Displacing Blackness

Displacing Blackness
Author: Ted Rutland
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2018-04-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1487518242

Modern urban planning has long promised to improve the quality of human life. But how is human life defined? Displacing Blackness develops a unique critique of urban planning by focusing, not on its subservience to economic or political elites, but on its efforts to improve people’s lives. While focused on twentieth-century Halifax, Displacing Blackness develops broad insights about the possibilities and limitations of modern planning. Drawing connections between the history of planning and emerging scholarship in Black Studies, Ted Rutland positions anti-blackness at the heart of contemporary city-making. Moving through a series of important planning initiatives, from a social housing project concerned with the moral and physical health of working-class residents to a sustainability-focused regional plan, Displacing Blackness shows how race – specifically blackness – has defined the boundaries of the human being and guided urban planning, with grave consequences for the city’s Black residents.

Transformative Planning

Transformative Planning
Author: Angotti Tom Angotti
Publisher: Black Rose Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2020-03-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1551646951

Though modern urban planning is only a century old, it appears to be facing extinction. Historically, urban planning has been narrowly conceived, ignoring gaping inequalities of race, class, and gender while promoting unbridled growth and environmental injustices. In Transformative Planning, Tom Angotti argues that unless planning is radically transformed and develops serious alternatives to neoliberal urbanism and disaster capitalism it will be irrelevant in this century. This book emerges from decades of urban planners and activists contesting inequalities of class, race, and gender in cities around the world. It compiles the discussions and debates that appeared in the publications of Planners Network, a North American urban planners' association. Original contributions have been added to the collection so that it serves as both a reflection of past theory and practice and a challenge for a new generation of activists and planners.

Reckoning with Racism

Reckoning with Racism
Author: Constance Backhouse
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2022-11-22
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0774868295

In 1997, complacency about the racial neutrality of a predominantly white judiciary was shattered as the Supreme Court of Canada considered a complaint of judicial racial bias for the first time. The judge in question was Corrine Sparks, the country’s first Black female judge. Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case. A white Halifax police officer had arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke hold, and charged him with assaulting an officer and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Judge Sparks remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal held, but most of the white appeal judges critiqued her comments, based on the tradition that the legal system was non-racist unless proven otherwise. That became a matter of wide debate. This book assesses the case of alleged anti-white judicial bias, the surrounding excitement, the dramatic effects on those involved, and the significance for the Canadian legal system.

Needle Work

Needle Work
Author: Jamie Jelinski
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2024-06-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022802305X

In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients. From this early example of tattooing as work, Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career. Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered.

Blackhood Against the Police Power

Blackhood Against the Police Power
Author: Tryon P. Woods
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2019-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1628953632

Both significant and timely, Blackhood Against the Police Power addresses the punishment of “race” and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary “post-racial” culture of politics. Here the author asserts that the post-racial presents an antiblack animus that should be read as desiring the end of blackness and the black liberation movement’s singular ethical claims. The book redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing antiblackness and, in so doing, redefines racism as an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of race. It smartly critiques the way leading antiracist discourse is frequently complicit with antiblackness and recalls the original 1960s conception of black studies as a corrective to the deficiencies in today’s critical discourse on race and sex. The book explores these lines of inquiry to pinpoint how the history of racial slavery wraps itself in a new discourse of disavowal. In this way, Blackhood Against the Police Power responds to a range of texts, policies, practices, and representations complicit with the police power—from the Fourth Amendment and the movements to curtail stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration to popular culture treatments of blackness to the leading academic discourses on race and sex politics.

