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JournalISSN: 0093-3139

College Literature 

About: College Literature is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Literary criticism & Power (social and political). It has an ISSN identifier of 0093-3139. Over the lifetime, 875 publications have been published receiving 5334 citations.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions was completely foreign to the spirit of the 1950s and 60s, and even if someone actually agreed with these ideas, he or she would have hesitated to take such a position in public and would have had a hard time finding an audience as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: If there is a class war in America, my side is winning. (Warren Buffet qtd. in Woodward 2004, para.47)In 1945 or 1950, if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today's standard neo-liberal toolkit, you would have been laughed off the stage or sent off to the insane asylum. . . . The idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions; the idea that the State should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy, or that corporations should be given total freedom, that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given much less rather than more social protection-such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time. Even if someone actually agreed with these ideas, he or she would have hesitated to take such a position in public and would have had a hard time finding an audience. (George 1999, para. 2)Just as the world has seen a more virulent and brutal form of market capitalism, generally referred to as neoliberalism, develop over the last thirty years, it has also seen "a new wave of political activism [which] has coalesced around the simple idea that capitalism has gone too far" (Harding 2001, para.28). Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public goods, and non-commodified values. Under neoliberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit. Public lands are looted by logging companies and corporate ranchers; politicians willingly hand the public's airwaves over to powerful broadcasters and large corporate interests without a dime going into the public trust; Halliburton gives war profiteering a new meaning as it is granted corporate contracts without any competitive bidding and then bills the U.S. government for millions; the environment is polluted and despoiled in the name of profit-making just as the government passes legislation to make it easier for corporations to do so; public services are gutted in order to lower the taxes of major corporations; schools more closely resemble either malls or jails, and teachers, forced to get revenue for their school by adopting market values, increasingly function as circus barkers hawking everything from hamburgers to pizza parties-that is, when they are not reduced to prepping students to take standardized tests. As markets are touted as the driving force of everyday life, big government is disparaged as either incompetent or threatening to individual freedom, suggesting that power should reside in markets and corporations rather than in governments (except for their support for corporate interests and national security) and citizens. Citizenship has increasingly become a function of consumerism and politics has been restructured as "corporations have been increasingly freed from social control through deregulation, privatization, and other neoliberal measures" (Tabb 2003, 153).Corporations more and more design not only the economic sphere but also shape legislation and policy affecting all levels of government, and with limited opposition. As corporate power lays siege to the political process, the benefits flow to the rich and the powerful. Included in such benefits are reform policies that shift the burden of taxes from the rich to the middle class, the working poor, and state governments as can be seen in the shift from taxes on wealth (capital gains, dividends, and estate taxes) to a tax on work, principally in the form of a regressive payroll tax (Collins, Hartman, Kraut, and Mota 2004). During the 2002-2004 fiscal years, tax cuts delivered $197.3 billion in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1% of Americans (i.e., households making more than $337,000 a year) while state governments increased taxes to fill a $200 billion budget deficit (Gonsalves 2004). Equally alarming, a recent Congressional study revealed that 63% of all corporations in 2000 paid no taxes while "[s]ix in ten corporations reported no tax liability for the five years from 1996 through 2000, even though corporate profits were growing at record-breaking levels during that period" (Woodard 2004, para. …

