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Born losers : a history of failure in America
What makes somebody a Loser, a person doomed to unfulfilled dreams and humiliation? Nobody is born to lose, and yet failure embodies our worst fears. The Loser is our national bogeyman, and his history over the past two hundred years reveals the dark side of success, how economic striving reshaped the self and soul of America.
From colonial days to the Columbine tragedy, Scott Sandage explores how failure evolved from a business loss into a personality deficit, from a career setback to a gauge of our self-worth. From hundreds of private diaries, family letters, business records, and even early credit reports, Sandage reconstructs the dramas of real-life Willy Lomans. He unearths their confessions and denials, foolish hopes and lost faith, sticking places and changing times. Dreamers, suckers, and nobodies come to life in the major scenes of American history, like the Civil War and the approach of big business, showing how the national quest for success remade the individual ordeal of failure.
Born Losers is a pioneering work of American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with The Loser--the label and the experience--in the days when American capitalism was building a nation of winners.
eBook
The Alienated Subject
A timely and provocative discussion of alienation as an
intersectional category of life under racial capitalism and white
supremacy
From the divisiveness of the Trump era to the Covid-19 pandemic,
alienation has become an all-too-familiar contemporary concept. In
this groundbreaking book, James A. Tyner offers a novel framework
for understanding the alienated subject, situating it within racial
capitalism and white supremacy. Directly addressing current
economic trends and their rhetoric of xenophobia, discrimination,
and violence, The Alienated Subject exposes the universal
whitewashing of alienation.
Drawing insight from a variety of sources, including Marxism,
feminism, existentialism, and critical race theory, Tyner develops
a critique of both the liberal subject and the alienated subject.
Through an engagement with the recent pandemic and the Black Lives
Matter movement, he demonstrates how the alienated subject is
capable of both compassion and cruelty; it is a sadomasochist.
Tyner goes on to emphasize the importance of the particular places
we find the alienated subject and how the revolutionary
transformation of alienation is inherently a spatial struggle.
Returning to key interlocutors from Sartre to Fromm, he examines
political notions of distance and the spatial practices of everyday
life as well as the capitalist conditions that give rise to the
alienated subject.
For Tyner, the alienated subject is not the iconic, romanticized
image of Marx's proletariat. Here he calls for an affirmation of
love as a revolutionary concept, necessary for the transformation
of a society marred by capitalism into an emancipated, caring
society conditioned by socially just relations.
eBook
Divide & conquer : race, gangs, identity, and conflict
Hyper-criminalization and the normalization of violence was an integral aspect of Robert Weide's formative years growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, where Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs maintained a precarious coexistence, often punctuated by racialized gang violence. His insider status informs Divide & Conquer, which considers how the capitalist economy, the race concept, and nationalist ideology have made gang members the instruments of their own oppression, resulting in racialized sectarian conflicts spanning generations between African American and Latino gangs in Los Angeles and California's prisons.
While gang members may fail to appreciate the deeper historical and conceptual foundations of these conflicts, they rarely credit naked bigotry as the root cause. As Weide asserts, they divide themselves according to inherited groupist identities, thereby turning them against one another in protracted blood feuds across gang lines and racial lines.
Weide explores both the historical foundations and the conceptual and cultural boundaries and biases that divide gang members across racial lines, detailing case studies of specific racialized gang conflicts between Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs. Weide employs mixed-methods research, having spent nearly a decade on ethnographic fieldwork and conducted over one hundred formal interviews with gang members and gang enforcement officers concerning taboo subjects like prison and gang politics, and transracial gang membership.
Divide & Conquer concludes with encouraging developments in recent years, as gang members themselves, on their own volition, have intervened to build solidarity and bring racialized gang conflicts between them to an end.
eBook
Conservatives against capitalism : from the Industrial Revolution to globalization
\"This book explores the complicated and frequently critical views of capitalism by American conservatives and how this discourse shaped the direction of the conservative movement\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935
Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the \"East\"--witness the popularity of the stories of theArabian Nights, the performances of Arab belly dancers and acrobats, the feats of turban-wearing vaudeville magicians, and even the antics of fez-topped Shriners. In this captivating volume, Susan Nance provides a social and cultural history of this highly popular genre of Easternized performance in America up to the Great Depression.According to Nance, these traditions reveal how a broad spectrum of Americans, including recent immigrants and impersonators, behaved as producers and consumers in a rapidly developing capitalist economy. In admiration of theArabian Nights, people creatively reenacted Eastern life, but these performances were also demonstrations of Americans' own identities, Nance argues. The story of Aladdin, made suddenly rich by rubbing an old lamp, stood as a particularly apt metaphor for how consumer capitalism might benefit each person. The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define \"the American dream.\"The recent success of Disney'sAladdinmovies suggests that many Americans still welcome an interpretation of the East as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. This abundantly illustrated account is the first by a historian to explain why and how so many Americans sought out such cultural engagement with the Eastern world long before geopolitical concerns became paramount.
eBook
Never Enough
Never Enough challenges the prevailing assumptions about the decline of middle-class prosperity, opportunity, and material well-being in the United States. In a careful reading of the evidence and a critical analysis of its implications, Gilbert demonstrates the extent to which the customary progressive claims about the severity of poverty, inequality, social mobility, and the benefits of universalism not only distort the empirical reality of modern life in an era of abundance, but confound efforts to help those most in need.
eBook