New in Books

Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies & the Unfinished Work of Emancipation, Julie Roy Jeffrey

"In Abolitionists Remember, Julie Roy Jeffrey illuminates a second, little-noted antislavery struggle as abolitionists in the postwar period attempted to counter the nation's growing inclination to forget why the war was fought, what slavery was really like, and why the abolitionist cause was so important." -- UNC Press

New in Books

Synopsis:

"Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911 examines the work of five female teachers who challenged gendered and cultural expectations to create teaching practices that met the civic and cultural needs of their students.

The volume analyzes Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book, a post–Civil War educational textbook for newly freed slaves; Zitkala Ša’s autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 that questioned the work of off-reservation boarding schools for Native American students; and Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, and Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s contributions to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica in 1910 and 1911—contributions that offered language and cultural instruction their readers could not receive in Texas public schools.

Author Jessica Enoch explores the possibilities and limitations of rhetorical education by focusing on the challenges that Child, Zitkala Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas made to dominant educational practices. Each of these teachers transformed their seemingly apolitical occupation into a site of resistance, revising debilitating educational methods to advance culture-based and politicized teachings that empowered their students to rise above their subjugated positions.

Refiguring Rhetorical Education considers how race, culture, power, and language are both implicit and explicit in discussions of rhetorical education for marginalized students and includes six major tenets to guide present-day pedagogies for civic engagement."

New In Books

"The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," Annette Gordon-Reed

New in Books: "Liberating Language..."

Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America

Shirley Wilson Logan

New in Books: Memory & History

The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico's Twentieth Century

Samuel Brunk  

New In Books

"Ida: A Sword Among Lions,
Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching"

by

Paula J. Giddings,
Professor in Afro-American Studies at Smith College

Book Description:
"In the tradition of towering biographies that tell us as much about America as they do about their subject, Ida: A Sword Among Lions is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching: a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race.

At the center of the national drama is Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), born to slaves in Mississippi, who began her activist career by refusing to leave a first-class ladies’ car on a Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation’s first campaign against lynching. For Wells the key to the rise in violence was embedded in attitudes not only about black men but about women and sexuality as well. Her independent perspective and percussive personality gained her encomiums as a hero -- as well as aspersions on her character and threats of death. Exiled from the South by 1892, Wells subsequently took her campaign across the country and throughout the British Isles before she married and settled in Chicago, where she continued her activism as a journalist, suffragist, and independent candidate in the rough-and-tumble world of the Windy City’s politics.

In this eagerly awaited biography by Paula J. Giddings, author of the groundbreaking book When and Where I Enter, which traced the activist history of black women in America, the irrepressible personality of Ida B. Wells surges out of the pages. With meticulous research and vivid rendering of her subject, Giddings also provides compelling portraits of twentieth-century progressive luminaries, black and white, with whom Wells worked during some of the most tumultuous periods in American history. Embattled all of her activist life, Wells found herself fighting not only conservative adversaries but icons of the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements who sought to undermine her place in history.

In this definitive biography, which places Ida B. Wells firmly in the context of her times as well as ours, Giddings at long last gives this visionary reformer her due and, in the process, sheds light on an aspect of our history that is often left in the shadows."

For a preview click ------> here

Memory/Memoria and Music(a)

Corridos in Migrant Memory

by

Martha I Chew Sanchez

Press Release about Corridos in Migrant Memory

Book Review by Maria Herrera-Sobek

New Books About Memory/Memoria

Brewer, Joseph E., Manzur Gill, eds. Nonvolatile Memory Technologies with Emphasis on Flash : A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and Using Flash Memory Devices. New York: 2008.

Howes, Mary B. Human Memory: Structures and Images. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2007.

Kliegel, Matthias, Mark A. McDaniel, Gilles O. Einstein, eds. Prospective Memory: Cognitive, Neuroscience, Developmental, and Applied Perspectives. New York : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008.

Strong-Wilson, Teresa. Bringing Memory Forward: Storied Remembrance in Social Justice Education with Teachers. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

New in Books

Scholar and novelist Anita August has published her debut novel titled "Gut Bucket Blues" (Stanley Publishing), which presents the story of a young boy's journey through the labrynth that is New Orleans.





You can order the book from bookmasters.com, amazon.com, and stanleypublishing.com. Get it now!

A reading will be held on April 9, 2008 at 6 p.m. at the UTEP Union Cinema. Mark your calendar!

Congratulations, Anita! Way to go! Yay!

Memory & History

On March 1, Texas A&M University Press will publish historian, ethnographer and photographer Marie Theresa Hernández’s “Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire: Unearthing Deep South Narratives from a Texas Graveyard,” an intricate history of the San Isidro Cemetery, which Hernández discovered was the site of a slave owning plantation before it was a burial site for Mexican/Mexican-American workers at the Imperial Sugar Company in Sugar Land, TX (which is located 20 miles southwest of Houston, Texas). According to the book description, Hernández used interviews, newspaper stories and other sources to construct a history that brings together Southern history and Mexican-American history. No doubt that Hernández’s monograph merits much attention in the field of memory/memory studies, as well as Chicana/o studies.

Has The Art of Persuasion Been Sold (Out)?

Jay Heinrichs' recently published "Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion" is perhaps making some cringe, some laugh and some simply dismiss the joy that Amazon customers have expressed via rave reviews of Heinrich's (off the cliff) notes about Aristotle and Cicero.

Heinrich is sure to be enjoying the positive reviews from a general audience that are able to understand the art of persuasion by watching "The Simpsons" or listening to Eminem via a "practical breakdown" of Aristotle and Cicero, but at what cost to academics?

Memory & Boricua/Chicana/Latina History

In 2007, Vicki L. Ruiz, chair of the department of history at the University of California, Irvine and John R. Chavez, professor of history at Southern Methodist University, published "Memories and Migrations: Mapping Boricua and Chicana Histories," which features articles by noted scholars such as Gabriela F. Arredondo, Marisela R. Chávez, and Yolanda Chávez Leyva.

Memory and the American Civil War

American historian and Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust's new book "This Republic of Sufferring: Death and the American Civil War" examines the magnitude of loss and memorialization caused by the massive deaths during and after the American Civil War. New York Times book reviewer Geoffrey C. Ward has presented an interesting preview of her book in his review in the NY Times. Also, you can read an excerpt in the New York Times. Gilpin Faust was interviewed by NPR recently, where she talked about nineteenth century views on death, the significance of burials during the causalties, and the challenges of identifying the bodies of soldiers in the bloodiest war in American history.

Memory and Sexuality

One of the leading voices in gay Chicano fiction and LGBT literature--John Rechy--is ready to release his new book "About My Life and the Kept Woman," a memoir about Rechy's discovery of his racial and sexual identity.

I hope the book will be better than his prior work, which has not been that impressive. Although, "City of Night," his debut novel, continues a classic in the world of letters. However, much of his work thereafter has not impressed (with the exception of "Numbers").

And here I was thinking that Rechy was against memory and memoirs because of his comments in Charles Casillo's biography "Outlaw: John Rechy," where he expressed his refusal to write a memoir. Hmmmmm?????? Prove me wrong, John!

Hasta la proxima...