LITMIR.BIZ

Days after taking the White House, Donald Trump signed three executive orders—these authorized the Muslim Ban, the border wall, and ICE raids. These orders would define his administration’s approach toward noncitizens. An essential primer on how we got here, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary shows that such barriers to immigration are embedded in the very foundation of the United States. A. Naomi Paik reveals that the forty-fifth president’s xenophobic, racist, ableist, patriarchal ascendancy is no aberration, but the consequence of two centuries of U.S. political, economic, and social culture. She deftly demonstrates that attacks against migrants are tightly bound to assaults against women, people of color, workers, ill and disabled people, and queer and gender nonconforming people. Against this history of barriers and assaults, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary mounts a rallying cry for a broad-based, abolitionist sanctuary movement for all.

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"A powerful — and personal — account of the movement and its players."—The Washington Post“This perceptive resource on radical black liberation movements in the 21st century can inform anyone wanting to better understand . . . how to make social change.”—Publishers Weekly The breadth and impact of Black Lives Matter in the United States has been extraordinary. Between 2012 and 2016, thousands of people marched, rallied, held vigils, and engaged in direct actions to protest and draw attention to state and vigilante violence against Black people. What began as outrage over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin and the exoneration of his killer, and accelerated during the Ferguson uprising of 2014, has evolved into a resurgent Black Freedom Movement, which includes a network of more than fifty organizations working together under the rubric of the Movement for Black Lives coalition. Employing a range of creative tactics and embracing group-centered leadership models, these visionary young organizers, many of them women, and many of them queer, are not only calling for an end to police violence, but demanding racial justice, gender justice, and systemic change. In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anticapitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community. From the perspective of a participant-observer, Ransby maps the movement, profiles many of its lesser-known leaders, measures its impact, outlines its challenges, and looks toward its future. 

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From the 1960s to the present, activists, artists, and science fiction writers have imagined the consequences of climate change and its impacts on our future. Authors such as Octavia Butler and Leslie Marmon Silko, movie directors such as Bong Joon-Ho, and creators of digital media such as the makers of the Maori web series&#160;<I>Anamata Future News</I>&#160;have all envisioned future worlds during and after environmental collapse, engaging audiences to think about the earth&rsquo;s sustainability. As public awareness of climate change has grown, so has the popularity of works of climate fiction that connect science with activism.<BR /><BR /> Today, real-world social movements helmed by Indigenous people and people of color are leading the way against the greatest threat to our environment: the fossil fuel industry. Their stories and movements&mdash;in the real world and through science fiction&mdash;help us all better understand the relationship between activism and culture, and how both can be valuable tools in creating our future.&#160;<I>Imagining the Future of Climate Change</I>&#160;introduces readers to the history and most significant flashpoints in climate justice through speculative fictions and social movements, exploring post-disaster possibilities and the art of world-making.

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On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the world fixed on Detroit, as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream. Mainstream observers contended that the &ldquo;riot&rdquo; brought about the ruin of a once-great city; for them, the municipal bankruptcy of 2013 served as a bailout paving the way for the rebuilding of Detroit. Challenging this prevailing view, Scott Kurashige portrays the past half century as a long rebellion whose underlying tensions continue to haunt the city and the U.S. nation-state. He sees Michigan&rsquo;s scandal-ridden &quot;emergency management&quot; regime, set up to handle the bankruptcy, as the most concerted effort to put it down by disenfranchising the majority black citizenry and neutralizing the power of unions.<BR /> &#160;<BR /> Are we succumbing to authoritarian plutocracy or can we create a new society rooted in social justice and participatory democracy? The corporate architects of Detroit&rsquo;s restructuring have championed the creation of a &ldquo;business-friendly&rdquo; city, where billionaire developers are subsidized to privatize and gentrify Downtown, while working-class residents are being squeezed out by rampant housing evictions, school closures, water shutoffs, toxic pollution, and militarized policing. Grassroots organizers, however, have transformed Detroit into an international model for survival, resistance, and solidarity through the creation of urban farms, freedom schools, and self-governing communities. This epochal struggle illuminates the possible futures for our increasingly unstable and polarized nation.

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In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism and political recognition. What happened in the last few decades to prompt such an extensive rethinking of our understanding of gendered embodiment? How did a stigmatized identity become so central to U.S. and European articulations of self? And how have people responded to the new definitions and understanding of sex and the gendered body? In&#160;<I>Trans*,</I> Jack Halberstam explores these recent shifts in the meaning of the gendered body and representation, and explores the possibilities of a nongendered, gender-optional, or gender-queer future.

