CSP200/Escaping the Matrix: A Discourse of Power
Fall2004
Annotated Bibliography (AMAZON.COM)

Bighorse, Tiana
1994    Bighorse the Warrior. University of Arizona Press.

Tiana Bighorse is my grandmother's aunt and the Bighorse of the title is my great-great grandfather. I love this book. It was such a find for me to finally read it. I do not speak Navajo being half Navajo and half Nakota Sioux, so this story was never told to me. And anyway, during short visits to my grandparents no one ever had time to talk this away about our family history. I love it that... See entire review

Ousmane, Sembene
1996    God's Bits of Wood. Heinemann.

Sembene Ousmane's third novel, God's Bits of Wood, was originally written and published in French as Les Bouts de bois de Dieu. The novel is set in pre-independence Senegal and follows the struggles of the African trainworkers in three cities as they go on strike against their French employers in an effort for equal benefits and compensation. The chapters of the book shift between the cities of Bamako, Thies, and Dakar and track the actions and growth of the men and women whose lives are transformed by the strike. Rather than number the chapters, Ousmane has labeled them by the city in which they take place, and the character who is the focal point of that chapter.

As the strike progresses, the French management decides to "starve out" the striking workers by cutting off local access to water and applying pressure on local merchants to prevent those shop owners from selling food on credit to the striking families. The men who once acted as providers for their family, now rely on their wives to scrape together enough food in order to feed the families. The new, more obvious reliance on women as providers begins to embolden the women. Since the women now suffer along with their striking husbands, the wives soon see themselves as active strikers as well.

The strategy of the French managers, or toubabs as the African workers call them, of using lack of food and water to pressure the strikers back to work, instead crystallizes for workers and their families the gross inequities that exist between them and their French employers. The growing hardships faced by the families only strengthens their resolve, especially that of the women. In fact, some of the husbands that consider faltering are forced into resoluteness by their wives. It is the women, not the men, who defend themselves with violence and clash with the armed French forces.

The women instinctively realize that women who are able to stand up to white men carrying guns are also able to assert themselves in their homes and villages, and make themselves a part of the decision making processes in their communities. The strike begins the awakening process, enabling the women to see themselves as active participants in their own lives and persons of influence in their society.

This book is wonderful yet sadly under-appreciated. Ousmane's handling of issues such as the politics of language, indigenous resistence, the cultural costs of forced industrialization, and the changing role of women really has the power to change the way people think. And yet, maybe the book's reach and resonance are the reasons that God's Bits of Wood is not widely read and taught in schools.

Butler, Octavia E.
2000    Parable of the Sower. Warner Books.

Octavia E. Butler, the grande dame of science fiction, writes extraordinary, inspirational stories of ordinary people. Parable of the Sower is a hopeful tale set in a dystopian future United States of walled cities, disease, fires, and madness. Lauren Olamina is an 18-year-old woman with hyperempathy syndrome--if she sees another in pain, she feels their pain as acutely as if it were real. When her relatively safe neighborhood enclave is inevitably destroyed, along with her family and dreams for the future, Lauren grabs a backpack full of supplies and begins a journey north. Along the way, she recruits fellow refugees to her embryonic faith, Earthseed, the prime tenet of which is that "God is change." This is a great book--simple and elegant, with enough message to make you think, but not so much that you feel preached to.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai
1999    Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books.

Looking at Western research practices from the �underside� of a positivist paradigm deeply entrenched and diffused throughout public and private educational, governmental, and corporate tentacles, Linda Tuhiwai Smith is a Maori (New Zealand) intellectual presenting a counter-methodological narrative stemming from a collective indigenous historical cynicism and whose voice bespeaks the refusal... See entire review

Tea, Michelle
2004    Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class. Seal Press.

While many recent books have thoughtfully examined the plight of the working poor in America, none of the authors of these books is able to claim a working-class background, and there are associated methodological and ethical concerns raised when most of the explicatory writing on how poverty affects women and girls is done by educated, upper-class journalists. It was these concerns that prompted indie icon Michelle Tea-whose memoir, The Chelsea Whistle, details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts-to collect these fierce, honest, tender essays written by writers who can't go home to the suburbs when their assignment is over. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from stealing and selling blood to make ends meet; to "jumping" class; how if time equals money, then being poor means waiting; surviving and returning to the ghetto; and how feminine identity is shaped by poverty. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Diane Di Prima, Terri Griffith, Daisy Hernandez, Frances Varian, Eileen Myles, Shawna Kenney, Siobhan Brooks, Terry Ryan, and more.

