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Picture of a book: Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique
Picture of a book: Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology
Picture of a book: Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
Picture of a book: The Sun Also Rises
Picture of a book: The Racial Contract
Picture of a book: Selected Poems
Picture of a book: The Infernal Machine and Other Plays
Picture of a book: Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Picture of a book: Great Expectations
Picture of a book: Moby-Dick or, the Whale
Picture of a book: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Picture of a book: The First Man
Picture of a book: The Dew Breaker
Picture of a book: Red Doc>
Picture of a book: Possession
Picture of a book: Light in August

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Picture of a book: Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique
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Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique

Roderick A. Ferguson
The sociology of race relations in America typically describes an intersection of poverty, race, and economic discrimination. But what is missing from the picture--sexual difference--can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology--Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson--has measured African Americans' unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans' culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology's regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories--the narrative of capital's emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture--works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story--one in which people who presumably manifest the dys-functions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery--a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way thatcomplicates and illuminates Ellison's project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson's work introduces a new mode of discourse--which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis--that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology. A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture.
Picture of a book: Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology
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Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology

2005
While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project.The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies.Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace
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The Racial Contract

Charles W. Mills
The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the "separate but equal" system of segregation in the United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War. Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy's invisible white male bias, Mills's explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.
Picture of a book: Selected Poems
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Selected Poems

Paul Verlaine
This poetry collection by Verlaine, who ranks with Baudelaire and Rimbaud as one of the most outstanding poets of late nineteenth-century France, captured my attention with its unique craftsmanship:Music, more music, always music!Create verse which lifts and flies away,Verse of a soul that has taken offInto other stratospheres of love.I read poetry for language, to listen to the rhythm and sound, to sense the metres. This is one of those instances where I couldn't help but become a bit of a poetry nerd. At the risk of sounding too technical, I was surprised to see that the metres in most of these poems were determined by the syllables per line, and not by the number of beats or stresses. I guess this is why I love reading poetry from different continents and eras, why I fall easily for bilingual collections (like this one), so that I can compare and learn. Language in poetry generally fascinates.In comparing the French poem to its English translation, one senses the distinct organization of the French line of poetry. These poems are conservative with technique. In some instances, even when Verlaine is ambitious with parisyllabic lines, he sticks to a set amount of syllables per line (nine in this case):Imagine fine eyes behind a veil,Imagine the shimmer of high noon,Imagine, in skies cooled for autumn,Blue entanglements of lucent stars.The adherence to style and framework is alluring. For example, on the surface, the words in this stanza from "Brussels" are arranged nicely, but if one was to pay attention to the metres in the first and fourth lines (or second and third) one notices that the parallel arrangement carries the same syllabic metres, producing a different kind of sound:I drift in a languor of dreams,Becalmed in monotone airAnd hardly even sad, so muchDoes this early autumn picture fade.If you love story-telling in your poetry, you won't find them here. These poems seem more conceptual, abstract. Verlaine was said to be both delicate and callous; his poems are reflections of his contradictions. His translator, Martin Sorrell, says he's "both a good and a bad poet, but at one and the same time, in tandem." Take what you may from this.
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Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