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&ldquo;Puts campus activism in a radical historic context.&rdquo;&mdash;New York Review of Books In the post&ndash;World War II period, students rebelled against the university establishment. In student-led movements, women, minorities, immigrants, and indigenous people demanded that universities adapt to better serve the increasingly heterogeneous public and student bodies. The success of these movements had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: out of these efforts were born ethnic studies, women&rsquo;s studies, and American studies. &#160; In&#160;We Demand,&#160;Roderick A. Ferguson demonstrates that less than fifty years since this pivotal shift in the academy, the university is moving away from &ldquo;the people&rdquo; in all their diversity. Today the university is refortifying its commitment to the defense of the status quo off campus and the regulation of students, faculty, and staff on campus. The progressive forms of knowledge that the student-led movements demanded and helped to produce are being attacked on every front. Not only is this a reactionary move against the social advances since the &rsquo;60s and &rsquo;70s&mdash;it is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States.&#160;

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&ldquo;Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice.&rdquo;&mdash;Naomi Klein We are living in a precarious environmental and political moment. In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this&#160;moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles? &#160;Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed&#160;with cautiously hopeful stories for the future. &#160;

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From the shutdown of Planned Parenthood clinics and rising rates of HIV to opposition to marriage equality and bathroom bills, the New South is the epicenter of the new sex wars. Antagonism toward reproductive freedom, partner rights, and transgender rights has revealed a new and unacknowledged era of southern reconstruction centered on gender and sexuality.<BR /><BR /> In <I>A Dirty South Manifesto,</I> L.&#160;H. Stallings celebrates the roots of radical sexual resistance in the New South&mdash;a movement that is antiracist, decolonial, and transnational. For people within economically disenfranchised segments of society, those in sexually marginalized communities, and the racially oppressed, the South has been a sexual dystopia. Throughout this book, Stallings delivers hard-hitting manifestos for the new sex wars. With her focus on contemporary Black southern life, Stallings offers an invitation to anyone who has ever imagined a way of living beyond white supremacist heteropatriarchy.

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Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question&#160;tells the story of&#160;the country&rsquo;s first Latina Supreme Court Associate Justice&rsquo;s&#160;rise to the pinnacle of American public life at a moment of profound demographic and political transformation. While Sotomayor&rsquo;s confirmation appeared to signal the greater acceptance and inclusion of Latinos&mdash;the nation&rsquo;s largest &ldquo;minority majority&rdquo;&mdash;the uncritical embrace of her status as a &ldquo;possibility model&rdquo; and icon paradoxically erased the fact that her success was due to civil rights policies and safeguards that no longer existed.&#160; &#160;Being Brown&#160;analyzes Sotomayor&rsquo;s story of success and accomplishment, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, in order to ask:&#160;What do we lose in democratic practice when we allow symbolic inclusion to supplant the work of meaningful political enfranchisement? In a historical moment of resurgent racism, unrelenting Latino bashing, and previously unimaginable &ldquo;blood and soil&rdquo; Nazism,&#160;Being Brown&#160;explains what we stand to lose when we allow democratic values to be trampled for the sake of political expediency, and demonstrates how understanding &ldquo;the Latino question&rdquo; can fortify democratic practice. &#160;Being Brown&#160;provides the historical vocabulary for understanding why the Latino body politic is central to the country&rsquo;s future and why Sonia Sotomayor&rsquo;s biography provides an important window into understanding America, and the country&rsquo;s largest minority majority, at this historical juncture. In the process,&#160;Being Brown&#160;counters &ldquo;alternative facts&rdquo; with historical precision and ethical clarity to invigorate the best of democratic practice at a&#160;historical moment when we need it most.&#160; &#160; &#160;

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&#160;<B>&quot;Astute.&quot;&mdash;<I>New York Times&#160;</I></B><BR /><BR /> Ayn Rand&rsquo;s complicated notoriety as popular writer, leader of a political and philosophical cult, reviled intellectual, and ostentatious public figure endured beyond her death in 1982. In the twenty-first century, she has been resurrected as a serious reference point for mainstream figures, especially those on the political right from Paul Ryan to Donald Trump.&#160;<I>Mean Girl&#160;</I>follows Rand&rsquo;s trail through the twentieth century from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War and traces her posthumous appeal and the influence of her novels via her cruel, surly, sexy heroes. Outlining the impact of Rand&rsquo;s philosophy of selfishness,&#160;<I>Mean Girl&#160;</I>illuminates the Randian shape of our neoliberal, contemporary culture of greed and the dilemmas we face in our political present.

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