Identity Politics

"Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature - Shakespeare, for example - can cease to be literature". These are the words of Terry Eagleton, the working-class Irish Marxist critic of English literature who believes that all literary theory is political. Not only is his observation quite banal, but it does not qualify as literary criticism. It is journalistic writing, and its validity depends merely upon our definition of literature. Perhaps his definition is so generic as to encompass any random piece of published writing.

1963, North London. Nan fosters one-year-old Florence Olajide and calls her "Ann". Florence adores her foster mother more than anything but Nan, and the children around her, all have white skin, and she can’t help but feel different. Then, four years later, after a weekend visit to her birth parents, Florence never returns to Nan. Two months after, sandwiched between her mother and father plus her three siblings, six-year-old Florence steps off a ship in Lagos to the fierce heat of the African sun.

Brotha Vegan unpacks the lived experience of Black men on veganism, fatherhood, politics, sexuality, gender, health, popular culture, spirituality, food, animal advocacy, the environment, and the many ways that veganism is lived and expressed within the Black community in the United States.

In Real Americans, Jared A. Goldstein boldly challenges the conventional wisdom that a shared devotion to the Constitution is the essence of what it means to be American.

Asian American Christians need to hear and own our diverse stories beyond the cultural expectations of the model minority or perpetual foreigner. A team from East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian backgrounds explores what it means to learn our names and be seen by God. They encourage us to know our history, telling stories of the Asian diaspora in America who have been shaped and misshaped by migration, culture, and faith. As we live in the multiple tensions of being Asian American Christians, we can discover who we are and what God may have in store for us and our communities.

Aaron Douglas Keller recounts the struggles, adventures, and lessons of his journey to self-remembrance, acceptance, and celebration in this memoir. Along with renewed happiness and freedom, he gained empathy for what so many of us grieve: inner clarity and peace we lost when our nuanced humanity was covered by racism, religious ideology, nationalism, and other black-and-white mentalities. Aaron shares his story of trauma and survival as part of his escape from toxic racial dynamics, along with insights he gained about safeguarding our humanity from inhuman forces in American culture.

El libro revela el Amor Universal y Cósmico del Sendero Rojo. El Sendero Rojo es la filosofía/cosmovisión/religión de las tribus/pueblos indígenas nativos de América del Norte y del Sur. Esta cosmovisión promueve la integración con la Madre Tierra y el cosmos para lograr la armonía dentro de la Existencia en eterna evolución.

Identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence, until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. Award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members and tells the girls’ incredible story from their perspectives, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life.

A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult.

The book reveals the universal and cosmic love of the Red Road. The Red Road is the philosophy/worldview/religion of the native Indian tribes/pueblos of North and South America. This worldview promotes integration with Mother Earth and the cosmos to achieve harmony within eternally evolving existence. Using the Chicano as an example, the book explores the human lifetime as a cosmic being with eternal cycles of reincarnation and integration. This cosmic journey is examined from the perspective of the Red Road.

In Wholistic Feminism, you will see how the American women’s movement has defined success in a way that keeps us striving, yet never fully arriving. You will learn to see female contributions in a new light and realize that you are not inadequate. You, and your female body were never the problem.

In We Refuse to Forget, award-winning journalist Caleb Gayle tells the extraordinary story of the Creek Nation, a Native tribe that two centuries ago both owned slaves and accepted Black people as full citizens. Thanks to the efforts of Creek leaders like Cow Tom, a Black Creek citizen who rose to become chief, the U.S. government recognized Creek citizenship in 1866 for its Black members. Yet this equality was shredded in the 1970s when tribal leaders revoked the citizenship of Black Creeks, even those who could trace their history back generations—even to Cow Tom himself.

Este libro es una reflexión crítica sobre la cultura mexicana contemporánea. Se han elegido los lugares comunes del carácter del mexicano: se trata de un manojo de estereotipos codificados por la intelectualidad, pero cuyas huellas se reproducen en la sociedad, provocando el espejismo de una cultura popular de masas. Estas imágenes sobre "lo mexicano" no son reflejo de la conciencia popular (suponiendo, cosa que se duda, que dicha conciencia exista como entidad única y homogénea).

What does it mean to be Muslim in India? What does it mean to look like one's religion? Does one's faith determine how one is perceived? Is there a secular ideal one is supposed to live up to? Can people of different faiths have a shared culture, a shared identity? But You Don't Look Like a Muslim is a work that every thinking Indian must hear.

Ersula J. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community.