Synopses & Reviews
For a nation that often optimistically claims to be post-racial, we are still mired in the practices of racial inequality that plays out in law, policy, and in our local communities. One of two explanations is often given for this persistent phenomenon: On the one hand, we might be hypocritical—saying one thing, and doing or believing another; on the other, it might have little to do with us individually but rather be inherent to the structure of American society.
More Beautiful and More Terrible compels us to think beyond this insufficient dichotomy in order to see how racial inequality is perpetuated. Imani Perry asserts that the U.S. is in a new and distinct phase of racism that is “post-intentional”: neither based on the intentional discrimination of the past, nor drawing upon biological concepts of race. Drawing upon the insights and tools of critical race theory, social policy, law, sociology and cultural studies, she demonstrates how post-intentional racism works and maintains that it cannot be addressed solely through the kinds of structural solutions of the Left or the values arguments of the Right. Rather, the author identifies a place in the middle—a space of “righteous hope”—and articulates a notion of ethics and human agency that will allow us to expand and amplify that hope.
To paraphrase James Baldwin, when talking about race, it is both more terrible than most think, but also more beautiful than most can imagine, with limitless and open-ended possibility. Perry leads readers down the path of imagining the possible and points to the way forward.
Review
“Imani Perry has done it again. With an uncanny ability to merge art, law, social science, and cultural studies, she weaves a powerful analysis of race in contemporary America.”
-Patricia Hill Collins,author of Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media, and Democratic Possibilitie
Synopsis
Mussolini in Italy. Hitler in Germany. Franco in Spain. These men, and their style of government, both individually and collectively, have had a profound and lasting effect on global politics in this century.
Equipped with an official ideology and a charismatic leader, dictatorship contested democracy throughout the twentieth century, first in the form of fascist, and later communist and military, regimes. Examining their origins, evolution, and political and social roles, Paul Brooker here provides a sweeping canvas of dictatorships in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. By distinguishing between the different manifestations of dictatorshipfrom the mass-murdering reign of Hitler to the benevolent dictatorships of such figures as Crdenas in Mexico and Atatrk in Turkey, this work presents a clear and comprehensive overview of this often violent, sometimes paternalistic, always fascinating form of government.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 294-301) and index.
About the Author
Paul Brooker, is Lecturer in Politics at Victoria University of Wellington and author of The Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan and Twentieth-Century Dictatorships: The Ideological One-Party States, also available from NYU Press.