How do poor people cope with, and even make sense of, toxic danger? This book is a ‘‘story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’’ (p. 4). As such, it is distinct from much of the social movement literature, and also the ethnographies of the poor. The dependent variable in the social movement literature is community protest; we find protest, and try to explain its appearance, citing such things as ‘‘cognitive liberation.’’ But what about the many more communities that would seem ripe for protest, but do not? How, in particular, can we explain the ‘‘silent habituation to contamination’’ that is often associated with slum communities? Why the ‘‘perpetuation of ignorance, mistake, and confusion’’ (p. 8) on the part of the residents, despite ample evidence of contamination? The book explores ‘‘the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding, division, and ultimately, inaction in the face of sustained toxic assault’’ (p. 8). ‘‘Uncertainty and ignorance,’’ they claim ‘‘have not been a dominant focus among ethnographers’’ (p. 12). True or not, here the authors explore it in rich detail. The place is a settlement on the edge of Buenos Aires. With two-and-one-half years of intensive fieldwork they have intimate knowledge of the community, and the second author, Debora Swistun, was born and raised in the town, and only left at the end of the fieldwork. Javier Auyero, no stranger to poverty research in Latin America, came in from the University of Texas for long stays. This is an ethnography, loosely structured, and like most ethnographies it is theoretically undernourished. The repeated references to Bourdieuian aphorisms such as ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ ‘‘schemata of perception,’’ ‘‘how domination works,’’ and the curious ‘‘site effects’’ (where ‘‘what is lived and seen on the ground’’ is really ‘‘elsewhere’’) (p. 159) do not structure the argument. The authors’ excellent narratives make it clear that the domination is more material than symbolic, and the pervasiveness of the pollution—air, water, soil—speaks to the silent contamination more strongly than the mechanisms and metaphors in the literature they repeatedly cite. Though much of the material has appeared elsewhere in scholarly journals, where it is more tightly organized, the leisurely pace and intimacy of this presentation has many virtues. Unfortunately, however, the lack of a decent index, so easily constructed on a computer, is not one of them. In addition to its dramatic focus upon ignorance, mistake and confusion in the community, there is a striking emphasis upon the link between environment and misery. Scholars, they say, have remained silent for a long time about environmental factors as the key determinants in the reproduction of destitution and inequity. They see it as the missing dimension in the study of poverty in Latin America. Graphically, and in wrenching detail, they show how the polluted space the urban poor live in compounds the normal problems of poverty. The silent, often invisible, steady accumulation of poisons appears to feed the resignation and displace the blame. It may be the shantytowns of Argentina which have had protests have not had the full environmental assault Flammable has had. The settlement was once an area with many small farms and fruit trees, clean water from a river, and a white-sand beach in the estuary. Gradually, but implacably, it became a hellhole, a toxic dumping ground, surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in the country. The Shell refinery is the biggest, but there is another oil refinery, three plants that store oil, several that store chemical products, one that manufactures chemical products, and a power plant. The settlement expanded into the

Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence

Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere. By Gwendolyn D. Pough. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. Pp. 265, introduction, notes, bibliography, index, illustrations. In Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere, Women's Studies professor Gwendolyn Pough makes significant contributions to both black feminist thought and hip-hop scholarship. A third-wave feminist of the hip-hop generation, Pough critiques rap music's masculinist dynamics but stops short of dismissing hip-hop culture as inherently misogynistic or thoroughly corrupted by commercialism, as is the tendency for second-wave feminists and other scholars who came of age before rap. Rather, Pough convincingly argues that hiphop offers rhetorical tools to invigorate black feminist discourse and increase its relevance to new generations of female intellectuals and activists of color. Central to Pough's argument is the conceptualization of hip-hop as not simply an aggregation of artistic texts and performers--as is the case with most research on hip-hop, which takes the form of cultural history--but as a sphere of discourse, an expressive space within which young people, including young black women, communicate their experiences and articulate their political concerns. Yet it is a contested, male-dominated space in which women struggle for room to maneuver; hence, Pough's central metaphor of "bringing wreck," the hip-hop slang term that "connotes fighting, recreation, skill, boasting, or violence" (17). More specifically, she asserts, bringing wreck with regard to black women in hip-hop means to "fight hard and bring attention to their skill and right to be in the public sphere" (17). Another key term Pough continually invokes is the aforementioned "public sphere," a concept she productively mines to develop her spatio-political theorization of hip-hop as a locus of political and personal expression. Her primary theoretical orientation derives from the Black Public Sphere Collective, a group of African-American scholars who in the mid-nineties reworked critical theorist Jurgen Habermas' influential notion of the "public sphere" of civic participation to include the activities of black civil society. In Chapter One, Pough offers a succinct synopsis of Habermas' central claim: that the public sphere is an egalitarian zone of democratic debate in which individuals put aside personal differences and private interests to talk about a common good. Pough's first chapter serves as a useful introduction to the basics of public-culture theory for those unfamiliar with the literature. Here Pough also provides an astute overview of the Black Public Sphere Collective's key criticism of Habermas: that those bourgeois spaces he idealized--the cafes, meetinghouses, and salons of the eighteenth century--were always hostile to minorities as well as women, who could not as easily bracket off their differences as a private matter. Pough asserts that "as a result of Black history in the United States ... these concepts have to be rethought when applied to Black participation in the larger U.S. public sphere" (17). Check It While I Wreck is part of a growing body of scholarly efforts to rethink the traditions and practices of African-Americans in relation to Habermasian ideals, framing black culture in the U.S. as a "counter-public" formed in response to bourgeois exclusions and thriving today in places of African-American congregation, from barbershops to Baptist churches to street corner block parties, as is the case with hip-hop. Although Pough directly links hip-hop to the enduring legacy of black public culture in the U.S., she argues hip-hop exists today as a counterpublic in its own right in which African-American youth "claim control of the public's gaze and a public voice for themselves" (17) despite oppressive ideologies and structural conditions that continually marginalize them. …

Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere

Thank you very much for downloading black feminist thought knowledge consciousness and the politics of empowerment. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have look numerous times for their chosen novels like this black feminist thought knowledge consciousness and the politics of empowerment, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they cope with some infectious bugs inside their laptop.

Black Feminist Thought Knowledge Consciousness And The Politics Of Empowerment

Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. By Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. 295 pp. $14.95

Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography

Blackgirls are an oft-disappeared population Frequently, race or gender in popular and education discourse are foregrounded, leaving the Blackgirls fragmented By contrast, one word, Blackgirl, re

Blackgirl, One Word: Necessary Transgressions in the Name of Imagining Black Girlhood:

In this article, the authors make a case for the need for scholar activism—activism by faculty members on college campuses. Through an activist group, The Mobilizing Anger Collective, this article documents the challenges, tensions, and radical potential of scholar activism as a means of addressing injustices. Using duoethnography, the authors document the embodied experience of being Black faculty responding to an expressed need for creating space to organize, express anger, and transmute hurt and pain into community. Moreover, it introduces The Mobilizing Anger Collective as an example of scholar activism and offers insights into the complexities and risks involved in such an undertaking in the bodies the authors inhabit.

Blending scholar and activist identities: Establishing the need for scholar activism.

This essay highlights and extends the distinct and critical work of Black Girlhood Studies. With a particular focus on how it differentially engages Black girls and Black girlhood, it takes readers on a journey of rumination through my exploration of coming to understand reliability as taught to me by Black girls and Black girl celebratory spaces. Utilizing poetics and reflexive writing, this essay names and elucidates three facets of reliability – tracing, collective grounding, and embracing paradox. Overall this essay describes reliability as an important Black girl pedagogy and articulates the cultural and educational importance of Black girlhood and Black girl celebratory spaces.

Black Girl Pedagogies: Layered Lessons on Reliability.

What are the hesitations, dangers, and potentialities to inviting students to peruse my body? What possibilities arise from centering and leading with the body in the teaching/learning process? What risks and possibilities does this enactment pose to a Black lesbian educator? This auto/ethnography journeys through and reflects upon my experience enacting what I have coined “embodied vulnerability” as a pedagogical practice. Within this essay, I explore the interrelationship of race, gender, and embodiment (or, the performance of self). In addition, I reflect upon the pedagogical exercise—enacted over the last seven years—of asking students to see me and name what they see to illumine how social identities are read alongside context/location, as well as in relation to other assumed identities. Due to the historical and contemporary framing of Blackness and femininity—as paradoxical in popular culture and popular constructions of Blackness and queerness as antithesis—my queerness is undetectable in ...

What happened when I invited students to see me? A Black queer professor's reflections on practicing embodied vulnerability in the classroom.

Abstract This autoethnographic essay shares my experience as a teaching assistant, desiring to be more self aware of how my race informed my pedagogy in the classroom. Set in „Race and Cultural Diversity,“ an advanced undergrad writing course, I examine my commitments to racial and social justice within classroom happenings. Using critical performance pedagogy, this study explores my identity performance to identify and create effective strategies that further dialogue on the often charged and sensitive topic of race. Moreover, this essay reveals what I learned about myself and clarified my teaching/learning philosophy.

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Dominique C. Hill

Papers

Blackgirl, One Word: Necessary Transgressions in the Name of Imagining Black Girlhood:

Blending scholar and activist identities: Establishing the need for scholar activism.

Black Girl Pedagogies: Layered Lessons on Reliability.

What happened when I invited students to see me? A Black queer professor's reflections on practicing embodied vulnerability in the classroom.

A Vulnerable Disclosure: Dangerous Negotiations of Race and Identity in the Classroom.