Race

David McDermott Hughes
Palgrave Macmillian; April 2010
Paperback, 224 pages
9780230621435

Michelle Alexander
The New Press; January 2010
Hardcover, 290 pages
9781595581037

Dorothy Roberts
New Press; July 2011
Hardcover; 512 pages
9781595584953

• Ryan, Phil
• University of Toronto Press; 2010
• Paperback; 256 pages
• 9781442610682

Official multiculturalism, established as Canadian government policy in 1971, has drawn criticism from many scholars and journalists who view it as a potential threat to a strong, unified Canadian society. In this timely and original book, Phil Ryan examines the emergence and influence of these criticisms, which continue to provoke an anxiety he calls "multicultiphobia." Although Ryan argues that multicultiphobic discourse is often marred by important errors of fact and interpretation, a systematic inspection of news coverage and parliamentary debates reveals the persistent influence of these critiques and their underlying concerns.

Rather than simply dismissing multicultiphobia, Ryan acknowledges that critics of multiculturalism have identified issues about which Canadians need to talk. Does multiculturalism discourage adaptation and encourage 'cultural walls' between Canadians? Does it promote an 'anything goes' relativism? Finally, what do we - both as supporters and critics of multiculturalism - wish to make of Canada's ethnic diversity? Multicultiphobia perceptively tackles all of these questions by means of a sophisticated analysis that encourages a deeper understanding of the issues at the heart of multiculturalism.

• Zillah Eisenstein
• Zed Books; 2009
• Paperback; 212 Pages
• 9781848134201

In this exciting and insightful new work, Zillah Eisenstein weighs up the new anti-imperial possibilities created by the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Eisenstein likens the end of the Bush/Cheney presidency to the fall of Stalin, or Pinochet, and asks whether this is a key historical moment that will alter race and gender in newly unknown ways. Tracing the social and political presence of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, The Audacity of Race and Gender presents 25 conceptual "frames" of fast-paced critical analysis. Illuminated by her distinctive style and personal narrative, Eisenstein challenges her readers to always be looking for the "newly new" political configurations in order to create a politics of and for the globe.

• Frances Henry & Carol Tator
• University of Toronto Press; 2009
• Paperback; p. 192
• 9780802096777

The mission statements and recruitment campaigns for modern Canadian universities promote diverse and enlightened communities. Racism in the Canadian University questions this idea by examining the ways in which the institutional culture of the academy privileges Whiteness and Anglo-Eurocentric ways of knowing. Often denied and dismissed in practice as well as policy, the various forms of racism still persist in the academy. This collection, informed by critical theory, personal experience, and empirical research, scrutinizes both historical and contemporary manifestations of racism in Canadian academic institutions, finding in these communities a deep rift between how racism is imagined and how it is lived.

With equal emphasis on scholarship and personal perspectives, Racism in the Canadian University is an important look at how racial minority faculty and students continue to engage in a daily struggle for safe, inclusive spaces in classrooms and among peers, colleagues, and administrators.

• Daniel J. Walkowitz & Lisa Maya Knauer (Eds.)
• Duke UP, 2009
• Paperback, 365 pages
• 9780822342366

Contested Histories in Public Space brings multiple perspectives to bear on historical narratives presented to the public in museums, monuments, texts, and festivals around the world, from Paris to Kathmandu, from the Mexican state of Oaxaca to the waterfront of Wellington, New Zealand. Paying particular attention to how race and empire are implicated in the creation and display of national narratives, the contributing historians, anthropologists, and other scholars delve into representations of contested histories at such “sites” as a British Library exhibition on the East India Company, a Rio de Janeiro shantytown known as “the cradle of samba,” the Ellis Island immigration museum, and high-school history textbooks in Ecuador.

• Seymour Drescher
• Cambridge UP, 2009
• Paperback, 471 pages
• ISBN: 9780521600859

In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world transformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from the small corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution first interacted with peoples of other continents, they created, in the Americas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of coerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these same intercontinental actions produced a movement that successfully challenged the institution at the peak of its dynamism. Within another century a new surge of European expansion constructed Old World empires under the banner of antislavery. However, twentieth-century Europe itself was inundated by a new system of slavery, larger and more deadly than its earlier system of New World slavery. This book examines these dramatic expansions and contractions of the institution of slavery and the impact of violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.