Pilkington, Doris
2002    Rabbit-Proof Fence: The True Story of One of the Greatest Escapes of All Time. Miramax.

The girls headed for the nearby rabbit-proof fence that stretched over 1,000 miles through the desert toward their home. Their journey lasted over a month, and the survived on everything from emus to feral cats, while narrowly avoiding the police, professional trackers, and hostile white settlers. Their story is a truly moving tale of defiance and resilience.

Lazzarre, Jane
1997    Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, Duke University.

A heartfelt exploration of ethnicity and its implications in America. Novelist Lazarre (Worlds Beyond My Control, 1991, etc.) turns to autobiography in this account of interracial marriage and motherhood. ``I have spent most of my adult life,'' she writes, ``living in a Black family, raising Black sons, forming my most intimate relationships with African Americans, learning their culture,'' and yet, as her sons have grown to adulthood, she finds herself feeling always the outsider, however well accepted. Drawing on her studies of African-American history and on her experiences as a professor, she turns her book into an experiment in understanding, inspired by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's call for a literary form that is equal parts ``self-discovery and humane conscience.'' In this she succeeds admirably, and any reader concerned at all with African-American issues will find much of interest in her narrative. The knowledge drawn from bridging the nation's separate cultures comes at an emotional cost: ``Most of the time, there are two different worlds, and I see it, feel it, am no longer privileged to be blind to it, as most white people are.'' Yet she avoids easy posturing, and she writes with probing honesty of the sometimes conflicted feelings that arise as her children are called ``nigger'' for the first time, are accused of being ``aggressive'' when they ask pointed questions of their teachers, face the daily injuries that come from being black in America, and grow into an understanding of who they are as people: African and Jewish ethnically, culturally the products of the dozens of societies that have contributed to the American identity. One son is now an actor, another a budding scholar, and Lazarre takes pride in their achievements; as she writes, ``in my life and in my dreams they remain sources of cherished and immutable attachment, influencing me as I influence them.'' A beautifully written, deeply thoughtful journey into the worlds of self and other. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Guilloud, Stephanie
2001    Through the Eyes of the Judged: Autobiographical Sketches by Incarcerated Young Men. TESC Gateway Program.

Conley, Dalton
2001    Honky. Vintage.

As recalled in Honky, Dalton Conley’s childhood has all of the classic elements of growing up in America. But the fact that he was one of the few white boys in a mostly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side makes Dalton’s childhood unique.

At the age of three, he couldn’t understand why the infant daughter of the black separatists next door couldn’t be his sister, so he kidnapped her. By the time he was a teenager, he realized that not even a parent’s devotion could protect his best friend from a stray bullet. Years after the privilege of being white and middle class allowed Conley to leave the projects, his entertaining memoir allows us to see how race and class impact us all. Perfectly pitched and daringly original, Honky is that rare book that entertains even as it informs.

Amato, Toni and Mary Davies (Editors)
2004    Pinned Down By Pronouns. Conviction Books

Santi V. Buscemi, Charlotte Smith
2003    75 Readings : An Anthology (9th edition ). McGraw-Hill

75 Readings and 75 Readings Plus offer an outstanding collection of the most popular essays for first-year writing, at an affordable price. This edition boasts new readings about social issues and the environment, expanded argumentation coverage, and a section on mixed strategies—readings employing multiple rhetorical modes.

Correspondents of The New York Times, Introduction by Bill Keller
2005    Class Matters. Times Books, Henry Holt and Company.

In Class Matters, a team of New York Times reporters explores the ways in which class—defined as a combination of income, education, wealth, and occupation—influences destiny in a society that likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity. We meet individuals in Kentucky and Chicago who have used education to lift themselves out of poverty and others in Virginia and Washington whose lack of education holds them back. We meet an upper-middle-class family in Georgia who moves to a different town every few years, and the newly rich in Nantucket whose mega-mansions have driven out the longstanding residents. And we see how class disparities manifest themselves at the doctor’s office and at the marriage altar.
 

Hernandez , Daisy and Bushra Rehman (Edited)
2002    Colonize This! Seal Press