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First of the Year: 2009
This is the second volume in the First of the Year Series. Contributors like Armond White, Philip Levine, Donna Gaines, Lawrence Goodwyn, Irving Louis Horowitz, Charles O'Brien, Fredric Smoler, Paul Berman, and Amiri Baraka are back (and blazing). And there are important new voices in the First mix, such as Vincent Harding, Roxane Johnson, and Bob Levin. If there is a leitmotif to this edition, it is the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. First aims to be up to the minute of this moment.As Benj DeMott notes "a glance at this volume confirms the margin is still the center for us." And that margin stretches from Harlem to the world. There are tal...
The Left at War
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Bush’s belligerent response fractured the American left—partly by putting pressure on little-noticed fissures that had appeared a decade earlier. In a masterful survey of the post-9/11 landscape, renowned scholar Michael Bérubé revisits and reinterprets the major intellectual debates and key players of the last two decades, covering the terrain of left debates in the United States over foreign policy from the Balkans to 9/11 to Iraq, and over domestic policy from the culture wars of the 1990s to the question of what (if anything) is the matter with Kansas. The Left at War brings the history of cultural studies to bear on the present crisis—a history ...
Many Minds, One Heart
How did the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee break open the caste system in the American South between 1960 and 1965? In this innovative study, Wesley Hogan explores what SNCC accomplished and, more important, how it fostered significant social change in such a short time. She offers new insights into the internal dynamics of SNCC as well as the workings of the larger civil rights and Black Power movement of which it was a part. As Hogan chronicles, the members of SNCC created some of the civil rights movement's boldest experiments in freedom, including the sit-ins of 1960, the rejuvenated Freedom Rides of 1961, and grassroots democracy projects in Georgia and Mississippi. She highl...
Supergrow
Supergrow is a collection of fifteen essays that appeared between 1966 and 1969 in publications such as the American Scholar, the New York Times, Antioch Review, Esquire, and the Saturday Review. Author Benjamin DeMott discusses everything under the sun--music, improving one's sex life, violence in Mississippi, theater, student revolts--but a single theme unifies the material: people ought to use their imaginations more. The book starts from the assumption that our troubles stem from failures of the imagination. Overcome by mass media, we are often too oblivious to fresh and original ideas. As DeMott states, "the right use of the constructive imagination increases the effectiveness of our en...
Holding the Center
Politicians and pundits often scorn polarization and compromise—the intransigence of the former and the feebleness of the latter—without suggesting an alternative way. Polarization, when opposing forces are equal or close to equal in strength, leads to stalemate. Compromise threatens to betray one's conviction about what is essential. Ideally, a leader must combine conviction about what ought to be done with an open-minded awareness of unintended consequences.The social sciences are or should be based, largely, on the premise that people are historical and social beings. Holding the Center follows this tradition, while focusing on the trimming aspect. In nautical terms, trimming indicate...
Punk Rockers' Revolution
For punk rockers, music and art have often been used as tools for resisting and accommodating the interests of society's dominant classes. During the late 1970s, a predominantly white, male working/middle-class counterculture began to develop what is now known as punk rock. This book shows how punk rock serves to both subvert and accommodate the interest of late-capitalist American society by looking at the trends in the ideas, values, and beliefs transmitted through punk lyrical messages, specifically through the content of three punk record labels and how they have evolved over time. The impact of punk will continue because it is a product of the changing face of alternative cultural spaces - spaces that impact and are impacted by increasingly hostile and exploitive relationships between and within oppressor and oppressed groups.
Love and Theft : Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstre...
First of the Year: 2010
This is the third volume of the First of the Year annual series. Contributors such as Armond White, Philip Levine, Charles O'Brien, Uri Avnery, Donna Gaines, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer, and Amiri Baraka are back (and fractious as ever). And First's family of writers keeps growing. This volume includes vital new voices such as A. B. Spellman, Bernard Avishai, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Diane di Prima.First never shies away from hot button issues?Fredric Smoler, for example, offers a definitive consideration of America's recent history with torture. But First's approach to current political firestorms is often marked by a cool sense of the past. History is always in the mix when First writers exam...
Droppin' Science
Rap and hip hop, the music and culture rooted in African American urban life, bloomed in the late 1970s on the streets and in the playgrounds of New York City. This critical collection serves as a historical guide to rap and hip hop from its beginnings to the evolution of its many forms and frequent controversies, including violence and misogyny. These wide-ranging essays discuss white crossover, women in rap, gangsta rap, message rap, raunch rap, Latino rap, black nationalism, and other elements of rap and hip hop culture like dance and fashion. An extensive bibliography and pictorial profiles by Ernie Pannicolli enhance this collection that brings together the foremost experts on the pop culture explosion of rap and hip hop. Author note: William Eric Perkins is a Faculty Fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois House at the University of Pennsylvania, and an Adjunct Professor of Communications at Hunter College, City University of New York.
SNCC's Stories
Formed in 1960 in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was a high-profile civil rights collective led by young people. For Howard Zinn in 1964, SNCC members were “new abolitionists,” but SNCC pursued radical initiatives and Black Power politics in addition to reform. It was committed to grassroots organizing in towns and rural communities, facilitating voter registration and direct action through “projects” embedded in Freedom Houses, especially in the South: the setting for most of SNCC’s stories. Over time, it changed from a tight cadre into a disparate group of many constellations but stood out among civil rights organizations for its pa...
