Books of critical importance in the era of Trump from Temple University Press

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase books of importance in the era of Trump.

Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania
Jamie Longazel
Longazel uses the debate around Hazleton, Pennsylvania’s controversial Illegal Immigration Relief Act as a case study that reveals the mechanics of contemporary divide and conquer politics, making important connection between immigration politics and the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality.

The Gendered Executive: A Comparative Analysis of Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Chief Executives
Edited by Janet M. Martin and MaryAnne Borrelli
A critical examination of national executives, focusing on matters of identity, representation, and power. The editors and contributors address the impact of female executives through political mobilization and participation, policy- and decision-making, and institutional change.

The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements
Edited by Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson, and Peter N. Funke
With a Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
The Great Refusal provides an analysis of contemporary social movements around the world—such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement—with particular reference to Marcuse’s revolutionary concept.

Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto
Eric Tang
Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of Cambodian refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in New York City’s “hyperghetto.”

Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants; Race, Gender, and Immigration Politics in the Age of Security
Anna Sampaio
Winner! American Political Science Association’s Latino Politics Best Book Prize, 2016
Immigration politics has been significantly altered by the advent of America’s war on terror and the proliferation of security measures. Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants examines how these processes are racialized and gendered and how they impose inequitable burdens on Latina/o immigrants.

Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City
Michael T. Maly and Heather M. Dalmage
Examining how racial solidarity and whiteness were created and maintained, the authors provide an intriguing analysis of the experiences and memories of whites who lived in Chicago neighborhoods experiencing racial change during the 1950s through the 1980s.

Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice
Ryan Patrick Murphy
Situating the flight attendant union movement in the history of debates about family and work, Ryan Patrick Murphy offers an economic and a cultural analysis to show how the workplace has been the primary venue to enact feminist and LGBTQ politics.

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
Revised and Expanded Edition
George Lipsitz
In this unflinching look at white supremacy, Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes. He analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege.

Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness
George Yancy
Foreword by Naomi Zack
Look, a White! returns the problem of whiteness to white people. Prompted by Eric Holder’s charge, that as Americans, we are cowards when it comes to discussing the issue of race, Yancy identifies the ways white power and privilege operate.

Philadelphia Writers Resist

This week in North Philly Notes, we highlight the contributions Temple University Press authors made to the recent Writers Resist event held in Philadelphia.

Photo by Lena Popkin

Nathaniel Popkin, co-organizer of the program, and forthcoming Temple University Press author, said this about the event:

We had dual goals for Philadelphia Writers Resist—the first is the need to stand up to protect First Amendment rights. Writers in every society have particular responsibility, and historically are the observers, documenters, dreamers…But there is a second reason for writers to stand up today: we are being directly threatened by the President-elect. (You can read some of these ideas in the op-ed we wrote for the Inquirer). The second reason for doing the event was to unite the various cells of the Philly literary community with a common purpose. My sense of Philly is that we have an incredibly rich literary community but it doesn’t really cohere. With this event, I felt that we joined voices around texts—we inhabited words together.

The event exactly hit my expectations: tone, tenor, energy, goodwill, and the words and voices that brought them to life seemed to carry extra poignance, extra meaning, when arranged next to each other. My sense in reading comments on Facebook and from what people told me after: people were struck by the humility and humanity of writers reading other people’s work. They were both inspired and frustrated that we’ve fighting these fights as long as we have, and they were reminded, with the extraordinary beauty and grace of the texts, that writers matter, that writing matters, that it gives shape to our greatest hopes as human beings.

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One of the poems read at the event was “Learning to love America” by Shirley Geok-lim Lin, co-editor of Reading the Literatures of Asian America and Transnational Asian American Literature. 

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Beth Kephart, author of Flow, and Love, read the lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s song, “Further On (Up the Road),” from his album, The Rising. She said she chose this song because, “it was a simple text, an invitation, a sliver of hope, a reminder, a refrain that we are not stuck in present time, not contained by present conditions, not condemned to paralysis. We are on a journey, and at this moment it is dark and miles are marked in blood and gold, but: there is a further on up the road, there is a path, a brighter path, to be forged.”

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Daniel Biddle, co-author of Tasting Freedom, read the Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of Pennsylvania, 10 February 1865. Octavius V. Catto et al.

They were barbers, teachers, carpenters, soldiers. Octavius Catto and 80 other Pennsylvanians of color braved a blizzard to get to Harrisburg in February 1865.  There they met for three days and nights in a church, and emerged with a message to the white world.

Black soldiers’ service and sacrifice were helping the Union win the war, Catto and his allies wrote. Let there be no further debate or delay in granting “our political enfranchisement, now and forever.”

The petition was a good fit for Writers Resist. Its authors, like their heirs in the modern Civil Rights Movement, challenged the racist order with a mix of courage and calculation; and they wrote well. Their final sentence made the same argument sculptor Branly Cadet has depicted in his statue of Catto, soon to be erected by City Hall: that the people’s power, wielded at the ballot box, can make injustice “disappear as the dews of morning melt before the morning sun.”

“….We have never yet been secure in our persons, houses, papers and possessions, from unreasonable searches and seizures, as warranted to all persons under the State Constitution. When tried by accusation before our State Courts, it has been almost impossible to secure an impartial jury…and in no case can it be claimed that we are tried, and judgment rendered by our peers. All these disadvantages have contributed to rivet the shackles of prejudice and political slavery upon us, and throw us upon the mercy of those who know no mercy even up to this very hour of national calamity and moral revolution…

Slavery is now dead…  dead throughout the land — black men declared to be citizens of the United States, and marching by tens of thousands on field and flood against this monstrous rebellion… fighting, bleeding, dying in defense of our Constitution and the maintenance of our law.

Can it be possible that Pennsylvania will still suffer herself to be dishonored by refusing to acknowledge or to guarantee citizenship to those who have suffered so much, and still been foremost among her own sons in defending their country… against treason and rebellion?

Is it not our duty to ask
In the name of justice,
In the name of humanity,  

In the name of those whose bones whiten the battlefields of the South, that every bar to our political enfranchisement be now and forever removed?

Do this, and all other evils and outrages will disappear as the dews of morning melt before the morning sun.

Temple University Press’ Spring 2017 Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes we showcase our Spring 2017 catalog of books and journals!

 

A video showcasing jazz biographer and critic Jim Merod

This week in North Philly Notes, a video featuring Jim Merod, co-author of Whisper Not.

Jazz critic and historian Jim Merod has recorded live jazz for more than forty years across the United States and Europe. His BluePort Jazz label has been featured in the audio journal, The Absolute Sound, for its “on location” audiophile albums.

Jim has published essays in the journal Boundary 2 on Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Beethoven’s last string quartet. He has been responsible for producing and directing jazz concerts in Boston, La Jolla, the Napa Valley and is currently the Director of the “Jazz Monsters” concert series in the highly-acclaimed Performing Arts Hall at Soka University in Southern California, where he teaches a course on jazz and classical music.

He is collaborating with David Bowie’s pianist extraordinaire, Mike Garson, on a major symphonic production dedicated to the prospect of preserving earth’s ecosystem as a central objective of global responsibility for the purpose of world peace.

This video, created by northern California videographer, Francisco Lopez, was initiated after a conversation Merod had on the Lyons stage at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September, 2016 with Quincy Jones. That conversation inspired Lopez to travel to Soka University to cover Jim’s three day jazz festival, where these interviews took place.

Give a look and a listen….

Video courtesy of Tank Frank Filmz