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Illustrates the ways that the “war on crime” became conjoined—aesthetically, politically, and rhetorically—with the emergence of gangsta rap as a lucrative and deeply controversial subgenre of hip-hop In The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era, Bryan J. McCann argues that gangsta rap should be viewed as more than a damaging reinforcement of an era’s worst racial stereotypes. Rather, he positions the works of key gangsta rap artists, as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings ...
This eye-opening and well-researched companion to the first volume of Executing Democracy enters the death-penalty discussion during the debates of 1835 and 1843, when pro-death penalty Calvinist minister George Barrell Cheever faced off against abolitionist magazine editor John O’Sullivan. In contrast to the macro-historical overview presented in volume 1, volume 2 provides micro-historical case studies, using these debates as springboards into the discussion of the death penalty in America at large. Incorporating a wide range of sources, including political poems, newspaper editorials, and warring manifestos, this second volume highlights a variety of perspectives, thus demonstrating the centrality of public debates about crime, violence, and punishment to the history of American democracy. Hartnett’s insightful assessment bears witness to a complex national discussion about the political, metaphysical, and cultural significance of the death penalty.
Boldly and eloquently contributing to the argument against the prison system in the United States, these provocative essays offer an ideological and practical framework for empowering prisoners instead of incarcerating them. Experts and activists who have worked within and against the prison system join forces here to call attention to the debilitating effects of a punishment-driven society and offer clear-eyed alternatives that emphasize working directly with prisoners and their communities. Edited by Stephen John Hartnett, the volume offers rhetorical and political analyses of police culture, the so-called drug war, media coverage of crime stories, and the public-school-to-prison pipeline....
No modern president has had as much influence on American national politics as Franklin D. Roosevelt. During FDR’s administration, power shifted from states and localities to the federal government; within the federal government it shifted from Congress to the president; and internationally, it moved from Europe to the United States. All of these changes required significant effort on the part of the president, who triumphed over fierce opposition and succeeded in remaking the American political system in ways that continue to shape our politics today. Using the metaphor of the good neighbor, Mary E. Stuckey examines the persuasive work that took place to authorize these changes. Through t...
Christian Fundamentalism is a doctrine and a discourse in tension. Fundamentalists describe themselves as both marginal and a majority. They announce the imminent end of the world while building massive megachurches and political lobbying organizations. They speak of the need for purity and separation from the outside world while continually innovating in their search for more effective and persuasive ways to communicate with and convert outsiders. To many outsiders, Fundamentalist speech seems contradictory, irrational, intolerant, and dangerously antidemocratic. To understand the complexity of Fundamentalism, we have to look inside the tensions and the paradoxes. We have to take seriously ...
The San/Bushmen are one of the most studied people in anthropology, subjects of research going back one hundred years, of documentaries, and even of popular movies (The Gods Must Be Crazy). This intriguing new work on the San is a team-based ethnography, collaborative (one of the writers is married to a member of the community), reflexive (the authors become characters in the book themselves), and literary (with poetry, dialogue, interviews, photography, and first person accounts, as well as traditional ethnographic description). In this book, South Africans are studying other South Africans, in a new environment in which many San are no longer hunter gatherers, but are activist and engaged in cultural tourism. It will be an exciting counterpoint to traditional ethnographies and stories about the San people, for anthropologists and Africanists.
Before coming to the academy, Nathaniel Kohn was a screenwriter and producer in Hollywood, London, and South Africa. He produced the epic film Zulu Dawn (with Burt Lancaster, Peter O'Toole and 6,000 Zulu extras), and was involved in other projects in that wheel-and-deal world. Moving to the communications research world, he struggled to apply theory to his personal experiences, showing how everyday life and the pursuits of Hollywood interact and how communication and cultural theory (mis)inform those exchanges. The book is filled with priceless tales of finding a black market money changer in Johannesburg to pay off his extras during the filming of Zulu Dawn, the on again/off again nature of movie projects, the obsessed women and dreadful men, the egos, and the duplicity. His experimental writing style--descriptive ethnography, imaginary screen dialogue, recounted conversations--makes this a highly readable work.
The Pull of the Earth is Laurie Thorp's dirt-under-the-fingernails ethnography of four years in an elementary school garden and the ways in which this garden catalyzed cultural transformation and inspired hope, growth, and community. Filled with photographs, sketches, poetry, and journal entries, Thorp's engaging book describes the educational benefits of learning through the environment: lessons on nutrition, the rhythms and cycles found in nature, and the stability found in entering a reciprocal relationship with the land. It will be a valuable resource for educators, environmentalists, and ethnographers.
The Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, have often been portrayed in reductive, polarized terms; either as saintly activists or dangerous rebels. Cultural anthropologists Duncan Earle and Jeanne Simonelli, drawing on decades-long relationships and fieldwork, attained a collegiality with the Zapatistas that reveals a more complex portrait of a people struggling with self-determination on every level. Seeking a new kind of experimental ethnography, Earle & Simonelli have chronicled a social experiment characterized by resistance, autonomy and communality. Combining their own compelling narrative as participant-observers, and those of their Chiapas compadres, the authors effectively call for an activist approach to research. The result is a unique ethnography that is at once analytical and deeply personal. Uprising of Hope will be compelling reading for scholars and general readers of anthropology, social justice, ethnography, Latin American history and ethnic studies.
Creating Conservatism charts the vital role of canonical post–World War II (1945–1964) books in generating, guiding, and sustaining conservatism as a political force in the United States. Dedicated conservatives have argued for decades that the conservative movement was a product of print, rather than a march, a protest, or a pivotal moment of persecution. The Road to Serfdom, Ideas Have Consequences, Witness, The Conservative Mind, God and Man at Yale, The Conscience of a Conservative, and other mid-century texts became influential not only among conservative office-holders, office-seekers, and well-heeled donors but also at dinner tables, school board meetings, and neighborhood reading...