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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.ISBN: 9780385474542
Publication Date: 1994
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Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie One of The New York Times'snbsp;Ten Best Books of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction An NPR "Great Reads" Book, a Chicago Tribune Best Book, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Seattle Times Best Book, an Entertainment Weekly Top Fiction Book, a Newsday Top 10 Book, and a Goodreads Best of the Year pick. A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun. Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion--for each other and for their homeland.nbsp;ISBN: 9780307455925
Publication Date: 2014
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The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt In this text, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems are identified as diminishing human agency and political freedom - the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions. This edition contains an expanded index and an introduction that analyzes the text's argument and its present relevance.ISBN: 0226025985
Publication Date: 1998
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The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.ISBN: 9780679744726
Publication Date: 1992
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Blues People by Amiri Baraka & Leroi Jones "The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music." So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.ISBN: 9780688184742
Publication Date: 1999
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And We Are Not Saved by Derek Bell A distinguished legal scholar and civil rights activist employs a series of dramatic fables and dialogues to probe the foundations of America’s racial attitudes and raise disturbing questions about the nature of our society.ISBN: 9780465003297
Publication Date: 1989
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The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, and brilliantly introduced by Judith Thurman, Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to analyze the Western notion of "woman" and to explore the power of sexuality. Sixty years after its initial publication, "The Second Sex" is still as eye-opening and pertinent as ever. This triumphant and genuinely revolutionary book began as an exceptional woman's attempt to find out who and what she was. Drawing on extensive interviews with women of every age and station of life, masterfully synthesizing research about women's bodies and psyches as well as their historic and economic roles, "The Second Sex" is an encyclopedic and cogently argued document about inequality and enforced "otherness." This long-awaited new translation pays particular attention to the existentialist terms and French nuances that may have been misconstrued in the first English edition; restores Beauvoir's phrasing, rhythms, and tone; and reinstates significant portions of the "Myths" and "History" chapters that were originally cut due to length, including accounts of more than seventy female figures. A vital and life-changing work that has dramatically revised the way women talk and think about themselves, Beauvoir's magisterial treatise continues to provoke and inspire.ISBN: 9780307265562
Publication Date: 2010
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Gender Trouble by Judith Butler Since its publication in 1990, Gender Trouble has become one of the key works of contemporary feminist theory, and an essential work for anyone interested in the study of gender, queer theory, or the politics of sexuality in culture.ISBN: 9780415924993
Publication Date: 1999-09-02
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The Stranger by Albert Camus Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward.ISBN: 9780679720201
Publication Date: 1989
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Black Power by Stokely S. Carmichael, Charles V. Hamilton & Kwame Ture In 1967, this revolutionary work exposed the depths of systemic racism in this country and provided a radical political framework for reform: true and lasting social change would only be accomplished through unity among African-Americans and their independence from the preexisting order. An eloquent document of the civil rights movement that remains a work of profound social relevance 25 years after it was first published.ISBN: 9780679743132
Publication Date: 1992
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Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins This is a synthetic theoretical treatment of the contributions of African-American women to feminist thought. The author argues that black African-American women have a special perspective - what she labels the outsider within - on feminist issues that has produced black feminist thought. The book examines the historical and social contributions that have produced this perspective, and then looks at the contributions of black feminist thought to various feminist issues. The book contains quotes from a range of African-American women thinkers, some well-known, others rarely heard from.ISBN: 9780415924832
Publication Date: 1999
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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y. Davis "Jazz, it is widely accepted, is the signal original American contribution to world culture. Angela Davis shows us how the roots of that form in the blues must be viewed not only as a musical tradition but as a life-sustaining vehicle for an alternative black working-class collective memory and social consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American middle-class values. And she explains how the tradition of black women blues singers - represented by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday - embodies not only an artistic triumph and aesthetic dominance over a hostile popular music industry but an unacknowledged proto-feminist consciousness within working-class black communities. Through a close and riveting analysis of these artists' performances, words, and lives, Davis uncovers the unmistakable assertion and uncompromising celebration of non-middle-class, non-heterosexual social, moral, and sexual values."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights ReservedISBN: 9780679450054
Publication Date: 1998
