The Civil Rights Revolution carries Bruce Ackerman’s sweeping reinterpretation of constitutional history into the era beginning with Brown v. Board of Education. From Rosa Parks’s courageous defiance, to Martin Luther King’s resounding cadences in “I Have a Dream,” to Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of Congress, to the Supreme Court’s decisions redefining the meaning of equality, the movement to end racial discrimination decisively changed our understanding of the Constitution.
“The Civil Rights Act turns 50 this year, and a wave of fine books accompanies the semicentennial. Ackerman’s is the most ambitious; it is the third volume in an ongoing series on American constitutional history called We the People. A professor of law and political science at Yale, Ackerman likens the act to a constitutional amendment in its significance to the country’s legal development.”
—Michael O’Donnell, The Atlantic
“Ackerman weaves political theory with historical detail, explaining how the civil rights movement evolved from revolution to mass movement and then to statutory law…This fascinating book takes a new look at a much-covered topic.”
—Becky Kennedy, Library Journal
African American history resounds with calls for black unity. From abolitionist times through the Black Power movement, it was widely seen as a means of securing a full share of America's promised freedom and equality. Yet today, many believe that black solidarity is unnecessary, irrational, rooted in the illusion of "racial" difference, at odds with the goal of integration, and incompatible with liberal ideals and American democracy. A response to such critics, We Who Are Dark provides the first extended philosophical defense of black political solidarity.
Tommie Shelby argues that we can reject a biological idea of race and agree with many criticisms of identity politics yet still view black political solidarity as a needed emancipatory tool. In developing his defense of black solidarity, he draws on the history of black political thought, focusing on the canonical figures of Martin R. Delany and W. E. B. Du Bois, and he urges us to rethink many traditional conceptions of what black unity should entail. In this way, he contributes significantly to the larger effort to re-envision black politics and to modernize the objectives and strategies of black freedom struggles for the post-civil rights era. His book articulates a new African American political philosophy--one that rests firmly on anti-essentialist foundations and, at the same time, urges a commitment to defeating racism, to eliminating racial inequality, and to improving the opportunities of those racialized as "black."
Is race something we know when we see it? In 1857, Alexina Morrison, a slave in Louisiana, ran away from her master and surrendered herself to the parish jail for protection. Blue-eyed and blond, Morrison successfully convinced white society that she was one of them. When she sued for her freedom, witnesses assured the jury that she was white, and that they would have known if she had a drop of African blood. Morrison’s court trial—and many others over the last 150 years—involved high stakes: freedom, property, and civil rights. And they all turned on the question of racial identity.
Over the past two centuries, individuals and groups (among them Mexican Americans, Indians, Asian immigrants, and Melungeons) have fought to establish their whiteness in order to lay claim to full citizenship in local courtrooms, administrative and legislative hearings, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Like Morrison’s case, these trials have often turned less on legal definitions of race as percentages of blood or ancestry than on the way people presented themselves to society and demonstrated their moral and civic character.
Unearthing the legal history of racial identity, Ariela Gross’s book examines the paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived capacity for citizenship in American society. This book reminds us that the imaginary connection between racial identity and fitness for citizenship remains potent today and continues to impede racial justice and equality.
“In a display of rationality uncommon to discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nusseibeh takes an impartial vantage point, trying to sort out a mess largely generated by overblown and hyperactive political identities.”—Boston Review
“[This] philosophical and balanced book is unfailingly sensitive and empathetic to both sides.”—Publishers Weekly
Can a devout Jew be a devout Jew and drop the belief in the rebuilding of the Temple? Can a devout Muslim be a devout Muslim and drop the belief in the sacredness of the Rock? Can one right (the right of return) be given up for another (the right to live in peace)? Can one claim Palestinian identity and still retain Israeli citizenship? What is a Palestinian state worth? For over sixty years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been subjected to many solutions and offered many answers by diverse parties. Yet, answers are only as good as the questions that beget them. It is with this simple, but powerful idea, the idea of asking the basic questions anew, that the renowned Palestinian philosopher and activist Sari Nusseibeh begins his book.
What Is a Palestinian State Worth? poses questions about the history, meaning, future, and resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Deeply informed by political philosophy and based on decades of personal involvement with politics and social activism, Nusseibeh’s moderate voice—global in its outlook, yet truly grounded in his native city of Jerusalem—points us toward a future which, as George Lamming once put it, is colonized by our acts in this moment, but which must always remain open.
In sixteen timely essays, the contributors map out an urgent intellectual and political terrain for queer studies and the contemporary politics of identity, family, and kinship. Collectively, these essays examine the limits of queer epistemology, the potentials of queer diasporas, and the emergence of queer liberalism. They rethink queer critique in relation to the war on terrorism and the escalation of U.S. imperialism; the devolution of civil rights and the rise of the prison-industrial complex; the continued dismantling of the welfare state; the recoding of freedom in terms of secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and the politics of citizenship, migration, and asylum in a putatively postracial and postidentity age.
Contributors. Michael Cobb, David L. Eng, Roderick A. Ferguson, Elizabeth Freeman, Gayatri Gopinath, Judith Halberstam, Janet R. Jakobsen, Joon Oluchi Lee, Martin F. Manalansan IV, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, Hiram Perez, Jasbir K. Puar, Chandan Reddy, Teemu Ruskola, Nayan Shah, Karen Tongson, Amy Villarejo
When Freedom Speaks chronicles the stories behind our First Amendment right to speak our minds. Lynn Levine Greenky’s background as a lawyer, rhetorician, and teacher gives her a unique perspective on the protection we have from laws that abridge our right to the freedom of speech. Rhetoricians focus on language and how it influences perception and moves people to action. Powerfully employing that rhetorical approach, this book explores concepts related to free speech as moral narratives that proscribe the boundaries of our constitutionally protected right. Using the characters and drama embedded in legal cases that elucidate First Amendment principles, When Freedom Speaks makes the concepts easier to understand and clearly applicable to our lives. With a wide range of examples and accessible language, this book is the perfect overview of the First Amendment.
In these lyrical and powerful essays, Thomas Glave draws on his experiences as a politically committed, gay Jamaican American to deliver a condemnation of the prejudices, hatreds, and inhumanities that persist in the United States and elsewhere. Exposing the hypocrisies of liberal multiculturalism, Glave offers instead a politics of heterogeneity in which difference informs the theory and practice of democracy. At the same time, he experiments with language to provide a model of creative writing as a tool for social change. From the death of black gay poet Essex Hemphill to the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Glave puts forth an ethical understanding of human rights to make vital connections across nations, races, genders, and sexualities.
Thomas Glave is assistant professor of English at SUNY Binghamton. He is author of Whose Song? and Other Stories.
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