In Fair Sex, Savage Dreams Jean Walton examines the work of early feminist psychoanalytic writing to decipher in it the unacknowledged yet foundational role of race. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, a time when white women were actively refashioning Freud’s problematic accounts of sexual subjectivity, Walton rereads in particular the writing of British analysts Joan Riviere and Melanie Klein, modernist poet H.D., the eccentric French analyst Marie Bonaparte, and anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Charting the fantasies of racial difference in these women’s writings, Walton establishes that race—particularly during this period—was inseparable from accounts of gender and sexuality. While arguing that these women remained notably oblivious to the racial meanings embedded in their own attempts to rearticulate feminine sexuality, Walton uses these very blindspots to understand how race and sex are deeply imbricated in the constitution of subjectivity. Challenging the notion that subjects acquire gender identities in isolation from racial ones, she thus demonstrates how white-centered psychoanalytic theories have formed the basis for more contemporary feminist and queer explorations of fantasy, desire, power, and subjectivity.
Fair Sex, Savage Dreams will appeal to scholars of psychoanalysis, literary and cinematic modernism, race studies, queer theory, feminist theory, and anthropology.

This classic study of the American working class, originally published in 1973, is now back in print with a new introduction and epilogue by the author. An innovative blend of first-person experience and original scholarship, Aronowitz traces the historical development of the American working class from post-Civil War times and shows why radical movements have failed to overcome the forces that tend to divde groups of workers from one another. The rise of labor unions is analyzed, as well as their decline as a force for social change. Aronowitz’s new introduction situates the book in the context of developments in current scholarship and the epilogue discusses the effects of recent economic and political changes in the American labor movement.

It is widely assumed that indigenous cultures are under threat: they are rooted in landscapes that have undergone radical transformations, and the opposing forces of business corporations and ruling political powers only seem to grow stronger. Yet Jeff Sissons argues here in First Peoples that, far from collapsing in the face of global capitalism, indigenous cultures today are as diverse and alive as they ever were.

First Peoples explores how, instead of being absorbed into a homogeneous modernity, indigenous cultures are actively shaping alternative futures for themselves and appropriating global resources for their own culturally specific needs. From the Inuit and Saami in the north to the Maori and Aboriginal Australians in the south to the American Indians in the west, Sissons shows that for indigenous peoples, culture is more than simply heritage-it is a continuous project of preservation and revival.

Sissons argues that the cultural renaissances that occurred among indigenous peoples during the late twentieth century were not simply one-time occurrences; instead, they are crucial events that affirmed their cultures and re-established them as viable political entities posing unique challenges to states and their bureaucracies. He explores how indigenous peoples have also defined their identities through forged alliances such as the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and how these allied communities have created an alternative political order to the global organization of states.

First Peoples is a groundbreaking volume that vigorously contends that indigenous peoples have begun a new movement to solve the economic and political issues facing their communities, and they are doing so in unique and innovative ways.

As the official resource of ABS, Issues in Race & Society is a double-blind, peer-reviewed academic journal. The biannual journal distinguishes itself as an interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and global examination of the increasingly racial and racialized world that connects us all. It provides a space where all voices can be heard and diverse conversations can occur about the relationship and interconnections between race, power, privilege, and location operating across cultures and societies.