By Joy James
Prisons represent probably the most arguable and contested websites in a democratic society. the us has the top incarceration fee within the industrialized international, with over 2 million humans in jails, prisons, and detention facilities; with over 3 thousand on loss of life row, it's also one of many few constructed nations that maintains to install the dying penalty. overseas Human Rights companies equivalent to Amnesty foreign have additionally famous the rankings of political prisoners in U.S. detention. This anthology examines a category of intellectuals whose analyses of U.S. society, politics, tradition, and social justice are infrequently referenced in traditional political speech or educational discourse. but this physique of outlawed 'public intellectuals' bargains essentially the most incisive analyses of our society and shared humanity. the following former and present U.S. political prisoners and activists-writers from the civil rights/black strength, women's, gay/lesbian, American Indian, Puerto Rican Independence and anti-war routine proportion various innovative evaluations and theories on radical democracy and progressive fight. This rarely-referenced 'resistance literature' displays the becoming public curiosity in incarceration websites, highbrow and political dissent for social justice, and the probabilities of democratic modifications. Such anthologies additionally spark new discussions and debates approximately 'reading'; for as Barbara Harlow notes: 'Reading criminal writing needs to. . . call for a correspondingly activist counterapproach to that of passivity, aesthetic gratification, and the pleasures of intake which are often sanctioned by means of the educational disciplining of literature.'―Barbara Harlow [1] 1. Barbara Harlow, Barred: girls, Writing, and Political Detention (New England: Wesleyan collage Press, 1992). Royalties are reserved for academic tasks on human rights and U.S. incarceration.
Read or Download Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion PDF
Best democracy books
Term Limits and Legislative Representation
Legislative time period limits are an important electoral reform at the political time table within the usa. time period Limits and Legislative illustration exams the critical arguments made by way of either supporters and rivals of the reform via interpreting the event of Costa Rica, the single long term democracy to impose time period limits on legislators, and by way of delivering broad comparisons with legislatures in Venezuela and the USA.
The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil
Many nations have experimented with diverse electoral principles so as both to extend involvement within the political method or allow you to shape strong governments. Barry Ames explores this significant subject in a single of the world's so much populous and critical democracies, Brazil. This booklet locates one of many assets of Brazil's "crisis of governance" within the nation's specified electoral approach, a method that produces a multiplicity of susceptible events and individualistic, pork-oriented politicians with little responsibility to electorate.
Marx, Tocqueville, and race in America : the "absolute democracy" or "defiled republic"
Whereas Alexis de Tocqueville defined the United States because the 'absolute democracy,' Karl Marx observed the state as a 'defiled republic' as long as it accredited the enslavement of blacks. during this insightful political background, Nimtz argues that Marx and his accomplice, Frederick Engels, had a much more acute and insightful examining of yankee democracy than Tocqueville simply because they well-known that the overthrow of slavery and the cessation of racial oppression have been valuable to its cognizance.
The European Union and British Democracy: Towards Convergence
This ebook seems to be at evolving tendencies in democracy at ecu and united kingdom degrees, mentioning the first shortcomings of either. It examines the connection among democratic practices of the european and the united kingdom, explaining the ambiguity of ways within which the ecu, regardless of the terrible caliber of its personal democracy, has enabled devolved selection making in a unique multi-layer polity.
Extra resources for Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion
Example text
18. This article was first published in the International Association of Democratic Lawyers Bulletin, January 1990, and reprinted in Social Jwtice, vol. 18, no. 3. 19. For information on Lori Berenson, see Rhoda Berenson, Lon: My Daughter, Wrongfully Imprisoned in Peru (New York: Context Books, 2000). For discussions of prisoners with the status of “illegal [non]combatants” following September 11, 2001, see: Amnesty International, “USA: Detainees from Afghan Conflict Should Be Released or Tried,” A1 Index: AMR 51/164/2002, 1 November 2002; and Joseph Lelyveld, “In Guantgnamo,” The New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002.
When NAACP leader Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus, Joanne Robinson’s Montgomery Women’s Political Caucus, with trade unionist E. D. Nixon, organized a bus boycott. The originators of the boycott chose the politically inexperienced King as its titular leader for appearances of respectability and authority tied to middle-class male clergy, and with their assistance King was elected president of the ad hoc Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).
242-43. 27. , We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People, A Petition to the United Nations (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951). 28. Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sundance, edited by Harvey Arden (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). 29. In September 1971, responding to George Jackson’s killing by San Quentin prison guards and administrators and to dehumanizing and racist prison conditions, 1,500 African American, Puerto Rican, and white prisoners seized control of Attica, a maximum-security prison in New York.
