Can we abolish the death penalty?

This week in North Philly Notes, Austin Sarat, editor of Death Penalty in Decline?, considers how attitudes about capital punishment have changed over the decades since Furman v. Georgia.

I have been studying America’s death penalty for almost 50 years. When I started doing so it seemed almost unimaginable that this country could, or would, ever give up its apparent love affair with capital punishment. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court brought a temporary halt to capital punishment in Furman v. Georgia. Four years later, however, the Court approved new procedures for deciding on death sentences and upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty. And by the 1990s, fueled by a “tough on crime” political climate, the number of death sentences and executions steadily climbed.

I have been inspired in my work on capital punishment by what Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in Furman. He believed people supported the death penalty because they did not know very much about it. Marshall argued that the more people knew about the death penalty, the less they would like it. He thought that scholars could play an important role in the work of educating the public about the grim realities of state-sponsored killing.

So I had my charge. Write about the workings of the death penalty system. Inform my fellow citizens about what the government does when it puts people to death.

I have written many books and scholarly articles about America’s death penalty. Recently, I added to my repertoire a series of op eds and commentaries designed to make my scholarship accessible to a public audience. I have not been alone in this work. Many distinguished scholars have lent their voices to the conversation about capital punishment. Lawyers, activists, and politicians have done the crucial work of mobilizing opposition to state killing.

They have alerted us to the fallibility of, and flaws in, the death penalty system. Sixty-three percent of the American public now believe that an innocent person has been executed in the past five years, and confronting the sheer fact of miscarriages of justice has led many Americans to reconsider their views about the death penalty. The fear of executing the innocent, the continuing specter of racial discrimination in the death penalty system, and the difficulties encountered with lethal injection executions have led to the perception that the death penalty system is broken from start to finish.

As a result, what was unimaginable 50 years ago is today very much on the horizon of possibility, namely that the United States may soon find a way to live without the death penalty. Indeed, it is fair to say that we are in the midst of a national reconsideration of capital punishment and on the road to its abolition. Signs of progress in the fight against capital punishment are everywhere.

Since 2007, more states have abolished the death penalty than at any other 17-year period in American history. As the Death Penalty Information Center noted in its 2022 annual report, “public support for capital punishment and jury verdicts for death remained near fifty-year lows. Defying conventional political wisdom, nearly every measure of change—from new death sentences imposed and executions conducted to public opinion polls and election results—pointed to the continuing durability of the more than 20-year sustained decline of the death penalty in the United States.”

The Death Penalty in Decline? looks back over the last half-century and offers an analysis of the enduring significance of Furman. It takes up the facts of the present moment in the hope of offering a portrait of where we are on the road to abolition. It continues the work that Justice Marshall inspired.  

The Cost of Beauty Bias in India

This week in North Philly Notes, Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg, coeditors of Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, write about their awareness that the beauty ideal is a societal construct.

“I have read that Indian women bleach their skin to appear lighter. Is that true?” 

“You should reduce a bit, else no one will marry you!”

When asked, we invoke colonialism, colorism, and a caste bias to explain the light-skin preference in India. But we may not confess that perhaps some of us bleached our skin as teenagers or had even used the highly controversial but bestselling Indian face cream, Fair and Lovely*, for years! Nor would we confess that we were asked to avoid tea and coffee out of the irrational fear of making our skins darker. 

Similarly, India has no dearth of older men and women admonishing younger girls to appear slim and pretty. Fat shaming in schools and colleges is rampant and goes unchecked. Ironically, in a tropical country where women’s bodies are genetically wired to be voluptuous, girls and women are perpetually reminded of the desirability of the slim body. No doubt, many of us have at various periods, practiced stringent diet regimes and succumbed to exercise mania to obtain popular body proportions. 

The beauty bias runs deep, and while we often subscribe to it, we rarely own up to it!

