Race Rebels : Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class

Author: Robin D. G. Kelley

Brand: Free Press

Features:

• Used Book in Good Condition

Binding: Paperback

Number Of Pages: 357

Release Date: 01-06-1996

Details: Product Description Robin D. G. Kelley is professor of history and Africana studies at New York University and author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990). Review Monthly Review It is not too much or too early to call Robin D. G. Kelley, barely thirty years old, a leading black historian of the age. But it may not be enough...His work, seen in a certain light, is less about the past than the future...To listen carefully to the voices of discontent is not our only mission, but it may curiously be our most difficult. Kelley helps us open our eyes (and our heart) to the task. Quarterly Black Review In a prose that is clear, full of real-world illustrations and sometimes outright funny, [Kelley] does something increasingly rare: he maintains political commitment while appreciating various kinds of aesthetic, social and political differences (rebel, rebel). The Dallas Weekly This book is smart, noble, and potentially restorative. Read it, we need to. Choice A wide-ranging, challenging book that deserves attention by anyone seriously interested in African American culture. Darlene Clark Hine author of The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present & Future Race Rebels is African American history at its challenging and transformative best. Robin D. G. Kelley's exquisite interweaving of cultural and political dynamics illuminates obscure and unseen sites of Black working-class resistance throughout the 20th century. This is an extraordinary and provocative book. Cornel West Robin Kelley is the preeminent historian of black popular culture writing today. About the Author Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. From 2003-2006, he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia Univeristy. From 1994-2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University as well the chairman of NYU's history department from 2002-2003. One of the youngest tenured professors in a full academic discipline—at the age of 32—Kelley has spent most of his career exploring American and African-American history with a particular emphasis on African-American musical culture, including jazz and hip-hop. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 Shiftless of the World Unite! If "conspicuous consumption" was the badge of a rising middle class, "conspicuous loafing" is the hostile gesture of a tired working class. Daniel Bell, Work and Its Discontents All observers spoke of the fact that the slaves were slow and churlish; that they wasted material and malingered at their work. Of course they did. This was not racial but economic. It was the answer of any group of laborers forced down to the last ditch. They might be made to work continuously but no power could make them work well. W.E.B. DuBois, Reconstruction in America Nearly a quarter century ago, a historian named George Rawick published an obscure article in a small left political journal that warned against treating the history of the working class as merely the history of trade unions or other formal labor organizations. If we are to locate working-class resistance, Rawick insisted, we need to know "how many man hours were lost to production because of strikes, the amount of equipment and material destroyed by industrial sabotage and deliberate negligence, the amount of time lost by absenteeism, the hours gained by workers through the slowdown, the limiting of the speed-up of the productive apparatus through the working class's own initiative." Unfortunately, few historians have followed Rawick's advice. Still missing from most examinations of workers are the ways in which unorganized working people resisted the conditions of work, tried to control the pace and amount of work, and carved out a modicum of dignity at the workplace. Not surprisingly, studies that seriously consider t

Package Dimensions: 9.0 x 6.0 x 1.0 inches

Languages: English