Celebrating University Press Week: Scholarship Making a Difference

November 6-11 is University Press Week. Since 2012, we have celebrated University Press Week each year to help tell the story of how university press publishing supports scholarship, culture, and both local and global communities.

Today’s theme: Scholarship Making a Difference

This year Temple University Press had three authors prominently featured in the news for their writings about race. Their scholarship made a difference; it generated broad discussions about topical issues.

In August, in light of the nationalist rally in Charlottesville, BuzzFeed News created a reading list for people looking to become informed about the history of systemic racism and white supremacy in the U.S. Coming in at #4 on the list was George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Cultural Critic Irene Nexica explained why:

In The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, George Lipsitz offers an exhaustive analysis of the many ways in which whiteness is centered and rewarded in housing, education, health care, employment, and culture, as well as an examination of white privilege as it’s long been defined and critiqued in radical black culture.

“Lipsitz deftly weaves a diverse set of knowledge into social histories of popular culture that simultaneously shapes and is shaped by society with analyses that are both accessible to a general reader and containing sharp cultural critique…The Possessive Investment in Whiteness looks at whiteness in America from many angles, including OJ Simpson (‘White Fear: O.J. Simpson and the Greatest Story Ever Sold’), Stephen King’s Lean on Me (where Lipsitz complicates things by describing how ‘not all white supremacists are white’), and the ways that different nonwhite communities are impacted by whiteness.”

Lipsitz’s book, which will be re-issued in a review, 20^th Anniversary Edition by Temple University Press this spring, is one of several titles that have generated attention for its discussion of race and inequality.

***

In June, Temple University Press published Tommy Curry’s provocative book, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, a justification for Black Male Studies. He posits that we should conceptualize the Black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex, challenging how we think of and perceive the conditions that actually affect all Black males.

In The Man-Not, Curry suggests that Black men are the primary targets of white supremacy and white patriarchy. He addresses issues of police brutality as well as how Black males are victims of domestic abuse and rape—a topic rarely discussed publicly given the current focus on intersectionality and sexual violence. Moreover, Curry writes about Eldridge Cleaver and his same sex lover Richard, a discovery that has generated considerable interest.

The author was profiled in both Inside Higher Ed and in The Chronicle of Higher Education this year. Curry’s past comments on race incited death threats, but his new book has generated attention for its provocative nature. A review that appeared in Choice this month read, “Many readers may find this book an uncomfortable read, and that is the very reason it should be read.”

Ishmael Reed, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Scholar at the California College of the Arts said this about The Man-Not:

“Tommy Curry has written a cool, brilliant defense of the men who are the pariahs of American society: the ones who, regardless of class, find themselves at the bottom of every hierarchy; the ones whose demographics and statistics in terms of the criminal justice, health care, and other systems are abysmal. Countless billions have been made from the portrayal of Black males as Boogeymen. The Man-Not is heavy work, but the general reader will find its arguments well worth the time and effort. This book is controversial. Those who’ve dogged and stalked Black men in the academy and popular culture for the past few decades are sure to have their critical knives out. I know. But it’s rare for an American intellectual to step up, regardless of the fallout. This book is the one that I’ve been waiting for. Curry has taken a bullet for the brothers.”

***

Lastly, in July, George Yancy, author of Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness, interviewed Noam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union,​ for his Opinionator blog in the New York Times. 

Yancy’s book examines whiteness through both a personal and philosophical lens, offering a convincing argument for the permanence of whiteness and how such a recognition can help to create a substantial anti-racist stance in philosophy and in the larger world.

He is also the author of the controversial essay, “Dear White America,” that stemmed from his book.​