Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand
Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand

Author: Piri Thomas

Publisher: Graymalkin Media

Published: 2016-08-10

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1631680811

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Many people write about the ghetto. Piri Thomas lived there. In this book, the author of Down These Mean Streets tells what he found when he returned from a seven year prison term. Friends dying on heroin, or getting rich selling it. Jobs he couldn’t get, not because he lacked training or ability, but because the union was open only to whites. And an indomitable aunt who brought him into her church, where he met the woman who became his wife, and where he began to take an interest in helping others. Eventually he got a job working with street children—helping them find highs other than drugs, trying to cool rivalries fueled by frustration, persuading gang leaders to surrender weapons originally intended for bloody street battles. But even with success came bitter disappointments. Pervasive discrimination forced Thomas and his family to give up a suburban home. And an appalling hypocritical and selfish boss forced him out of his job—and almost back into prison. Piri Thomas writes of these experiences with unselfish candor and compassion. He pictures the poverty and squalor as well as the spirit and vitality of the ghetto in a dramatic story that is blunt, painful, absorbing and profoundly moving.

Gang Nation
Gang Nation

Author: Monica Brown

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780816634798

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Challenges of Diversity
Challenges of Diversity

Author: Werner Sollors

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2017-10-26

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0813589355

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What unites and what divides Americans as a nation? Who are we, and can we strike a balance between an emphasis on our divergent ethnic origins and what we have in common? Opening with a survey of American literature through the vantage point of ethnicity, Werner Sollors examines our evolving understanding of ourselves as an Anglo-American nation to a multicultural one and the key role writing has played in that process. Challenges of Diversity contains stories of American myths of arrival (pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, slave ships at Jamestown, steerage passengers at Ellis Island), the powerful rhetoric of egalitarian promise in the Declaration of Independence and the heterogeneous ends to which it has been put, and the recurring tropes of multiculturalism over time (e pluribus unum, melting pot, cultural pluralism). Sollors suggests that although the transformation of this settler country into a polyethnic and self-consciously multicultural nation may appear as a story of great progress toward the fulfillment of egalitarian ideals, deepening economic inequality actually exacerbates the divisions among Americans today.

Beyond Ethnicity
Beyond Ethnicity

Author: Werner Sollors

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1987-10-29

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 0190281510

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Nothing is "pure" in America, and, indeed, the rich ethnic mix that constitutes our society accounts for much of its amazing vitality. Werner Sollors's new book takes a wide-ranging look at the role of "ethnicity" in American literature and what that literature has said--and continues to say--about our diverse culture. Ethnic consciousness, he contends, is a constituent feature of modernism, not modernism's antithesis. Discussing works from every period of American history, Sollors focuses particularly on the tension between "descent" and "consent"--between the concern for one's racial, ethnic, and familial heritage and the conflicting desire to choose one's own destiny, even if that choice goes against one's heritage. Some of the stories Sollors examines are retellings of the biblical Exodus--stories in which Americans of the most diverse origins have painted their own histories as an escape from bondage or a search for a new Canaan. Other stories are "American-made" tales of melting-pot romance, which may either triumph in intermarriage, accompanied by new world symphonies, or end with the lovers' death. Still other stories concern voyages of self-discovery in which the hero attempts to steer a perilous course between stubborn traditionalism and total assimilation. And then there are the generational sagas, in which, as if by magic, the third generation emerges as the fulfillment of their forebears' dream. Citing examples that range from the writings of Cotton Mather to Liquid Sky (a "post-punk" science fiction film directed by a Russian emigre), Sollors shows how the creators of American culture have generally been attracted to what is most new and modern. About the Author: Werner Sollors is Chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University and the author of Amiri Baraka: The Quest for a Populist Modernism. A provocative and original look at "ethnicity" in American literature BLCovers stories from all periods of our nation's history BLRelates ethnic literature to the principle of literary modernism BL"Grave and hilarious, tender and merciless...The book performs a public service."-Quentin Anderson

From the Tricontinental to the Global South
From the Tricontinental to the Global South