We grew up in India in the 1990s, when the country was ushering in economic liberalization. We were bombarded with images of Euro-American bodies through satellite television and print and digital media. We saw increasing airtime given to beauty contests. We even celebrated in 1994 when both Miss Universe and Miss World were women of Indian origin. The pageants perhaps had a momentous influence on our adolescent selves. We knew what a universal beauty ideal was and realized, with some despair, how impossible it was for us to attain those ideals realistically.

Beauty pageants were indeed not the first exposure we had to beauty bias. Women and girls have been routinely scrutinized over skin tone, weight, and youthfulness, to name a few, in our communities. We were keenly aware that girls who were not conventionally “good looking” could be perceived as a liability by their parents for being rejected by the marriage market. Looks matter in cases where dowry is concerned. Furthermore, if a girl child is disabled, then the premium goes up many notches.

An awareness that the beauty ideal is a societal construct came quite late for us. We studied feminist scholars and read feminist fiction and films to understand how women and females with alternate sexual identities are conditioned to internalize self-loathing. Our lived experiences with our body image in many ways pushed us to pursue academic interests in exploring the vexed issue of body image in creative ways.  

Body image issues could seem like a trivial issue when women in India grapple with burning problems, beginning with domestic violence, female foeticide, and caste-based violence to income inequality, nutritional inequality, and so on. However, if we were to look at the scale of the number of women who suffer body shaming and the emotional cost of beauty labor, the count would far outweigh the tactile and material forms of violence and injustice mentioned. And this being the case, the implications of body shaming being a trivial matter vanishes.   

In Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, we bring together essays by expert feminist scholars of the field that analyze literary texts, memoirs, magazines, blogs, advertisements, and Bollywood films, among others. We chose essays from the post-liberalization era to the present. These essays showcase how body image shapes women’s lives and identities in contemporary India. They also explore how the subject position of women, their age, fertility, caste, sexual orientation, sexual expression, physical ability, and class have unequal repercussions on a body image.

In conclusion, we claim that “body positivity” has been a buzzword on social media in India and worldwide. On one hand, young women are handed down the message that accepting one’s body is essential; on the other, celebrity culture and social media fetishize hard-to-attain beauty standards mediated with expensive beauty regimes, surgical interventions, extreme diets, and image manipulation.

Would we have grown up differently if we knew how beauty politics manipulate us and what body positivity truly entails? We surely may have been more comfortable in our bodies or our skins. Our book, then, starts the crucial conversation toward understanding the cost of beauty bias in India, and aspires to a day when women and girls feel more empowered in their bodily selves. 

 *Now Glow and Lovely

A Hopefully Realistic Take on the Future of Democracy

This week in North Philly Notes, David Campbell, author of Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, writes about the cultures of the bureaucratic and communal worlds.

It’s a little intimidating to have your book published on the same day that Taylor Swift’s new album drops. Even if everyone reading this blog rushes out to buy my book, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, it will be hard to keep up in the sales competition!

But Taylor and I share something in common. We both use small, everyday stories to tell a larger story worth hearing. While the particular stories can stand on their own, it is their accumulation that packs a narrative punch.

My stories were gathered over three decades and draw on over 2,000 interviews with local bureaucrats, nonprofit directors, and other community leaders. I use their highly particular accounts of daily hassles to tell a larger story about democratic governance—what it requires, why it is so routinely difficult, but also why it often works better than we might expect. In this story, the bureaucrats we have been taught are narrow-minded rule followers often turn out to be the creative agents rescuing policy from implementation roadblocks. They don’t always succeed, but their efforts are worthy of our attention.

Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is a hopefully realistic book that counters the current pessimism about the future of democracy. Much of that pessimism stems from our division into two warring tribes. But instead of a left-right distinction let us imagine that the names of the two tribes are bureaucracy and community.

The culture of the bureaucratic world is captured in terms like standardization, specialization, formality, and uniform treatment. Its language is primarily metric—things exist to be counted, measured, and controlled.

The culture of the communal world is captured in terms like craftsmanship, social networks, local knowledge, and informal agreements. In this world communication is infused with stories. Nuance and discretion are always necessary because we are dealing with individual human beings and unique local circumstances.