In the Wake

In the Wake
Author: Christina Sharpe
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2016-10-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822373459

In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

Displacing Whiteness

Displacing Whiteness
Author: Ruth Frankenberg
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 1997-09-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 082238227X

Displacing Whiteness makes a unique contribution to the study of race dominance. Its theoretical innovations in the analysis of whiteness are integrated with careful, substantive explorations of whiteness on an international, multiracial, cross-class, and gendered terrain. Contributors localize whiteness, as well as explore its sociological, anthropological, literary, and political dimensions. Approaching whiteness as a plural rather than singular concept, the essays describe, for instance, African American, Chicana/o, European American, and British experiences of whiteness. The contributors offer critical readings of theory, literature, film and popular culture; ethnographic analyses; explorations of identity formation; and examinations of racism and political process. Essays examine the alarming epidemic of angry white men on both sides of the Atlantic; far-right electoral politics in the UK; underclass white people in Detroit; whiteness in "brownface" in the film Gandhi; the engendering of whiteness in Chicana/o movement discourses; "whiteface" literature; Roland Barthes as a critic of white consciousness; whiteness in the black imagination; the inclusion and exclusion of suburban "brown-skinned white girls"; and the slippery relationships between culture, race, and nation in the history of whiteness. Displacing Whiteness breaks new ground by specifying how whiteness is lived, engaged, appropriated, and theorized in a range of geographical locations and historical moments, representing a necessary advance in analytical thinking surrounding the burgeoning study of race and culture. Contributors. Rebecca Aanerud, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Phil Cohen, Ruth Frankenberg, John Hartigan Jr., bell hooks, T. Muraleedharan, Chéla Sandoval, France Winddance Twine, Vron Ware, David Wellman

Kim Harrison Bundle #1

Kim Harrison Bundle #1
Author: Kim Harrison
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 1491
Release: 2014-08-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062378627

Get the first four novels in Kim Harrison's #1 New York Times bestselling Hollows series as one e-book! This bundle includes Dead Witch Walking, The Good, the Bad, and the Undead, Every Which Way But Dead, and A Fistful of Charms. Discover this great series at a special price! Dead Witch Walking All the creatures of the night gather in "the Hollows" of Cincinnati, to hide, to prowl, to party ... and to feed. Vampires rule the darkness in a predator-eat-predator world rife with dangers beyond imagining — and it’s Rachel Morgan'sjob to keep that world civilized. A bounty hunter and witch with serious sex appeal and an attitude, she'll bring 'em back alive, dead ... or undead. The Good, the Bad, and the Undead It's a tough life for witch Rachel Morgan, sexy, independent bounty hunter, prowling the darkest shadows of downtown Cincinnati for criminal creatures of the night. She can handle the leather-clad vamps and even tangle with a cunning demon or two. But a serial killer who feeds on the experts in the most dangerous kind of black magic is definitely pressing the limits. Confronting an ancient, implacable evil is more than just child's play — and this time, Rachel will be lucky to escape with her very soul. Every Which Way But Dead Rachel Morgan's back! Bestselling author Kim Harrison returns with a new supernatural adventure that fans of Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris won't want to miss. Some days, you just can't win. Witch and former bounty hunter Rachel Morgan's managed to escape her corrupt company, survive living with a vampire, start her own runner service, and face down a vampire master. But her vampire roommate Ivy is off the wagon, her human boyfriend Nick is out of town indefinitely and doesn't sound like he's coming back while the far-too-seductive vampire Kisten is looking way too tempting, and there's a turf war erupting in Cincinnati's underworld. And there's a greater evil still. To put the vampire master behind bars and save her family, Rachel made a desperate bargain and now there's hell to pay—literally. For if Rachel cannot stop him, the archdemon Algaliarept will pull her into the sorcerous ever-after to forfeit her soul as his slave. Forever. A Fistful of Charms The evil night things that prowl Cincinnati despise witch and bounty hunter Rachel Morgan. Her new reputation for the dark arts is turning human and undead heads alike with the intent to possess, bed, and kill her — not necessarily in that order. Now a mortal lover who abandoned Rachel has returned, haunted by his secret past. And there are those who covet what Nick possesses — savage beasts willing to destroy the Hollows and everyone in it if necessary. Forced to keep a low profile or eternally suffer the wrath of a vengeful demon, Rachel must nevertheless act quickly. For the pack is gathering for the first time in millennia to ravage and to rule. And suddenly more than Rachel's soul is at stake.