This book examines the impact of violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.

• Yatta Kanu (ed.)
• University of Toronto Press, 2009
• Paperback, 326 pages
• ISBN: 9781442610279

Initiatives that deconstruct and challenge the dominance of Western cultural knowledge in curriculum are gaining momentum, and though some of the most potent challenges come from the field of postcolonial theory, the implications of these challenges for theorizing curriculum have not been fully explored.  Curriculum as Cultural Practice aims to revitalize current discourses of curriculum research and reform from a postcolonial perspective.

Yatta Kanu brings together an impressive list of scholars to interrogate the dominance of Western European knowledge, cultural production, representation, and dissemination in education, and to promote critical, democratic, and ethical practices in curriculum design.  Contributors examine current curriculum from a variety of different perspectives including subalternity, indigenous knowledges and spirituality, critical ontology, biolinguistic diversity, postnationalism, transnationalism, globalization, and the West African concept of Sankofa.  Each of these unique perspectives frame the postcolonial condition and reflect changing educational relations, practices, and institutional arrangements.

• David Levering Lewis
• Holt, 2009
• Paperback, 893 pages
• ISBN:9780805088052

The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of W. E. B. Du Bois from renowned scholar David Levering Lewis, now in one condensed and updated volumeWilliam Edward Burghardt Du Bois-the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America-was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator. Now, David Levering Lewis has carved one volume out of his superlative two-volume biography of this monumental figure that set the standard for historical scholarship on this era. In his magisterial prose, Lewis chronicles Du Bois's long and storied career, detailing the momentous contributions to our national character that echo still today.

• damali ayo
• Lawrence Hill Books, 2005
• Paperback, 196 pages
• ISBN:1556525737

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

A hilarious and satirical look at race relations that is almost too close for comfort, this pseudo-guidebook gives both renters and rentals "much-needed" advice and tips on technique. Reframing actual stories, techniques, requests, and responses gathered from the author's more than 30 years of research and experience, tips are provided in step-by-step outlines for renters to get the most for their money, and how rentals can become successful and wealthy, what they should wear, and topics of conversation to avoid. The book also serves up photo-dramatizations of some of the popular approaches covered in the book, handy tip-boxes, frequently asked questions for renters and rentals, a "How do I know if I'm being rented" quiz, a glossary of important terms, and "quickie" insta-rentals for those who need to rent on the go. Punctuated by quotes from former renters, and featuring rental diaries based on real encounters, this satire shocks and amuses, presenting a strikingly stark mirror of human relationships.

• Vincent Carretta
• Penguin, 2006
• Paperback, 436 pages
• ISBN:9780143038429

A controversial look at the most renowned person of African descent in the eighteenth century.

In this widely aclaimed biography, historian Vincent Carretta gives us the authoritative portrait of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745a1797), the former slave whose 1789 autobiography quickly became a popular polemic against the slave trade and a literary classic. Sailor, entrepreneur, and adventurer, Equiano is revealed here as never before, thanks to archival research on an unprecedented scaleasome of which even indicates that Equiano may have lied about his origins to advance the antibondage struggle with which he became famously identified. A masterpiece of scholarship and writerly poise, this book redefines an extraordinary man and the turbulent age that shaped him.

• bell hooks
• South End Press; 1981
• Paperback; 205 pages
• 9781897071199

A groundbreaking work of feminist history and theory analyzing the complex relations between various forms of oppression. Ain't I a Woman examines the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the historic devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent women's movement, and black women's involvement with feminism.

• Judson L Jeffries, editor
• Indiana UP; December 2007
• Paperback; 336 pages
• 978-0-253-21930-5

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was perhaps the most visible of the Black Power groups in the late 60s and early 70s, not least because of its confrontational politics, its rejection of nonviolence, and its headline-catching, gun-toting militancy. Important on the national scene and highly visible on college campuses, the Panthers also worked at building grassroots support for local black political and economic power. Although there have been many books about the Black Panthers, none has looked at the organization and its work at the local level. This book examines the work and actions of seven local initiatives in Baltimore, Winston-Salem, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. These local organizations are revealed as committed to programs of community activism that focused on problems of social, political, and economic justice.

Judson L. Jeffries is Professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University and Director of the African American and African Studies Community Extension Center. He is editor of Black Power in the Belly of the Beast. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.