bell hooks
\ White male scholars who examined the black family by attempting to see in what ways it resembled the white family structure were confident that their data was not biased by their own personal prejudices against women assuming an active role in family decision-making. But it must be remembered that these white males were educated in an elite institutional world that excluded both black people and many white women, institutions that were both racist and sexist.\ Calling myself racist accomplishes nothing. Calling society racist accomplishes nothing. Calling the world racist accomplishes nothing, and in fact solipsistically applies the framework of United States oppression theory to a vast spectra of bigotry, each impacting the other but never, ever, the same. In a word, calling out an observation does nothing. Appropriating the patriarchal scientific method for a moment, one hypothesizes, experiments, hypothesizes, experiments, ad infinitum. Call out your observations, wonder why, go forth, call out, wonder, go forth. Never, ever, stop.\ Historically, white patriarchs rarely referred to the racial identity of white women because they believed that the subject of race was political and therefore would contaminate the sanctified domain of “white” women’s reality. By verbally denying white women racial identity, that is by simply referring to them as women when what they really meant was white women, their status was reduced to that of non-person.White feminists did not challenge the racist-sexist tendency to use the word “woman” to refer solely to white women; they supported it. For them it served two purposes. First, it allowed them to proclaim white men world oppressors while making it appear linguistically that no alliance existed between white women and white men based on shared racial imperialism. Second, it made it possible for white women to act as if alliances did exist between themselves and non-white women in our society, and by doing so they could deflect attention away from their classism and racism.\ hooks called out both feminists I've read and feminists I'm planning to read, and yet I will continue to use the information I have learned and will seek out more of the same. An answer to the wherefore lies in my inherently valuing the critical process far more than the perfection of the accumulated tidbits, a holistic rejection of the freeze frame, the weighing, the hierarchy of the patriarchy implying white imperialism and androcentrism and so much else. It is far easier to hate everything else than it is to incorporate that everything else into a deconstruction of that hate, but if you proclaim yourself an agent of justice, that is what you must do.\ We cannot form an accurate picture of woman’s status by simply calling attention to the role assigned females under patriarchy. More specifically, we cannot form an accurate picture of the status of black women by simply focusing on racial hierarchies.Scholars have argued further that by not allowing black men to assume their traditional patriarchal status, white men effectively emasculated them, reducing them to an effeminate state. Implicit in this assertion is the assumption that the worst that can happen to a man is that he be made to assume the social status of woman.\ I'll rest when a black trans lesbian, a recovering addict who grew up in poverty and was once a sex worker, is the President of the United States. Inconceivable enough to almost everyone as of now, but that list of characteristics will only grow longer during my lifetime of reading, writing, and thinking, for the lack of academic discourse on that particular combination of bigotry does not prevent me from being aware of the existence of individuals who, by sheer coincidence of birth, fit the bill. That coincidence should not choke aspirations of leadership in the highest echelons from the get go. What must change is not the aspirations, but the choking.\ “I know of more than one colored woman who was openly importuned by white women to become the mistresses of their white husbands, on the grounds that they, the white wives, were afraid that, if their husbands did not associate with colored women, they would certainly do so with outside white women, and the white wives, for reasons which ought to be perfectly obvious, preferred to have their husbands do wrong with the colored women in order to keep their husbands straight.”I interviewed a black woman usually employed as a clerk who was living in near poverty, yet she continually emphasized the fact that black woman was matriarchal, powerful, in control of her life; in fact she was nearly having a nervous breakdown trying to make ends meet.\ hooks did not touch on queer theory. She did not call out the disrespectful and dehumanizing view of China and its culture in one of her used quotes. She did not cite her sources as explicitly as most, although the very concept of citations evolves from the quick and easy rhetoric of the patriarchy that engulfs its oppression in seeming ethos while in reality making the rules so as to have something to mewl and puke about when the institution is threatened, as if the rules themselves as with racism were anything but conjured out of thin air and as such can be treated accordingly (similar to how Goodreads keeps capitalizing her name aka disrespecting her autonomy in the effort to preserve the fragile sanctity of its holy search function). However, her holistic breakdown of white, black, male, female, without ever playing one off the other, is a lesson of criticizing the complex web of indoctrination oppression that can be applied to any intersectional social justice. The patriarchy is a bloated blight, spanning from its emphasis on capitalism to its compromised inheritance, all in the effort to reduce humanity to ciphers of privilege for this or that or any old reason of difference, difference, difference. Life is politics is life is a multifarious thing, and will not limit its splintered evolution for the sake of your self-help book view of life.\ Feminism as a political ideology advocating social equality for all women was and is acceptable to many black women. They rejected the women’s movement when it became apparent that middle and upper class college-educated white women who were its majority participants were determined to shape the movement so that it would serve their own opportunistic ends.To those who saw feminism solely as a way to demand entrance into the white male power structure, it simplified matters to make all men oppressors and all women victims.\ Any idea can be abused. What matters is the willingness to pay heed to the consequences and the neverending effort to push that idea to its ultimate limits of inclusiveness of every being deserving of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And then some.\ Racism is the barrier that prevents positive communication and it is not eliminated or challenged by separation. White women supported the formation of separate groups because it confirmed their preconceived racist-sexist notion that no connection existed between their experiences and those of black women.It in no way diminishes our concern about racist oppression for us to acknowledge that our human experience is so complex that we cannot understand it if we only understand racism.\ The Internet enables me to say these words without fear of physical retribution. Words words words, of course, but I am a writer, and once upon a time my words were not so good. Once upon a time, everything I stood for and how I stood for it was not so good. The memory of that, if nothing else, is what keeps me going.\ A feminism so rooted in envy, fear, and idealization of male power cannot expose the de-humanizing effect of sexism on men and women in American society.Our willingness to assume responsibility for the elimination of racism need not be engendered by feelings of guilt, moral responsibility, victimization, or rage. It can spring from a heartfelt desire for sisterhood and the personal, intellectual realization that racism among women undermines the potential radicalism of feminism.That sisterhood cannot be forged by the mere saying of words. It is the outcome of continued growth and change. It is a goal to be reached, a process of becoming. The process begins with action, with the individual woman’s refusal to accept any set of myths, stereotypes, and false assumptions that deny the shared commonness of her human experience; that deny her capacity to experience the Unity of all life, that deny her capacity to bridge gaps created by racism, sexism, or classism; that deny her ability to change. The process begins the the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist, and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.\ She wrote this at nineteen. Imagine that. Now go forth.