Author: Anne Garland Mahler

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2018-04-19

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0822371715

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In From the Tricontinental to the Global South Anne Garland Mahler traces the history and intellectual legacy of the understudied global justice movement called the Tricontinental—an alliance of liberation struggles from eighty-two countries, founded in Havana in 1966. Focusing on racial violence and inequality, the Tricontinental's critique of global capitalist exploitation has influenced historical radical thought, contemporary social movements such as the World Social Forum and Black Lives Matter, and a Global South political imaginary. The movement's discourse, which circulated in four languages, also found its way into radical artistic practices, like Cuban revolutionary film and Nuyorican literature. While recent social movements have revived Tricontinentalism's ideologies and aesthetics, they have largely abandoned its roots in black internationalism and its contribution to a global struggle for racial justice. In response to this fractured appropriation of Tricontinentalism, Mahler ultimately argues that a renewed engagement with black internationalist thought could be vital to the future of transnational political resistance.

Invisibility and Influence
Invisibility and Influence

Author: Regina Marie Mills

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2024-06-04

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1477329145

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A rich literary study of AfroLatinx life writing, this book traces how AfroLatinxs have challenged their erasure in the United States and Latin America over the last century. Invisibility and Influence demonstrates how a century of AfroLatinx writers in the United States shaped life writing, including memoir, collective autobiography, and other formats, through depictions of a wide range of “Afro-Latinidades.” Using a woman-of-color feminist approach, Regina Marie Mills examines the work of writers and creators often excluded from Latinx literary criticism. She explores the tensions writers experienced in being viewed by others as only either Latinx or Black, rather than as part of their own distinctive communities. Beginning with Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg, who contributed to wider conversations about autobiographical technique, Invisibility and Influence examines a breadth of writers, including Jesús Colón; members of the Young Lords; Piri Thomas; Lukumi santera and scholar Marta Moreno Vega; and Black Mexican American poet Ariana Brown. Mills traces how these writers confront the distorted visions of AfroLatinxs in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and how they created and expressed AfroLatinx spirituality, politics, and self-identity, often amidst violence. Mapping how AfroLatinx writers create their own literary history, Mills reveals how AfroLatinx life writing shapes and complicates discourses on race and colorism in the Western Hemisphere.

Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes
Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes

Author: David William Foster

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1994-11-07

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 0313368740

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Gay and lesbian themes in Latin American literature have been largely ignored. This reference fills this gap by providing more than a hundred alphabetically arranged entries for Latin American authors who have treated gay or lesbian material in their works. Each entry explores the significance of gay and lesbian themes in a particular author's writings and closes with a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The figures included have a professed gay identity, or have written on gay or lesbian themes in either a positive or negative way, or have authored works in which a gay sensibility can be identified. The volume pays particular attention to the difficulty of ascribing North American critical perspectives to Latin American authors, and studies these authors within the larger context of Latin American culture. The book includes entries for men and women, and for authors from Latin American countries as well as Latino writers from the United States. The entries are written by roughly 60 expert contributors from Latin America, the U.S., and Europe.

The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel
The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel

Author: Juan E. De Castro

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-03-07

Total Pages: 889

ISBN-13: 0197541852

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The Latin American novel burst onto the international literary scene with the Boom era--led by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa--and has influenced writers throughout the world ever since. García Márquez and Vargas Llosa each received the Nobel Prize in literature, and many of the best-known contemporary novelists are inspired by the region's fiction. Indeed, magical realism, the style associated with García Márquez, has left a profound imprint on African American, African, Asian, Anglophone Caribbean, and Latinx writers. Furthermore, post-Boom literature continues to garner interest, from the novels of Roberto Bolaño to the works of César Aira and Chico Buarque, to those of younger novelists such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Alejandro Zambra, and Valeria Luiselli. Yet, for many readers, the Latin American novel is often read in a piecemeal manner delinked from the traditions, authors, and social contexts that help explain its evolution. The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel draws literary, historical, and social connections so that readers will come away understanding this literature as a rich and compelling canon. In forty-five chapters by leading and innovative scholars, the Handbook provides a comprehensive introduction, helping readers to see the region's intrinsic heterogeneity--for only with a broader view can one fully appreciate García Márquez or Bolaño. This volume charts the literary tradition of the Latin American novel from its beginnings during colonial times, its development during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, and its flourishing from the 1960s onward. Furthermore, the Handbook explores the regions, representations of identity, narrative trends, and authors that make this literature so diverse and fascinating, reflecting on the Latin American novel's position in world literature.