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Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida This book represents Jacques Derrida's first important statement on Marx and his definitive entry into social and political philosophy. Specter is the first noun one reads in The Manifesto of the Communist Party. In this book, Derrida questions the spectropoetics that Marx allowed to invade his discourse and undertakes this task within the context of a critique of the new dogmatism and new world order that have proclaimed the death of Marxism and of Marx. Noting its resemblance to the manic discourse that prevails in what Freud called the triumphant stage of mourning work, Derrida likens this jubilant and obscene display (the body is rotting in a safe place; long live capitalism) to an exorcism and a conjuration. This disavowal attempts to neutralize a spectral necessity, but also the future of a spirit of Marxism. Derrida argues that there is more than one spirit of Marx and it is the finite responsibility of his heirs (and we are all heirs of Marx) to sift through the possible legacies, the possible spirits, reaffirming one and not the other.ISBN: 9780415910453
Publication Date: 1994
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The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois In this founding work in the literature of black protest, Du Bois eloquently affirms that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to beg for those rights that belong inherently to all mankind. He also charges that the strategy of accommodation to white supremacy would only serve to perpetuate black oppression.ISBN: 9780486280417
Publication Date: 1994
Books
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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.ISBN: 9780679732761
Publication Date: 1995
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Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today. "[Fanon] demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images.” -- Robert Coles, The New York Times Book ReviewISBN: 9780802150844
Publication Date: 1994
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Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.ISBN: 0679752552
Publication Date: 1995
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Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. With a substantive new introduction on Freire's life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come. For more information, visit www.pedagogyoftheoppressed.com.ISBN: 9780826412768
Publication Date: 2000
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Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud Written in the decade before Freud s death, Civilization and Its Discontents may be his most famous and most brilliant work. It has been praised, dissected, lambasted, interpreted, and reinterpreted. Originally published in 1930, it seeks to answer several questions fundamental to human society and its organization: What influences led to the creation of civilization? Why and how did it come to be? What determines civilization s trajectory? Freud s theories on the effect of the knowledge of death on human existence and the birth of art are central to his work. Of the various English translations of Freud s major works to appear in his lifetime, only Norton s Standard Edition, under the general editorship of James Strachey, was authorized by Freud himself. This new edition includes both an introduction by the renowned cultural critic and writer Christopher Hitchens as well as Peter Gay s classic biographical note on Freud."ISBN: 9780393304510
Publication Date: 2010
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The Classic Slave Narratives by Henry Louis Gates Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Africana Studies at Cornell University, and also tenured at Yale, Duke, and Harvard, where he was appointed W.E.B. DuBois professor of humanities in 1991. Professor Gates is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self, Wonders of the African World, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Loose Cannons: Notes on the Culture Wars, and Colored People: A Memoir. With Cornel West, he co-wrote The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country and The Future of the Race. He is also the editor of the critically-acclaimed edition of Our Nig, an annotated reprint of Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 novel, The Slave's Narrative (with the late Charles T. Davis), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, Six Women's Slave Narratives, and In the House of Oshugbo: Critical Essays on Wole Soyinka. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize.ISBN: 9780451627261
Publication Date: 1987
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Lord of the Flies by William Golding Before The Hunger Games there was Lord of the Flies Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on modern thought and literature. William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral island has become a modern classic. At first it seems as though it is all going to be great fun; but the fun before long becomes furious and life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic and death. As ordinary standards of behaviour collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with them—the world of cricket and homework and adventure stories—and another world is revealed beneath, primitive and terrible.Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic. "Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books. That was a big influence on me as a teenager, I still read it every couple of years." —Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games "As exciting, relevant, and thought-provoking now as it was when Golding published it in 1954." —Stephen KingISBN: 9780140283334
Publication Date: 1999-10-01
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X "Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, and important book." THE NEW YORK TIMES If there was any one man who articulated the anger, the struggle, and the beliefs of African Americans in the 1960s, that man was Malcolm X. His AUTOBIOGRAPHY is the result of a unique collaboration between Alex Haley and Malcolm X, whose voice and philosophy resonate from every page, just as his experience and his intelligence continue to speak to millions.ISBN: 9780345376718
Publication Date: 1992
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There Is a River by Vincent Harding From an unflinchingly black perspective, Harding writes of the struggle of heroic African americans to achieve freedom from slavery. Index; photographs.ISBN: 9780156890892
Publication Date: 1993
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The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes A complete anthology of the poetry of Langston Hughes presents 860 poems that capture the rhythms, emotions, cultural significance, and political awareness of African-American life, from his earliest works to his final collection.ISBN: 9780679426318
Publication Date: 1994
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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston A classic of black literature, it tells with haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy the story of Janie Crawford's evolving sense of self through three marriages.ISBN: 9780756964337