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Picture of a book: The Woman Destroyed
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The Woman Destroyed

Simone de Beauvoir
Rich and powerful writing in these three novellas. I will definitely read more of this author. SPOILERS FOLLOW BELOW FOR ALL 3 NOVELLAS! The first novella, The Age of Discretion, centers around the aging process and the end of careers of both husband and wife. In addition, there’s the bitter disappointment the woman feels after the son she has ‘groomed’ to follow in her footsteps as a professor turns thirty and changes career and political outlook to go into government service. His mother feels it’s all about his wife and father-in-law pushing him to make more money and get a ‘real’ Job. Amazingly she turns against her son in an incredibly brutal way. She throws her son out of her house and says things like “I cannot love anyone I do not respect.” And to her husband: “Do you think I ought to see him again?” [This is their son!]The couple is both around 60. He still works as a scientist but feels only younger people can contribute. “Great scientists are valuable to science in the first half of their lives and harmful in the second.” [quote from Bachelard] She argues with him until her latest book that she thought of as 'filled with new insights’ is panned by both critics and friends as a summary of her earlier work. “In earlier days I never used to worry about old people. I looked upon them as the dead whose legs still kept moving.”The second novella, The Monologue, is a bitter screed by a woman left alone and abandoned at age 44. Her daughter, off on her own, died five years ago. “It’s flying in the face of nature that my own brother my own mother should prefer my ex-husband to me.” And: “I wanted decent clean children I didn’t want Francis to become a fairy like Nanard.” “I’m not ill I live alone because your swine of a father ditched me he buttered me up then he tortured me he even knocked me about….I have weapons I’ll use them he’ll come back to me I shan’t go on rotting all alone in this dump with those people on the next floor who trample me underfoot and the ones next door who wake me every morning with their radio and no one to bring me so much as a crust when I’m hungry. All those fat cows have a man to protect them and kids to wait on them and me nothing…” She envisions her enemies roasting in hell: “You owe me this revenge, God. I insist that you grant it to me.” And, of course, through this screed, she reveals so much of herself to us so that we see why she has been abandoned. The title story, The Woman Destroyed, is written as a diary over six months or so. A woman has a husband and two daughters, one locally and one in the US that she seldom sees. Her husband admits to her that he is having an affair. With the advice of her friends she agrees to let him continue with it, taking the attitude that “men his age do these things; it will pass.” That turns out to be a mistake. All her life, she only worked in the home. He still has his career, his wife, his mistress and good times. She has nothing. Even with her women friends all she talks about is her situation with her husband. When she hears his key in the lock “…there was that horrible taste in my mouth – the taste of dread. (The same exactly, as when I used to go to see my father dying in the nursing home.)” “It seems to me that I no longer have anything whatever to do. I always used to be busy. Now everything – knitting, cooking, reading, putting on a record – everything seems pointless.” “Women who do nothing can’t stand those who work.” (Did her husband’s mistress really say that?) Good stories and excellent writing.Paris street scene from dreamstime.comPhoto of the author from alpha.aeon.co/images
Picture of a book: The Library of Babel
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The Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges, Erik Desmazieres