Now imagine that these two worlds routinely meet and often collide, often in grants designed on high and implemented locally. Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is about the governance spaces where these collisions happen and the people who work in those spaces. These “heroes” live with a foot in both the bureaucratic world and the communal world and the burden of their work is to reconcile those worlds, however difficult that reconciliation may be. This burdened work is the secret sauce without which public policy will fail, not matter how well-intended or well-funded.

The protagonists in my story—government and foundation funders, on the one hand, and participants in networks of benevolent community care, on the other—share the common goal of improving the health and well-being of children, families, and communities. They are partners in a quest to produce tangible results, driven by their own civic motivations and increasingly by accountability demands imposed by others. The funders have the resources and some types of expertise that the community partners need. Network participants have local knowledge without which the funders’ initiatives cannot be adapted successfully to place and personal circumstance. If they could find a way to bring their capacities together, we could reasonably expect better policy and programmatic outcomes and with them a badly needed uptick in public trust in government.

By paying attention to the way the hidden heroes reconcile these two worlds—their way of embracing contraries—we can learn profound lessons that inform our politics, policy processes, and democratic culture. We learn how to become conversant in two distinct languages of public life and how to balance the alternative forms of knowledge on which bureaucracy and community networks rely. We learn to emphasize crossover roles: experts as community members; community members as experts. We learn to put more stake in learning from experience and less on pre-set strategies. We learn how to treat rules as starting points for negotiation. We learn to evaluate short-term programs not in isolation but in light of the dynamics of the community networks in which they are embedded and long-term trajectories of community change. These are the sorts of strategies and approaches needed to navigate difference democratically.  

The hidden heroes know that the voice of the people has no efficacy if there are not resources and staffing and expertise to turn that voice into programs and policies that work. They also know that the policy wonks and bureaucratic experts will always be wielding blunt instruments, such that the work of fitting policy to people and place will always be critical to achieving the results we want.

And here’s the good news: we already have a huge cadre of mid-level bureaucrats and nonprofit directors who have extraordinary experience in finding a way to marry the best of bureaucracy with the best of community voice. Hopefully, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes will play a role in introducing their collective wisdom to a broader audience of academics, students, and practitioners. 

Welcome to the Zombie Apocalypse

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood, by Dr. Terry Rey, our latest title published by North Broad Press, a joint open access imprint of Temple University Libraries and Temple University Press.

 

North Broad Press,has published a new textbook. Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood, by Dr. Terry Rey.

Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood explores the intellectual and cultural histories of two highly influential and essentially religious ideas, that of the zombie and that of the apocalypse. The former is a modern idea rooted in Haitian Vodou and its popular African and European religious antecedents, while the latter is an ancient one rooted in Zoroastrianism and the Bible and widely expanded in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and is arguably one of the most influential ideas in world history. Today the merger of the zombie and the apocalypse has pervaded popular culture, with the zombie surpassing the vampire and Frankenstein as the most prolific monster in popular American consciousness.

Drawing on biblical studies, African studies, Caribbean studies, and the sociology and history of religion, Parts I (Holy Land) and II (Haiti) explore the religious origins of these ideas. Part III (Hollywood) uses aspects of cultural studies, literary analysis, critical race theory, and cinema studies to document the (primarily) American obsession with the zombie and the zombie apocalypse.

The apocalypse and the zombie have been momentous intellectual, historical, and cultural realities and social forces in both very ancient and very recent human history and culture. As such, Zombie Apocalypse provides a focused analysis of certain fundamental aspects of human existence. It challenges readers to cultivate their critical thinking skills while learning about two of the most compelling notions in human religious history and the impact they continue to have. 

Terry Rey is Professor and Undergraduate Chair of the Department of Religion at Temple University, where he specializes in the anthropology and history of African and African diasporic religions. His current research projects focus on violence and religion in Central African and Haitian history. Rey developed the Temple course “Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood,” which he began teaching in spring 2020. 