314 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Emmett Till's body arrived home in Chicago in September 1955 and was left open for four long days as discussed by the authors, while mainstream news organizations ignored the horrifying image, Jet magazine published an unedited photo of Till's face taken while he lay in his coffin.
Abstract: Emmett Till's body arrived home in Chicago in September 1955. White racists in Mississippi had tortured, mutilated, and killed the young 14-year-old African-American boy for whistling at a white woman. Determined to make visible the horribly mangled face and twisted body of the child as an expression of racial hatred and killing, Mamie Till, the boy's mother, insisted that the coffin, interred at the A.A. Ranier Funeral Parlor on the South Side of Chicago, be left open for four long days. While mainstream news organizations ignored the horrifying image, Jet magazine published an unedited photo of Till's face taken while he lay in his coffin. Shaila Dewan points out that "[mjutilated is the word most often used to describe the face of Emmett Till after his body was hauled out of the Tallahatchie river in Mississippi. Inhuman is more like it: melted, bloated, missing an eye, swollen so large that its patch of wiry hair looks like that of a balding old man, not a handsome, brazen 14-year-old boy" (2005).Till had been castrated and shot in the head; his tongue had been cut out; and a blow from an ax had practically severed his nose from his face-all of this done to a teenage boy who came to bear the burden of the inheritance of slavery and the inhuman pathology that drives its racist imaginary. The photo not only made visible the violent effects of the racial state; they also fuelled massive public anger, especially among blacks, and helped to launch the Civil Rights Movement.From the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement to the war in Vietnam, images of human suffering and violence provided the grounds for a charged political indignation and collective sense of moral outrage inflamed by the horrors of poverty, militarism, war, and racism-eventually mobilizing widespread opposition to these antidemocratic forces. Of course, the seeds of a vast conservative counter-revolution were already well underway as images of a previous era-"whites only" signs, segregated schools, segregated housing, and nonviolent resistance-gave way to a troubling iconography of cities aflame, mass rioting, and armed black youth who came to embody the very precepts of lawlessness, disorder, and criminality. Building on the reactionary rhetoric of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan took office in 1980 with a trickle-down theory that would transform corporate America and a corresponding visual economy. The twin images of the young black male "gangsta" and his counterpart, the "welfare queen," became the primary vehicles for selling the American public on the need to dismantle the welfare state, ushering in an era of unprecedented deregulation, downsizing, privatization, and regressive taxation. The propaganda campaign was so successful that George H. W. Bush could launch his 1988 presidential bid with the image of Willie Horton, an African-American male convicted of rape and granted early release, and succeed in trouncing his opponent with little public outcry over the overtly racist nature of the campaign. By the beginning of the 1990s, global media consolidation, coupled with the outbreak of a new war that encouraged hyper-patriotism and a rigid nationalism, resulted in a tightly controlled visual landscape-managed both by the Pentagon and by corporate-owned networks-that delivered a paucity of images representative of the widespread systemic violence (Kellner 1972). Selectively informed and cynically inclined, American civic life became more sanitized, controlled, and regulated.Hurricane Katrina may have reversed the self-imposed silence of the media and public numbness in the face of terrible suffering. Fifty years after the body of Emmett Till was plucked out of the mud-filled waters of the Tallahatchie River, another set of troubling visual representations has emerged that both shocked and shamed the nation. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, grotesque images of bloated corpses floating in the rotting waters that flooded the streets of New Orleans circulated throughout the mainstream media. …

216 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argues that there is much more at stake in the current assault on the university than the issue of academic freedom, and proposes a theoretical framework for engaging critical pedagogy and developing a defense for its use in the classroom as part of a broader project of connecting education to democratic values, identities, public spaces, and relationships.
Abstract: In spite of its broad-based, even global, recognition, higher education in the United States is currently being targeted by a diverse number of right-wing forces, which have high jacked political power and have waged a focused campaign to undermine the principles of academic freedom, sacrifice critical pedagogical practice in the name of patriotic correctness, and dismantle the university as a bastion of autonomy, independent thought, and uncorrupted inquiry. Ironically, by adopting the vocabulary of individual rights, academic freedom, balance, and tolerance, private advocacy groups and individuals such as the American Council for Trustees and Alumni and David Horowitz are waging a campaign designed not merely to counter dissent but to destroy it and in doing so to eliminate all of those remaining public spaces, spheres, and institutions that nourish and sustain a democratic civil society. The article argues that there is much more at stake in the current assault on the university than the issue of academic freedom. First and foremost is the concerted attempt by right-wing extremists and corporate interests to strip the professoriate of any authority, render critical pedagogy as merely an instrumental task, eliminate tenure as a protection for teacher authority, and remove critical reason from any vestige of civic courage, engaged citizenship, and social responsibility. The article offers both a critique and some suggestions about how such an attack can be collectively resisted, especially by those of us working in the universities. There is a central focus in the article on the importance of both developing a theoretical framework for engaging critical pedagogy and developing a defense for its use in the classroom as part of a broader project of connecting education to democratic values, identities, public spaces, and relationships.

