Today, about one-quarter of all Native Americans live on reservations, covering 52.4 million acres in 33 different states, some of which are located in geographically remote areas. Native Americans living on reservations are suffering from poverty, unemployment, health disparities, crime, educational failures, and poor living conditions that are reminiscent of Third World countries. The concept of state harm introduced in this book constitutes a framework that suggests a reasonable explanation for the poor social conditions in these “Third World societies” that make up the reservation system in the United States. The book also shows how the psychological and emotional traumas of colonization, relocation, assimilation, and boarding schools have manifested harm within generations of Native Americans.
Features updated material and a special foreword from Arianna for the UK audience It’s not an exaggeration to say that the hard-working, average citizen on an average income is an endangered species and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become outdated. The USA is in danger of becoming a Third World nation.
Decades after the massive student protest movements that consumed much of the world, the 1960s remain a significant subject of scholarly inquiry. While important work has been done regarding radical activism in the United States and Western Europe, events in what is today known as the Global South-Asia, Africa, and Latin America-have yet to receive the requisite attention they deserve. This volume inserts the Third World into the study of the 1960s by examining the local and international articulations of youth protest in various geographical, social, and cultural arenas. Rejecting the notion that the Third World existed on the periphery, it situates the events of the 1960s in a more inclusive context, building a richer, more nuanced understanding of the Global 1960s that better reflects the dynamism of the period. Samantha Christiansen is an instructor at Northeastern University. Her research interests focus on youth and student mobilizations in South Asia and Europe and international Left politics. She has also taught at Independent University Bangladesh. Zachary A. Scarlett is an instructor at Northeastern University specializing in modern Chinese history and the history of radical social movements in the twentieth century. His work examines the ways in which Chinese students imagined and co-opted global narratives during the Cultural Revolution.
Soul Power is a cultural history of those whom Cynthia A. Young calls “U.S. Third World Leftists,” activists of color who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anticolonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the “long 1960s.” Nearly thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence in the 1960s alone. Arguing that the significance of this wave of decolonization to U.S. activists has been vastly underestimated, Young describes how literature, films, ideologies, and political movements that originated in the Third World were absorbed by U.S. activists of color. She shows how these transnational influences were then used to forge alliances, create new vocabularies and aesthetic forms, and describe race, class, and gender oppression in the United States in compelling terms. Young analyzes a range of U.S. figures and organizations, examining how each deployed Third World discourse toward various cultural and political ends. She considers a trip that LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams made to Cuba in 1960; traces key intellectual influences on Angela Y. Davis’s writing; and reveals the early history of the hospital workers’ 1199 union as a model of U.S. Third World activism. She investigates Newsreel, a late 1960s activist documentary film movement, and its successor, Third World Newsreel, which produced a seminal 1972 film on the Attica prison rebellion. She also considers the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American artists who made films about conditions in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. By demonstrating the breadth, vitality, and legacy of the work of U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power firmly establishes their crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American struggles for social change.
Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about. The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country—substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other—black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.
Praise for the first edition: "... this masterful and concise volume overviews the range of approaches social scientists have applied to explain events in the Third World." --Journal of Developing Areas Understanding Third World Politics is a comprehensive, critical introduction to political development and comparative politics in the non-Western world today. Beginning with an assessment of the shared factors that seem to determine underdevelopment, B. C. Smith introduces the major theories of development--development theory, modernization theory, neo-colonialism, and dependency theory--and examines the role and character of key political organizations, political parties, and the military in determining the fate of developing nations. This new edition gives special attention to the problems and challenges faced by developing nations as they become democratic states by addressing questions of political legitimacy, consensus building, religion, ethnicity, and class.
Why do many Asian, African, and Latin American states have such difficulty in directing the behavior of their populations--in spite of the resources at their disposal? And why do a small number of other states succeed in such control? What effect do failing laws and social policies have on the state itself? In answering these questions, Joel Migdal takes a new look at the role of the state in the third world. Strong Societies and Weak States offers a fresh approach to the study of state-society relations and to the possibilities for economic and political reforms in the third world. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, state institutions have established a permanent presence among the populations of even the most remote villages. A close look at the performance of these agencies, however, reveals that often they operate on principles radically different from those conceived by their founders and creators in the capital city. Migdal proposes an answer to this paradox: a model of state-society relations that highlights the state's struggle with other social organizations and a theory that explains the differing abilities of states to predominate in those struggles.
Examines the evolution of US foreign policy toward the Third World, and the policy challenges facing developing nations in the post-Cold War era. This book provides information and insight on US policy objectives, and considers whether anti-Western sentiment in Third World regions is a result of US foreign policies since the end of the Cold War.
In this revised and expanded second edition of Third World Studies, Gary Y. Okihiro considers the methods and theories that might constitute the formation of Third World studies. Proposed in 1968 at San Francisco State College by the Third World Liberation Front but replaced by faculty and administrators with ethnic studies, Third World studies was over before it began. As opposed to ethnic studies, which Okihiro critiques for its liberalism and US-centrism, Third World studies begins with the colonized world and the anti-imperial, anticolonial, and antiracist projects located therein as described by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1900. Third World studies analyzes the locations and articulations of power around the axes of race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, class, and nation. In this new edition, Okihiro emphasizes the work of Third World intellectuals such as M. N. Roy, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Oliver Cromwell Cox; foregrounds the importance of Bandung and the Tricontinental; and adds discussions of eugenics, feminist epistemologies, and religion. With this work, Okihiro establishes Third World studies as a theoretical formation and a liberatory practice.