Displacing kinship

This week in North Philly Notes, Linh Thủy Nguyễn, author of Displacing Kinship, write about family history in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

I have a clear memory of the day that, at 18, I realized that my parents were refugees from the Vietnam War. Struggling to order more rice at a Chinese restaurant, confusing the waiter as I spoke mixed Chinese (mom) and Vietnamese (dad), my sister laid out the details. She had for several years been taking college courses about the history of the region and the war. It sounds like a ridiculous thing, to be so detached from family and national history, but mine is a typical second-generation immigrant story about children not knowing about their parents’ pasts. This version is now, perhaps, difficult to imagine for the generations having grown up consuming Vietnamese American cultural productions, as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ocean Vuong, and Thao Nguyen have reached mainstream popularity.

What I encountered about the history of this instance of forced displacement and the US response to it was a vast gulf in what the children of refugees, the second generation, knew about their parents and their pasts and what policymakers and social scientists knew about them. When the first cohort of 130,000 mostly Vietnamese refugees arrived in 1975, few expected a diaspora that would amount to over 2.2  million Vietnamese Americans. Policy makers and scientists made quick work of predicting their successful assimilation into the country, speculating that their ties with the US government, projected model minority status, and proximity to white values would spare them the “downward assimilation” faced by their Black and brown neighbors. This inclusion, of course, came at the cost of their own histories and relations.

Why does it seem that so much of the art and writing of children of Vietnamese refugees is singularly focused on searching for origins and longing for parental affection? Social science and policy framings of refugee successes in America are matched in volume by narratives of familial discord and trauma by the second generation. Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production is my response to emerging dominant narratives about family history and that war. The book was inspired by seemingly constant popular culture evocations and my students’ comments about what they called the intergenerational trauma of the war – an idea that seemed to do more to mask than explain the alienation they experienced from their parents. It is my attempt to contextualize for the children of refugees from the wars in Vietnam, but also for all children of immigrants, that the reasons for our disconnect from our histories is structural, though it is experienced interpersonally.

Second-generation texts situate themselves in relation to the past and their family history, and squarely in the war. My close readings of Vietnamese American art, music, and writing revealed that behind the emotional weight and heaviness of the texts was a sense of mourning for the family relationships that were destroyed. These were destroyed not only by the specificities of the war and its aftermath, including environmental destruction and economic embargoes, but also, as I emphasize, the larger systems of white supremacy and racial capital that shape U.S. interventions and the day-to-day lives of refugees after they have been resettled. Much of the pain and suffering described in the texts I analyze was much more about everyday experiences of fighting to make it in the U.S., stories of parents struggling to make ends meet, scenes of watching white neighbors yell racist vitriol, in short, the experiences of poverty and racism.

In Displacing Kinship, I explore the reasons the Vietnamese diaspora feels separated from family histories and ultimately call for new ways to relate to ourselves and our own communities. It is my hope that once we can identify the conditions that have alienated us from these histories, we can forge new liberatory cultural politics rooted in connection and attachment to radical possibilities, rather than increasingly conservative identity politics.

Celebrating Women’s History Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase titles for Women’s History Month. Use promo code TWHM24 for 25% off all our Women’s Studies titles. (Sale ends April 1, 2024.)

Gendered Places: The Landscape of Local Gender Norms across the United States, by William J. Scarborough, reveals how distinct cultural environments shape the patterns of gender inequality

Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors, edited by Sharon D. Wright Austin, examines the crucial role that Black women have carried out in the cities they govern

Solidarity & Care: Domestic Worker Activism in New York City, by Alana Lee Glaser, shows how intersectional labor organizing and solidarity can effectively protect workers in the domestic work sector and other industries

Forthcoming Titles:

Proper Women: Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran, by Fae Chubin, provides an intersectional analysis of Iran’s feminist activism through an ethnographic study of an NGO-led women’s empowerment program (May)

Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, edited by Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg, initiates a much-neglected and much-needed discussion of the politics of Indian women’s body image and self-identity (May)

Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism: How Progressive Era Feminists Redefined Who We Are, and What It Means Today, by Wendy Sarvasy, theorizes a useable radical past for intersectional activists today (June)

Celebrating the Good America while lamenting the Bad America

This week in North Philly Notes, William Gee Wong, author of Sons of Chinatown, writes about growing up in Oakland’s Chinatown and how that shaped his—and his father’s—worldview

Until I was 13 years old in 1954, I thought the world was, well, Chinatown, where I was born in Oakland, California. It was such a safe, secure place, like a yellow blanket warming me up against the cold, white world nearby. The first words I heard were in my parents’ Chinese dialect, but I quickly acquired English-language skills going to the neighborhood “American” school.

Then I started the 9th grade in a mostly white high school two miles from Chinatown. Uneasy and mostly mute at first, I learned to adapt, got friendly with white students, did well in my classes, and became active in student journalism activities, eventually becoming editor of the school yearbook. This new environment disabused me of my illusion that the world was Chinatown.

My father never had this identity transformation. A mid-teenager from an obscure, isolated rice-growing village, he came to America in 1912 during the height of China’s quake-like governance revolution and the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred most Chinese from entry into America. He managed to get in legally using partially false papers, settled in Chinatown, went to the nearest “American” school to learn English, worked and lived in an herbalist shop, and returned to China several times to marry and have three girls before bringing his young family to settle for good in Oakland’s Chinatown, where he operated small businesses until his death in 1961 at age 65.

I tell our shared and divergent stories in Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America to shed light on a rarely told positive American immigration story that began under negative circumstances. How Chinese migrants, like my father, survived the century-long period of unofficial then official discrimination isn’t widely known. Sons of Chinatown illuminates America’s ongoing complex, solution-defying struggles to address its deeply confounding immigration conundrum.

The positive part is my father’s hard work, resilience, and legacy of four generations of law-abiding, productive wholly or partially ethnic Chinese American citizens. For example, I emerged out of the Chinatown bubble to gradually join the white-dominated mainstream by serving my country as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of the Philippines and as one of a small group of Chinese American/Asian American pioneers in newspaper journalism. My commentaries unveiled untold Chinese American and Asian American stories, captured in Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America (Temple University Press, 2001).

The negative part is the continuing racism against us on an individual and systemic basis despite our multiple generations of rock-solid Americanness and adherence to the core constitutional values and principles espoused by the wealthy white men who founded the United States of America. After so many generations as Americans of Asian descent, some of us wonder whether we truly belong in the land of our birth or legalized national adoption.

During my father’s time and early in my life, there were relatively few of us of Chinese and Asian descent in America. Beginning in the mid- to-late 1960s, thanks to a major liberalization of U.S. immigration laws, many more immigrants and refugees from East, Southeast, and South Asia came to America, the vast majority of whom are valuable, if not exemplary, cogs of our powerful multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, freedom-loving society.

I celebrate the Good America while lamenting the Bad America, with more hope than fear that collectively we will resist the bad aspects of who we are to further embrace the good and forge ahead to be even better.

The struggles of Black migrants and refugees are everyone’s problem

This week in North Philly Notes, Philip Krestedemas, coeditor of Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations, writes about the impact of the wet foot/dry foot policy.

