Synopses & Reviews
Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation.
Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power—indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, “power” assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form.
In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter-intuitive power—as a resource for the political present—found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.
Review
&9220;In this fascinating study, Ridzi deftly explores how 'work-first' came to dominate welfare policy and how this neoliberal ideology contours the interactions between welfare staff and their clients. Selling Welfare Reform is a must-read for all those interested in contemporary welfare reform.&8221;
-Nancy Naples,co-editor of The Sexuality of Migration
Review
&9220;In this fascinating study, Ridzi deftly explores how 'work-first' came to dominate welfare policy and how this neoliberal ideology contours the interactions between welfare staff and their clients. Selling Welfare Reform is a must-read for all those interested in contemporary welfare reform.&8221;
- Nancy Naples, co-editor of The Sexuality of Migration
&8220;Ridzi provides a deeply grounded and richly detailed view of the many activities that have produced a new U.S. welfare regime. His focus on implementation gives fresh insight into the complex interplay of local and extra-local forces.&8221;
- Marjorie DeVault, editor of People at Work
Review
"The strength of
is its focus on the perspectives of caseworkers. Thirty years ago, Michael Lipsky published , a call for scholars to heed the power of those responsible for implementing policy. Lipsky's advice is especially relevant to welfare, given the local discretion embedded in reform, and Ridzi provides an insightful glimpse into how welfare caseworkers have responded to their new role." &9220;In this fascinating study, Ridzi deftly explores how 'work-first' came to dominate welfare policy and how this neoliberal ideology contours the interactions between welfare staff and their clients. Selling Welfare Reform is a must-read for all those interested in contemporary welfare reform.&8221;
&8220;Ridzi provides a deeply grounded and richly detailed view of the many activities that have produced a new U.S. welfare regime. His focus on implementation gives fresh insight into the complex interplay of local and extra-local forces.&8221;
“Using institutional ethnography, Ridzi critically examines welfare reform at a country work-first program. The considerable benefits of this book derive from the author's interviews with clients and with caseworkers who struggle to reconcile the circumstances of welfare recipients with a rigorous job-placement strategy.”
Review
“According to Darieck Scott, the awful legacies of racial difference and debasement are not inevitable. And so in Extravagant Abjection, he deftly paves the way for new understandings of the history and culture of black power and violence. His work is theoretically exciting and sophisticated, offering invaluable lessons: that the violent pressure of black history—the pressure of its terrible subordination—can be relieved, often in unexpected ways. Scott helps us see, even in the most humiliating and violent of scenes, an entire horizon of other, sometimes pleasurable, possibilities of resistance.”
-Michael Cobb,author of God Hates Fags
Review
“A powerful theoretical statement in the emerging field of black queer studies, Extravagant Abjection makes the bold claim that it is necessary to work through and not simply to ‘white wash the political, social, ideological, and psychological consequences of what Darieck Scott names ‘black abjection. Building upon the insights of the more articulate practitioners of bondage and submission, Sadism and Masochism, Scotts readings of key texts in twentieth century Black American literature are at once sophisticated, provocative, creative, and indeed titillating. This book will surely become a ‘dark classic.”
-Robert Reid-Pharr,author of Once You Go Black
Review
&8220;Ridzi provides a deeply grounded and richly detailed view of the many activities that have produced a new U.S. welfare regime. His focus on implementation gives fresh insight into the complex interplay of local and extra-local forces.&8221;
-Marjorie DeVault,editor of People at Work
Review
“Using institutional ethnography, Ridzi critically examines welfare reform at a country work-first program. The considerable benefits of this book derive from the author's interviews with clients and with caseworkers who struggle to reconcile the circumstances of welfare recipients with a rigorous job-placement strategy.”
-CHOICE,
Synopsis
The 1996 Welfare Reform Act promised to end welfare as we knew it. In Selling Welfare Reform, Frank Ridzi uses rich ethnographic detail to examine how new welfare-to-work policies, time limits, and citizenship documentation radically changed welfare, revealing what really goes on at the front lines of the reformed welfare system. Selling Welfare Reform chronicles how entrepreneurial efforts ranging from front-line caseworkers to high-level administrators set the pace for restructuring a resistant bureaucracy. At the heart of this remarkable institutional transformation is a market-centered approach to human services that re-framed the definition of success to include diversion from the present system, de-emphasis of legal protections and behavioral conditioning of poor parents to accommodate employers. Ridzi draws a compelling portrait of how welfare staff and their clients negotiate the complexities of the low wage labor market in an age of global competition, exposing the realities of how the new "common sense" of poverty is affecting the lives of poor and vulnerable Americans.
About the Author
Darieck Scott is Assistant Professor of African American studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of the novels Hex and Traitor to the Race, and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica.