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Books by Jonathan Scott
Socialist Joy in
the Writing of Langston Hughes
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Bio-Sketch
Jonathan Scott
grew up on the southwest side of Detroit where he attended the
public schools and was a member of Messiah Church. In 1990, he
graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a BA
in English, and in 1998 he received a PhD in English studies
from the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he
benefited from the guidance of Amiri Baraka.
He wasa
professor of English at the City University of New York, Borough
of Manhattan Community College where he taught remedial
English, composition, and literature. He has been the
coordinator of the writing program at BMCC since 2001 and a
full-time member of the faculty since 2000. He has taught at
SUNY-Stony Brook, Wayne State University in the City of Detroit,
Lawrence Tech, and Henry Ford Community College, both located in
the Detroit metro area.
Jonathan Scott
is Assistant Professor of English at Al-Quds University
in East Jerusalem. He is the author of
Socialist Joy in
the Writing of Langston Hughes (University of Missouri
Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in Modern
Fiction Studies, Langston Hughes Review,
Minnesota Review, Race & Class, College
Literature, Journal of Teaching Writing,
Rethinking Marxism, and Socialism and Democracy,
and in the e-zines CounterPunch, Black
Commentator, and ChickenBones. At present he
is working on a study of the Palestinian literary
tradition.
jonascott15@aol.com
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Jonathan Scott has written the first
book-length study to analyze the extraordinary range of
Hughes’s creative output, showing that his unassailable
reputation as one of America’s finest “folk poets”
barely scratches the surface of his oeuvre. Scott offers
a robust account of the relations between Hughes and
political activism to show that Hughes’s direct
involvement with the U.S. socialist movement of the
1920s and 1930s was largely responsible for the variety
of his writing. Scott also contends that the goal of
overthrowing white oppression produced a “socialist joy”
that would express itself repeatedly in Hughes’s work
during the anticommunist crusades of the 1950s and
1960s.Socialist
Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes
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For as soon as any prominent white leader
starts criticizing white people’s bad behavior, the white
identity falls apart and then the doors are pushed wide open for
a new multiethnic U.S. populist movement, which remains the
ruling class’ absolute worst nightmare. In this spirit, I have
written the sermon that Reverend Billy Graham would have
delivered on to the heads of white America had he forgotten, for
just a day or two, his own whiteness – if he had been a white
Bill Cosby.
If White America Had a Bill Cosby
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Table
The
underlying issue, as is always the case with Palestine,
is how Americans might respond politically if they came
to know that a significant portion of their tax dollars
is funding the most brutal system of racial oppression
the world has seen since American Jim Crow and apartheid
in South Africa. The thousands of dedicated Palestine
solidarity activists across the U.S. work under the
assumption that once the basic facts of Israeli racial
oppression against the Palestinians are established,
vividly and for the political education of the majority
of Americans, organized opposition to the 60-year old
U.S. pro-Israel policy will spring to life, leading
finally to a just solution of what’s called
euphemistically in the West “the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.”
The Niggerization of Palestine
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The overwhelming success of the right at the level of ideas
makes it unnecessary to elaborate them here in any detail. Their
ideas have become common sense. Big government is bad because it
promotes corruption, incompetence, laziness and inefficiency. An
undeterred capitalist "free market" is the best of all
possible worlds not just because it regulates itself but, more
importantly, because it rewards labor productivity, creative
innovation, and good team work.
The tougher the criminal laws and
punishments, the less likely it is people will commit crimes.
Sex education is a mistake because it encourages young people to
have sex; abstinence is the only solution. The women's movement
has destroyed the moral integrity of the American family. Taxing
corporations is actually a civil rights violation because it
discriminates against rich people.
Multiculturalism is bad because it divides
Americans along ethnic lines, tearing to shreds our society's
wholesome national fabric. Hollywood and the mass media are
controlled by liberals who are probably Satan-worshippers, since
their movies, music, and television programming constantly
advocate sexual immorality and disrespectful and irresponsible
behavior towards adult authority, especially parents and
religious figures.
Notes on Political Education
created 8 May 2007
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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updated 2 November 2007
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