The U.S. government’s wet foot/dry foot policy for Cuban and Haitian refugees, which was rolled out in the mid-1990s, is often cited as an example of the racially biased double standards that are baked into U.S. refugee policy. Under this policy, Cuban asylum seekers who touched ground on U.S. soil were eligible to receive asylum. Haitians who did the same thing were detained and returned to Haiti. But on closer inspection, the wet foot/dry foot policy is not just a story about how Haitian refugees were treated differently from Cubans.  It’s also a story about how the exclusionary treatment of Haitians established a precedent that weakened asylum rights for all Caribbean asylum seekers.
            The disparate treatment of Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers is most apparent in the way the “dry foot” criterion was applied (i.e., what happened once refugees reached U.S. soil).  The “wet foot” criterion was applied the same way to Cubans and Haitians. This wasn’t much of a change for Haitian refugees. For Cuban refugees, on the other hand, it marked the end of the more generous “open arms” policy that had been in effect since the early 1960s. Under the “open arms” policy, Cuban refugees were fast-tracked for asylum whether they were apprehended at sea or on the shores of south Florida. Under wet foot/dry foot, this generous asylum policy was limited to Cubans who touched U.S. soil. Cubans who were apprehended at sea were treated no different from Haitians. 
            The saga of wet foot/dry foot is just one example of a story that has repeated itself many times over in U.S. history. Black communities are often the first to be affected by deprivations, coercions, and incursions on personal liberty that, eventually, spread to the wider society. Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations aims to give the reader an insight into the depth of this problem, examining it from several theoretical, historical, and geo-political vantage points.The book’s contributors note that anti-Black racism doesn’t just describe a group-specific experience of race; it is foundational to the structures of thought and feeling that gave rise to the modern world. One implication of this analysis is that the problems that Black people contend with can tell you a lot about problems that pervade our entire society. 
            Think of a house that is built on top of a sinkhole. The people on the bottom floor of the house are more at risk of falling into the sinkhole. The people on the upper floors of the house may not feel the same sense of urgency to address the problem and may feel comforted by the thought that they are in a somewhat better situation. But they are ignoring the fact that when the foundation finally gives way, everyone’s falling into the hole. 
            This may not be a perfect metaphor, but it captures a dynamic that is very common to the Black experience. Haitians, for example, were the first U.S. refugee population to be subjected to mandatory detention. Thirty years later, mandatory detention is not only standard for most asylum seekers in the US., it has become the norm for how governments around the world manage refugee populations.  The same can be said for the interdiction practices initially rolled out to control Haitian asylum seekers in the 1980s. These were expanded throughout the 1980s and 1990s to all refugees trying to enter the U.S. by water, imitated by European governments in the 2000s that were trying to control flows of African and Asian refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, and were also cited as a precedent by the U.S. government in the 2010s when it rolled out programs to control the growing numbers of asylum seekers (mostly Central American, but also including Haitians and many other nationalities) at the US–Mexico border. These are just some examples from the recent history of U.S. refugee policy.  You can find similar processes at work in the U.S. history of mass incarceration, predatory lending practices in housing markets, unsafe work conditions in low-wage employment sectors, medical neglect in the health care sector, and the list goes on.
            Although Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations is focused on the migrant experience, it engages this experience with an eye to the bigger picture I’ve just described.  Our analysis is premised on the understanding that the Black experience can be used as a starting point for diagnosing problems that affect everyone, and also in a way that elevates the value of Black life. But in order to do this, we have to step outside of the ways of seeing that normalize all of the problems I’ve just described. This sums up  the purpose of the book—to invite the reader to take this step.
 

The issues raised by this blog will be discussed in more depth at a free webinar hosted by the Acacia Center for Justice, to be held on Monday, February 26, 3pm (EST), featuring faculty from Morehouse College, Temple, and Bowdoin Universities and guest speakers from Undocublack, Families for Freedom and the Haitian Bridge Alliance. Click here for more info and to register.  

Getting an Education

This week in North Philly Notes, Grant Farred, author of The Perversity of Gratitude, writes about what his apartheid education taught him.

I write this blog on the 4^th of January, 2024, having just hours ago received my advance copies of The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education. It’s CLR James’s birthday today, and James figures, tangentially, in the book. I was introduced to James by one of my teachers, a Trotskyist who held James’s The Black Jacobins in high regard.

Long before it arrived, 2024 had the feel of a tumultuous year. Half of the planet’s population goes to the polls this year: India, just to begin with; South Africa, where the African National Congress seems destined to capture less than 50% of the vote – and not a moment too soon, say I; and, of course, the United States, where God alone can possibly know what will happen.

Fear. Dread. Expecting the worst.

