Synopses & Reviews
The Los Angeles riot of 1992 marked America's first high-profile multiethnic civil unrest. Latinos, Asian Americans, whites, and African Americans were involved as both victims and assailants. Nearly half of the businesses destroyed were Korean American owned, and nearly half of the people arrested were Latino.
In the aftermath of the unrest, Los Angeles, with its extremely diverse population, emerged as a particularly useful site in which to examine race relations. Ethnic Peace in the American City documents the nature of contemporary inter-ethnic relations in the United States by describing the economic, political, and psychological dynamics of race relations in inner-city Los Angeles. Drawing from local as well as international examples, the authors present strategies such as coalition building, dispute resolution, and community organizing.
Moving beyond the stereotyped focus on negative interactions between minority groups such as Korean-owned businesses and the African American community, and countering the white-black or bi-racial paradigms of American race relations, the authors explore practical means by which ethnically fragmented neighborhoods nationwide can work together to begin to address their common concerns before tensions become explosive.
Review
"Eisenstein's lucid analysis is formed around the factual datum of the global cybereconomy, which even a cursory glance reveals as appallingly inequitable: 'Eighty-four percent of computer users are found in north america and northern europe.'" -Signs,
Synopsis
The New York Times devotes the cover of its magazine to America's declining interest in politics and its obsession with money, finance, and the markets. Bill Gates builds a $50 million mansion while food pantries and homeless shelters overflow with the desperate. The explosive expansion of media and cyber conglomerates creates dreamworlds while the ecology of our actual world is jeopardized. Public space and public democracy withers, as is evidenced by the fact that the closest facsimile of a town square is the local Barnes and Noble.
New geographies of power are defined by sex scandals, plant closings, cyberporn, sweatshop labor, information webs, and stock market schizophrenia. Global capitalism and its cyberrelations use this chaos to construct modern forms of sexual and racial exploitation.
Into this world steps Zillah Eisenstein, with a book of profound despair and yet also great hope, informed by her trademark sharp analysis and her unrelenting passion for a more humane world. Exposing the purported democratic effect of new media for the global mirage it is, Eisenstein shows how transnational capital and its patriarchal obsessions threaten us all, while at the same time creating possibilities for a new democratic society.
About the Author
A noted feminist writer, Zillah Eisenstein is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College. She is the author of The Female Body and the Law, which won the Victoria Schuck Book Prize for the best book on women and politics, and, more recently, The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy and Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century.