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The Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) was created in 1967, when several hundred dissident political scientists walked out of the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) to protest the Association’s refusal to take an official position against the Vietnam War. The CNPS soon expanded its mission to challenge the APSA’s behavioral and pluralist orthodoxy, protest a lack of democratic procedure and transparency in the organization, and oppose ties between the leadership and government agencies involved in covert activities. It remains unique among the more than 50 Organized Sections of APSA as the only section that defines itself ideologically and politically, rather than by research topic, methodology, subfield, or identity status.

A Critique of Political Science distinguishes between the discipline of political science (methods and concepts) and the profession of political science (persons and institutions) to move disciplinary history beyond its current form as intellectual history toward a politics of political science. The book argues that understanding the development of a discipline requires the same type of theoretical analysis that political scientists apply to other political institutions. By examining universities and professional associations as political institutions, this approach puts political struggles and ideological conflict at the very core of disciplinary history. In reviewing 50 years of debate, controversy, and in-fighting in the political science profession, the book serves as a critique of the profession and the discipline of political science, which remains woefully disengaged from the concerns of ordinary citizens, particularly the working class and the poor throughout the world.

A new retrospective of a titan of LGBTQ literature, activism, and Black feminism

Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke’s illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, a long-awaited retrospective of the indelible work of a Black feminist, community and LGBTQ activist, and educator. This collection features carefully curated poems from Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006), By My Precise Haircut (2016), and Targets (2019). Together these works show a brilliant thinker who has profoundly impacted generations of writers and activists.

Clarke’s poetry and essays, centered around the Black, lesbian, feminist experience, have attracted an audience around the world. Her essays, “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community” revolutionized the thinking about lesbians of color and the struggle against homophobia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and assigned in women and sexuality courses globally. Having published since 1977, Clarke and her work have become a foundational part of LGBTQ literature and activism. Archive of Style is a celebration and homage to one of American literature’s Black Women literary warriors.
 

In this selection of poems written over thirty years, Leon Stokesbury careens through the Maple Leaf Bar and the Restaurant-on-the-Corner, Oklahoma City, and Fairbanks, Alaska, consuming and offering up his sweet-and-sour vision of our lot in life. Whether he comes at us in masks as varied as his father and mother, Nick Bottom or John Keats, Señor Wences or Owen Glendower, it is his own Cheshire grin we spy creeping out around the edges. He readily sees the horror in the death of a New Orleans poet, in his own brother’s sufferings, in the inescapable process of mutability itself, but he finds also, often enough, the dark joke at the center of things and the chance for redemptive laughter. Whether in his own deeply personal voice or in the multitude of idioms from which he is able to draw—southern, midwestern, Shakespearean—Stokesbury creates whole landscapes in perfected, formal lines from the shards of memories and dreams.