Publication Date: 2006
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Pragmatism by William James It is absolutely the only philosophy with no humbug in it, an exhilarated William James wrote to a friend early in 1907. And later that year, after finishing the proofs of his little book, he wrote to his brother Henry: I shouldn't be surprised if ten years hence it should be rated as 'epoch-making, ' for of the definitive triumph of that general way of thinking I can entertain no doubt whatever I believe it to be something quite like the protestant reformation. Both the acclaim and outcry that greeted Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking helped to affirm James's conviction. For it was in Pragmatism that he confronted older philosophic methods with the pragmatic method, demanding that ideas be tested by their relation to life and their effects in experience. James's reasoning and conclusions in Pragmatism have exerted a profound influence on philosophy in this century, and the book remains a landmark.ISBN: 0674697359
Publication Date: 1975
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Strength to Love by Martin Luther King A collection of sermons by this martyred Black American leader which explains his convictions in terms of the conditions and problems of contemporary society.ISBN: 9780800614416
Publication Date: 2004
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Sister Outsider by Audre Geraldine Lorde The leader of contemporary feminist theory discusses such issues as racism, self-acceptance, and mother- and woman-hood.ISBN: 9780307809049
Publication Date: 1984
Books
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The Harpercollins Study Bible Standard Version with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books by Wayne A. Meeks The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is steadily increasing in popularity. It is highly respected among academics, including evangelicals, and popular in theological colleges, where it is preferred to the New International Version. This edition incorporates extensive annotations and the Deuterocanonical books/Apocrypha, making it an ideal edition for students and serious Bible readers. The NRSV sensitively avoids gender exclusivity without any loss of accuracy or clarity, and retains the traditional style of referring to God as 'He' or 'Him.'ISBN: 9780060655808
Publication Date: 1993
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Beloved by Toni Morrison Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.ISBN: 9780394535975
Publication Date: 1987
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Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr Arguably his most famous book, Moral Man and Immoral Society is Reinhold Niebuhr's important early study (1932) in ethics and politics. Widely read and continually relevant, this book marked Niebuhr's decisive break from progressive religion and politics toward a more deeply tragic view of human nature and history. Forthright and realistic, Moral Man and Immoral Society argues that individual morality is intrinsically incompatible with collective life, thus making social and political conflict inevitable. Niebuhr further discusses our inability to imagine the realities of collective power; the brutal behavior of human collectives of every sort; and, ultimately, how individual morality can mitigate the persistence of social immorality. This new edition includes a foreword by Cornel West that explores the continued interest in Niebuhr's thought and its contemporary relevance.ISBN: 0664235395
Publication Date: 2013
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Augustine by Albert Cook Outler This volume in the Library of Christian Classics offers translations of Augustine's Confessions and Enchiridion. Long recognized for the quality of its translations, introductions, explanatory notes, and indexes, the Library of Christian Classics provides scholars and students with modern English translations of some of the most significant Christian theological texts in history. Through these works--each written prior to the end of the sixteenth century--contemporary readers are able to engage the ideas that have shaped Christian theology and the church through the centuries.ISBN: 9780664230807
Publication Date: 1955
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The Republic by Plato This is a completely new translation of one of the great works of Western political thought. In addition to Tom Griffith's vivid, dignified and accurate rendition of Plato's text, this edition is suitable for students at all levels. It contains an introduction that assesses the cultural background to the Republic, its place within political philosophy, and its general argument; succinct notes in the text; an analytical summary of content; a full glossary of proper names; a chronology of important events; and a guide to further reading.ISBN: 9780521481731
Publication Date: 2000
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Southern Horrors and Other Writings by Jacqueline Jones Royster Ida B. Wells was an African-American woman who achieved national and international fame as a journalist, public speaker, and community activist. This volume collects three pamphlets that constitute her major works during the anti-lynching movement: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans.ISBN: 9780312116958
Publication Date: 1996
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Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle Focus Philosophical Library's edition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is a lucid and useful translation of one of Aristotle's major works for the student of undergraduate philosophy, as well as for the general reader interested in the major works of western civilization. This edition includes notes and a glossary, intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Aristotle's immediate audience. Focus Philosophical Library books are distinguished by their commitment to faithful, clear, and consistent translations of texts and the rich world part and parcel of those texts.ISBN: 1585100358
Publication Date: 2002