In Borges's short story, the world consists of a gigantic library which contains every possible book that can ever be written. So, somewhere, there must logically be the book, the one that reveals the Library's secret! Unfortunately, there is no filing system, and no one has any idea of how to find the elusive book. In fact, it's challenging even to locate one which contains a meaningful sentence: most of them are gibberish from beginning to end. Well, our own world isn't quite as bad - but it's still harder than it should be to locate the books you really want to read, when they're mixed up with the ones you just think you might want to read. I am often appalled at the amount of time I waste on this site, but comfort myself with the thought that it has helped me find some amazing books I normally wouldn't even have considered. But exactly how helpful has it been? The other day, it occurred to me to try and answer this question quantitatively. I calculate that, since I started hanging out here in late 2008, I have read 42 books just because someone here has recommended them. (I didn't count books recommended by people on Goodreads whom I also know in real life, otherwise the figure would be considerably higher). After some more thought, I've picked out a Top Ten, which I present here for your amusement:10. I've never seen anyone outside Goodreads mention \ Everything Explained Through Flowcharts\ , recommended to me by David G, but it's the funniest thing I've seen in ages. I challenge you to read it without giggling helplessly at least a couple of times. Why it isn't more famous is more than I understand.9. \ À rebours\ , a weird 19th century French novel recommended to me by Sabrina, is another book that deserves to be better known. Nothing happens, but it's somehow utterly compelling. I think it's also been very influential.8. I love books written under strong formalist constraints, but I'd never heard of \ Eunoia\ , recommended by Gary. Five chapters, each using only one vowel, and, even though it sounds impossible, it works remarkably well as poetry. Really!7. Eric W recommended \ The Terrible Hours: The Greatest Submarine Rescue in History\ . If you're after inspiration and good old-fashioned heroism, look no further. 6. Choupette was so indignant about \ Plateforme\ that I had to check it out for myself. I liked it enough that I also read \ Les particules élémentaires\ . I won't promise that you'll enjoy them, but they're certainly going to make you think.5. Everyone recommended \ The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains\ . Alas, all too true. The mere fact that I'm sitting here writing this proves his point.4. Would you believe it, I hadn't even heard of \ Infinite Jest\ before I joined GR. Within a couple of months, I'd given in and bought a copy. Admittedly, I also bought a copy of \ Twilight\ at the same time...3. Pavel told me I had to read \ Voices from Chernobyl\ , and he was right. Whatever your opinions on nuclear power, it's irresponsible not to. You can't take more than a chapter or so at a time; after that, you just sit there stunned, doing your best not to cry. Another book that people have unaccountably overlooked.2. Was I really going to read a thousand page physics text full of scary math? I did a math degree in the late 70s, but this looked way over my level. However, Nick called me chicken enough times that I decided to tackle \ The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe\ . I've finally got to the end, and wow, was it a fascinating read! If you like math and physics, take Nick's advice: forget the pop science books and go for the big one. It's worth the effort.1. I don't really know Norwegian, and how likely was it that I'd buy a three volume magical-realist Norwegian novel by an author I'd never heard of? But, moved by Oriana's glowing review, I started thinking that I speak Swedish, Norwegian isn't that different (it's a kind of Spanish/Portugese deal), so why not give it a shot? By the time I was 20 pages into \ Forføreren\ , I was hooked, and then I immediately continued with \ Erobreren\ and \ Oppdageren\ . The trilogy is the most brilliant thing I have read this century, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you Oriana!So, there you are, and I hope I've made at least one sale :) In the interests of completeness, here's the rest of the list, in alphabetical order:\ 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style\ \ The Authoritarians\ \ The Bent Sword\ \ Breaking Dawn\ \ Crowds and Power\ \ The Dreamfighter: And Other Creation Tales\ \ Eclipse\ \ L'élégance du hérisson\ \ Exercices de Style\ \ Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will\ \ Go the Fuck to Sleep\ \ Galatea 2.2\ \ Gray Matters\ \ Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!\ \ The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos\ \ How To Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own\ \ Musical Chairs\ \ Mysterier\ \ New Moon\ \ No Hope for Gomez!\ \ Not a Chance: Fictions\ \ The Riddler's Gift (Lifesong, #1)\ \ The Sparrow\ \ Sult\ \ The Triple A's Check It Out\ \ Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights\ \ Whom God Would Destroy\ \ Zazie dans le métro\ Happy Goodreading!