Surely a good moment for revolution, James would have said. If only . . .

If we start with the failure of the post-apartheid regime in South Africa, then today is surely an opportune moment to reflect on what it meant to have lived and been educated, as a member of the disenfranchised, under apartheid.

“Apartheid made me think.” That is the opening line and the resonant sentiment that animates The Perversity of Gratitude. I am grateful to my apartheid education, perverse as that might seem; my anti-apartheid teachers prepared me for this moment. They did so in no small measure because the rise of black petit bourgeoisie nationalism, ethno-nationalism fueled by the fires of religious fundamentalism and the United States’s impulse toward hegemony were always made a matter for thinking by them.

Today I write from an academic position securely located within the United States. But, even after almost 35 years of living in this country, I retain more than a vestige of the tendency toward political skepticism and philosophical critique instilled in me as a high school and college student.

Not one of us is sufficiently ballasted against the political headwinds that are approaching and will shortly reach gale force strength.

Certainly not me.

But I do have a singular advantage: my apartheid education. It prepared me, against the will of the white minority regime, to live in the world. Fully. And it encouraged me to be open to the complexities of the world and its uncertainties. To live in anticipation of the event.

On CLR James’s birthday, I am moved to reflect on the perverse gift made to me by apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, when the tumultuous was the order of the day in apartheid South Africa.

In this way, it might be that The Perversity of Gratitude is a gift most timely. A gift I am able to make myself.

Presenting Temple University Press’ Spring 2024 Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we present Temple University Press’ Spring 2024 catalog.

Below are our forthcoming books, arranged alphabetically by title. You can also view the catalog online here.

Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories, by Marianne Novy

Bringing together birthmothers’, adoptees’, and adoptive parents’ portrayals of their experiences in memoirs

Beyond Left, Right, and Center: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Germany, by Christina Xydias

Debunks our assumptions about ideology and women’s representation in democracies

Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape: Deep Roots, Continuing Legacy, by Amy Jane Cohen

Philadelphia’s Black history as seen through historical markers, monuments, murals, and more

Carceral Entanglements: Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration, by Wendi Yamashita

Critiques how Japanese American public memorializations unintentionally participate in maintaining and justifying a neoliberal racial order

Crossing Great Divides: City and Country in Environmental and Political Disorder, by John D. Fairfield

Forging a path forward toward modes of production and ways of life, less dependent on despoliation and manic consumption, that will be genuinely sustaining

Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal, by Jeevan R. Sharma

How the changing political economy of rural Nepal informs the desire and agency of young male migrants who seek work in cities

Death Penalty in Decline?: The Fight against Capital Punishment in the Decades since Furman v. Georgia, Edited by Austin Sarat

Examines how the politics of capital punishment have changed in America since 1972 and the current prospects for abolition

Democracy’s Hidden Heroes: Fitting Policy to People and Place, by David C. Campbell

Turning deeply rooted governance dilemmas into practical policy results

Disability, the Environment, and Colonialism, Edited by Tatiana Konrad

Explores discourses related to gender, race, imperialism, and climate across the colonial era

Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production, by Linh Thủy Nguyễn

How American children of Vietnamese refugees connect and express their experiences of racialization using the tropes of family, war, and grief

Faith and Community: How Engagement Strengthens Members, Places of Worship, and Society, by Rebecca A. Glazier

Showing how community engagement can build stronger congregations and improve democracy

Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, Edited by Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg

Initiates a much-neglected and much-needed discussion of the politics of Indian women’s body image and self-identity

From South Central to Southside: Gang Transnationalism, Masculinity, and Disorganized Violence in Belize City, by Adam Baird

How longstanding socio-economic vulnerability in Belize City created fertile grounds for embedding deported Bloods and Crips from Los Angeles

The Improviser’s Classroom: Pedagogies for Cocreative Worldmaking, Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Lomanno

Exploring improvisation as a fundamental practice for teaching and learning

Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm, by Tongyu Wu

A critical exploration into the gamification in modern workplaces as a means of control