Title: Honky
Author: Conley, Dalton 1969-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | Urban Studies | American Studies | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: This intensely personal and engaging memoir is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in a neighborhood of predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. Vividly evoking the details of city life from a child's point of view - the streets, buses, and playgrounds - Honky poignantly illuminates the usual vulnerabilities of childhood complicated by unusual circumstances. As he narrates these sharply etched and often funny memories, Conley shows how race and class shaped his life and the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. A brilliant case study for illuminating the larger issues of inequality in American society, Honky brings us to a deeper understanding of the privilege of whiteness, the social construction of race, the power of education, and the challenges of inner-city life. Conley's father, a struggling artist, and his mother, an aspiring writer, joined Manhattan's bohemian subculture in the late 1960s, living on food stamps and raising their family in a housing project. We come to know his mother: her quirky tastes, her robust style, and the bargains she strikes with Dalton - not to ride on the backs of buses, and to always carry money in his shoe as protection against muggers. We also get to know his father, his face buried in racing forms, and his sister, who in grade school has a burning desire for cornrows. From the hilarious story of three-year-old Dalton kidnapping a black infant so he could have a baby sister to the deeply disturbing shooting of a close childhood friend, this memoir touches us with movingly rendered portraits of people and the unfolding of their lives. Conley's story provides a sophisticated example of the crucial role culture plays in defining race and class. Both of Conley's parents retained the "cultural capital" of the white middle class, and they passed this on to their son in the form of tastes, educational expectations, and a general sense of privilege. It is these advantages that ultimately provide Conley with his ticket to higher education and beyond. A tremendously good read, Honky addresses issues both timely and timeless that pertain to us all.   [brief]
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Title: No there there: race, class, and political community in Oakland
Author: Rhomberg, Chris 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | American Studies | Labor Studies | Politics | Ethnic Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Challenged by Ku Klux Klan action in the '20s, labor protests culminating in a general strike in the '40s, and the rise of the civil rights and black power struggles of the '60s, Oakland, California, seems to encapsulate in one city the broad and varied sweep of urban social movements in twentieth-century America. Taking Oakland as a case study of urban politics and society in the United States, Chris Rhomberg examines the city's successive episodes of popular insurgency for what they can tell us about critical discontinuities in the American experience of urban political community.   [brief]
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Title: Colonial subjects: Puerto Ricans in a global perspective
Author: Grosfoguel, Ramón
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Latin American History | Postcolonial Studies | Urban Studies | Immigration | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Colonial Subjects is the first book to use a combination of world-system and postcolonial approaches to compare Puerto Rican migration with Caribbean migration to both the United States and Western Europe. Ramón Grosfoguel provides an alternative reading of the world-system approach to Puerto Rico's history, political economy, and urbanization processes. He offers a comprehensive and well-reasoned framework for understanding the position of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the position of Puerto Ricans in the United States, and the position of colonial migrants compared to noncolonial migrants in the world system.   [brief]
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Title: MeXicana encounters: the making of social identities on the borderlands
Author: Fregoso, Rosa Linda
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Film | Women's Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Latin American Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: meXicana Encounters charts the dynamic and contradictory representation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in culture. Rosa Linda Fregoso's deft analysis of the cultural practices and symbolic forms that shape social identities takes her across a wide and varied terrain. Among the subjects she considers are the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez; transborder feminist texts that deal with private, domestic forms of violence; how films like John Sayles's Lone Star re-center white masculinity; and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os and how it can subordinate gender and sexuality to masculinity and heterosexual roles. Fregoso's self-reflexive approach to cultural politics embraces the movement for social justice and offers new insights into the ways that racial and gender differences are inscribed in cultural practices.   [brief]
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Title: Under the medical gaze: facts and fictions of chronic pain
Author: Greenhalgh, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Medical Anthropology | Physical Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Medicine | Gender Studies | Sociology | Social Problems | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: This compelling account of the author's experience with a chronic pain disorder and subsequent interaction with the American health care system goes to the heart of the workings of power and culture in the biomedical domain. It is a medical whodunit full of mysterious misdiagnosis, subtle power plays, and shrewd detective work. Setting a new standard for the practice of autoethnography, Susan Greenhalgh presents a case study of her intense encounter with an enthusiastic young specialist who, through creative interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for a newly emerging chronic disease, became convinced she had a painful, essentially untreatable, lifelong muscle condition called fibromyalgia. Greenhalgh traces the ruinous effects of this diagnosis on her inner world, bodily health, and overall well-being. Under the Medical Gaze serves as a powerful illustration of medicine's power to create and inflict suffering, to define disease and the self, and to manage relationships and lives. Greenhalgh ultimately learns that she had been misdiagnosed and begins the long process of undoing the physical and emotional damage brought about by her nearly catastrophic treatment. In considering how things could go so awry, she embarks on a cogent and powerful analysis of the sociopolitical sources of pain through feminist, cultural, and political understandings of the nature of medical discourse and practice in the United States. She develops fresh arguments about the power of medicine to medicalize our selves and lives, the seductions of medical science, and the deep, psychologically rooted difficulties women patients face in interactions with male physicians. In the end, Under the Medical Gaze goes beyond the critique of biomedicine to probe the social roots of chronic pain and therapeutic alternatives that rely on neither the body-cure of conventional medicine nor the mind-cure of some alternative medicines, but rather a broader set of strategies that address the sociopolitical sources of pain.   [brief]
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