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Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said "The extraordinary reach of Western imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is one of the most astonishing facts in all of geopolitical history. Neither Rome, nor Byzantium, nor Spain at the height of its glory came close to the imperial scope of France, the United States, and particularly Great Britain in these years. But while the rule of these vast dominions left scarcely a corner of life untouched in either the colonies or the imperialist capitals, its profound influence upon the cultural products of the West has been largely ignored. In this dazzling work of historical inquiry, Edward Said shows how the justification for empire-building was inescapably embedded in the Western cultural imagination during the Age of Empire, and how even today the imperial legacy colors relations between the West and the formerly colonized world at every level of political, ideological, and social practice." "Probing some of the great masterpieces of the Western tradition - including Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Austen's Mansfield Park, Verdi's Aida, and Camus's L'Estranger - Said brilliantly illuminates how culture and politics cooperated, knowingly and unknowingly, to produce a system of domination that involved more than cannon and soldiers - a sovereignty that extended over forms, images, and the very imaginations of both the dominators and the dominated. The result was a "consolidated vision" that affirmed not merely the Europeans' right to rule but their obligation, and made alternative arrangements unthinkable." "Pervasive as this vision was, however, it did not go unchallenged. Said also traces the development of an "oppositional strain" in the works of native writers who participated in the perilous process of cultural decolonization. Working mainly in the languages of their colonial masters, these writers - including William Butler Yeats, Salman Rushdie, Aime Cesaire, and Chinua Achebe - identified and exposed mechanisms of control and repression. In so doing, they reclaimed for their peoples the right of self-determination in history and literature." "In today's post-colonial world, Said argues, imperialist assumptions continue to influence Western politics and culture, from the media's coverage of the Gulf War to debates over what histories and literatures are worth teaching in our schools. But his vision reveals a hopeful truth: if the West and its former subject peoples are to achieve a meaningful, harmonious coexistence, it will depend upon the development of a humanistic historical understanding that all cultures are interdependent, that they inevitably borrow from one another. Finally this passionate and immensely learned book points the way beyond divisive nationalisms toward an awareness that the true human community is global."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights ReservedISBN: 0394587383
Publication Date: 1993
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Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution. Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremny that defeats the most virulent of afflictions—despair.ISBN: 9780140086836
Publication Date: 1986
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The Spivak Reader by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Among the foremost feminist critics to have emerged over the last 15 years, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has challenged established approaches in literary and cultural studies. Although her readings of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with post-structuralism, this collection explores Spivak's theories of critical analysis. Spanning a decade of Spivak's writing, this text brings together of some of the author's readings of trends in the study of Marxism, feminism and post-structuralism. Engaging with such figures as Derrida and Foucault, Spivak's writing provides an analysis of disputes within the field of critical theory, encompassing issues such as: post-colonialism; textuality; commodity fetishism; sexual difference and the relevance of philosophy to literature.ISBN: 9780415910019
Publication Date: 1995
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Prophesy Deliverance! by Cornel West Examines the history of Afro-American philosophy, discusses the traditional responses of Blacks to racism, and argues for a fusion of Christianity and progressive Marxism.ISBN: 9780664244477
Publication Date: 1982
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Sisters in the Wilderness by Delores S. Williams This landmark work first published 20 years ago helped establish the field of African-American womanist theology and is widely regarded as a classic text. Drawing on the biblical figure of Hagar mother of Ishmael, cast into the desert by Abraham and Sarah, but protected by God Williams finds a proptype for the struggle of African-American women. African slave, homeless exile, surrogate mother, Hagar's story provides an image of survival and defiance appropriate to black women today. Exploring the themes implicit in Hagar's story poverty and slavery, ethnicity and sexual exploitation, exile and encounter with God Williams traces parallels in the history of African-American women from slavery to the present day. A new womanist theology emerges from this shared experience, from the interplay of oppressions on account of race, sex and class. Sisters in the Wilderness offers a telling critique of theologies that promote liberation but ignore women of color. This is a book that defined a new theological project and charted a path that others continue to explore.ISBN: 9781570750267
Publication Date: 1995
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Native Son by Richard Wright Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.ISBN: 006083756X
Publication Date: 2005
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The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder Tradition has painted a portrait of a Savior aloof from governmental concerns and whose teachings point to an apolitical life for his disciples. How, then, are we to respond today to a world so thoroughly entrenched in national and international affairs? But such a picture of Jesus is far from accurate, argues John Howard Yoder. Using the texts of the New Testament, Yoder critically examines the traditional portrait of Jesus as an apolitical figure and attempts to clarify the true impact of Jesus' life, work, and teachings on his disciples' social behavior. The book first surveys the multiple ways the image of an apolitical Jesus has been propagated, then canvasses the Gospel narrative to reveal how Jesus is rightly portrayed as a thinker and leader immediately concerned with the agenda of politics and the related issues of power, status, and right relations. Selected passages from the epistles corroborate a Savior deeply concerned with social, political, and moral issues. In this thorough revision of his acclaimed 1972 text, Yoder provides updated interaction with publications touching on this subject. Following most of the chapters are new "epilogues" that summarize research conducted during the last two decades -- research that continues to support the insights set forth in Yoder's original work. Currently a standard in many college and seminary ethics courses, The Politics of Jesus is also an excellent resource for the general reader desiring to understand Christ's response to the world of politics and his will for those who would follow him.ISBN: 9780802807342
Publication Date: 1994
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