray plateaus pocked with dark craters and huge black ponds filled with a toxic byproduct called coal slurry. The desolation stretches like a long scar up the Kentucky-Virginia line, before eating its way across southern West Virginia.
Central Appalachia provides much of the country's coal, second only to Wyoming's Powder River Basin. In the United States, one hundred tons of coal are extracted every two seconds. Around 70 percent of that coal comes from strip mines, and over the last twenty years, an increasing amount comes from mountaintop removal sites. In the name of corporate expedience, coal companies have turned from excavation to simply blasting away the tops of the mountains. To achieve this, they use the same mixture of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel that Timothy McVeigh employed to level the Murrow Building in Oklahoma City—except each detonation is ten times as powerful, and thousands of blasts go off each day across central Appalachia. Hundreds of feet of forest, topsoil, and sandstone—the coal industry calls all of this "overburden"—are unearthed so bulldozers and front-end loaders can more easily extract the thin seams of rich, bituminous coal that stretch in horizontal layers throughout these mountains. Almost everything that isn't coal is pushed down into the valleys below. As a result, 6,700 "valley fills" were approved in central Appalachia between 1985 and 2001. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that over 700 miles of healthy streams have been completely buried by mountaintop removal and thousands more have been damaged. Where there once flowed a highly braided system of headwater streams, now a vast circuitry of haul roads winds through the rubble. From the air, it looks like someone had tried to plot a highway system on the moon.
To Read the Entire Essay
NOT SINCE THE GLACIERS PUSHED toward these ridgelines a million years ago have the Appalachian Mountains been as threatened as they are today. But the coal-extraction process decimating this landscape, known as mountaintop removal, has generated little press beyond the region. The problem, in many ways, is one of perspective. From interstates and lowlands, where most communities are clustered, one simply doesn't see what is happening up there. Only from the air can you fully grasp the magnitude of the devastation. If you were to board, say, a small prop plane at Zeb Mountain, Tennessee, and follow the spine of the Appalachian Mountains up through Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, you would be struck not by the beauty of a densely forested range older than the Himalayas, but rather by inescapable images of ecological violence. Near Pine Mountain, Kentucky, you'd see an unfolding series of staggered green hills quickly give way to a wide expanse of gray plateaus pocked with dark craters and huge black ponds filled with a toxic byproduct called coal slurry. The desolation stretches like a long scar up the Kentucky-Virginia line, before eating its way across southern West Virginia.
Central Appalachia provides much of the country's coal, second only to Wyoming's Powder River Basin. In the United States, one hundred tons of coal are extracted every two seconds. Around 70 percent of that coal comes from strip mines, and over the last twenty years, an increasing amount comes from mountaintop removal sites. In the name of corporate expedience, coal companies have turned from excavation to simply blasting away the tops of the mountains. To achieve this, they use the same mixture of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel that Timothy McVeigh employed to level the Murrow Building in Oklahoma City—except each detonation is ten times as powerful, and thousands of blasts go off each day across central Appalachia. Hundreds of feet of forest, topsoil, and sandstone—the coal industry calls all of this "overburden"—are unearthed so bulldozers and front-end loaders can more easily extract the thin seams of rich, bituminous coal that stretch in horizontal layers throughout these mountains. Almost everything that isn't coal is pushed down into the valleys below. As a result, 6,700 "valley fills" were approved in central Appalachia between 1985 and 2001. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that over 700 miles of healthy streams have been completely buried by mountaintop removal and thousands more have been damaged. Where there once flowed a highly braided system of headwater streams, now a vast circuitry of haul roads winds through the rubble. From the air, it looks like someone had tried to plot a highway system on the moon.
To Read the Entire Essay
Nixon White House Counsel John Dean and Pentagon Papers Leaker Daniel Ellsberg on Watergate and the Abuse of Presidential Power from Nixon to Bush
Nixon White House Counsel John Dean and Pentagon Papers Leaker Daniel Ellsberg on Watergate and the Abuse of Presidential Power from Nixon to Bush
Hosted by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive we are joined by two figures who played central roles in the fall of President Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal of a generation ago, John Dean and Daniel Ellsberg. Dean served as President Nixon's chief counsel. He exposed the government-sanctioned break-in of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the government analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers and earned himself a spot on Nixon's enemy list. Dean and Ellsberg join us in our firehouse studio to discuss Watergate and the abuse of presidential power from Nixon to Bush.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Hosted by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive we are joined by two figures who played central roles in the fall of President Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal of a generation ago, John Dean and Daniel Ellsberg. Dean served as President Nixon's chief counsel. He exposed the government-sanctioned break-in of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the government analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers and earned himself a spot on Nixon's enemy list. Dean and Ellsberg join us in our firehouse studio to discuss Watergate and the abuse of presidential power from Nixon to Bush.
To Watch/Listen/Read
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