142 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examined the effects of 9/11 on Arab Americans and other minority groups and found that Arab Americans became more patriotic and defensive-some might say more defensive-sensibility among students and educators.
Abstract: IntroductionThis article will examine the effects of 9/11 on Arab Americans and other minorities. 9/11 altered nearly all aspects of American life; even the so-called restoration of "the American lifestyle" is a contrived metamorphosis given the deliberate manner in which American leaders urged its convalescence. 9/11 and its aftermath leave social critics with a remarkably broad range of issues to examine, primary among them a more patriotic-some might say more defensive-sensibility among students and educators. This sensibility is especially apropos in relation to what is often referred to as ethnic or multicultural studies. (Even though both terms are problematic, I will use the more common designation ethnic studies to describe the area studies of non-White American ethnic groups.) Ethnic critics have long invoked and then challenged centers of traditional (White) American power. They also have maintained strong ties to radical politics; ethnic critics, in fact, have been pivotal in unmasking the workings of American imperialism and in turn formulating alternative politics in response to that imperialism, both domestic and international (for instance, Edward Said, Vine Deloria, Jr., Robert Warrior, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Barbara Christian, Craig Womack, Lisa Suhair Majaj).Because ethnic critics challenge the production and reproduction of American hegemony, we must explore how those challenges function in a newly reactive-indeed, at times oppressive-American atmosphere. After 9/11, dissent, a cornerstone of ethnic studies, was attacked as unpatriotic, a serious accusation in today's society. In modern American universities, which increasingly are seen as investments that ultimately must pay dividends, dissent-i.e., lack of patriotism-is conceptualized as irresponsible by enraged parents and conservative groups. Since dissent is inherent in ethnic studies, it is usually the target of the attacks (Nolndoctrination.org, for example, is filled with African American Studies courses). An American Indian Studies professor put it to me this way in a recent conversation: "How do we get people to understand the reality of American imperialism in Indian communities when imperialism is such a taboo topic now?"With the appropriate variations, this is a crucial question for any scholar dealing with domestic or international communities that are in some sort of conflict with the United States.As an Arab American critic, I feel particularly affected by the question enumerated above. If we alter it a bit, we are left with the following: How do instructors of Arab American culture and society comprehend the position of the Arab American community in the aftermath of 9/11? How have Arab American culture and society changed? How, in turn, has the pedagogy of Arab America changed? And how, most important, do we find a viable space to develop Arab American Studies now that Arab Americans receive the sort of attention for which its scholars once clamored?The last question is resonant, albeit extraordinarily complex. While Arab American critics once lamented a lack of Arab American issues in various disciplines, the sudden inclusion of those issues across the academic spectrum is at best ambivalent. Before 9/11, Arab American scholars were only beginning to theorize the relationship between Arab Americans and the field of ethnic studies (as well as other fields and area studies). We therefore have little prior scholarship with which to work in speculating how to position in the Academy what has become a highly manifold community after 9/11. In the following sections, I will summarize relevant issues in Arab America before and after 9/11; analyze the post-9/11 terminology that shapes mainstream perceptions of Arabs and Arab Americans; discuss theoretical issues that influence both the production and reception of Arab American scholarship; and assess possible relationships among Arab American politics and the politics of other ethnic or minority groups. …

101 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: For example, Bauman et al. as mentioned in this paper argue that there appears to be a developing hostility towards addressing the basic problems of society (e.g., racial injustice, the dismantling of social welfare programs, the alarming incarceration rates among youth of color in the inner cities, the full-scale attack on the public schools, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, along with the refusal on the part of many people to participate meaningfully in political elections indicate a far reaching public cynicism and indifference to the world of public politics.
Abstract: Politics, Pedagogy, and the Culture of Cynicism At the present moment in American history, there appears to be a developing hostility, if not cynicism, towards addressing the basic problems of society ( Goldfarb 1991, Capella 1997,Jacoby 1999, Chaloupka 1999, Bauman 1999, Boggs 2000). The absence of a widespread public debate or even substantive resistance over issues such as racial injustice, the dismantling of social welfare programs, the alarming incarceration rates among youth of color in the inner cities, the full-scale attack on the public schools, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, along with the refusal on the part of many people to participate meaningfully in political elections indicate a far reaching public cynicism and indifference to the world of public politics (Bauman 1999, Giroux 2000). As freedom is defined increasingly through the logic of consumerism, the dynamics of self-interest, an e-commerce investment culture, and all things private, there seems to be a growing disinterest on the part of the general population in such non commercial values as empathy, compassion, loyalty, caring, trust, and solidarity that bridge the private and the public and give substance to the meaning of citizenship, democracy, and public life (Putnam 2000, Chaloupka 1999). New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, captured the mood of such cynicism in his claim that "more Americans care about who is going to be voted off the island on 'Survivor' than who will be the next vice president"(2000, A27; see also Giroux 2000, Bauman 1999). As the state is increasingly stripped of its public functions, it is defined less through its efforts to invest in the public good than through the exercise of its police and surveillance functions in order to contain those groups deemed a threat to social order. As the obligations of citizenship are narrowly defined through the imperatives of consumption and the dynamics of the market place, commercial space replaces noncommodified public spheres and the first casualty is a language of social responsibility capable of defending those vital public spheres that provide education, health care, housing, and other services crucial to a healthy democracy) Instead of celebrating the historical struggle to advance public life, the media now largely celebrate financial markets. Models of leadership are no longer drawn from the ranks of those heroic individuals who, in connection with social movements, have struggled to expand civil rights, individual liberties, and relations of democracy. On the contrary, political leadership has now given way to celebrity, representatives of whom are drawn from Hollywood film studios and the ranks of corporate culture. Narcissistic behavior now generates media attention as never before, while admiration for private success turns people like Bill Gates into cultural icons. Collapsing intellectual ambition and social vision are matched by a mounting disdain towards matters of equality justice, and politics. The upshot is a rising indifference towards those aspects of education that foster critical consciousness, engender a respect for public goods, and affirms the need to energize democratic public life and reinvigorate the imperatives of social citizenship. Evidence of the privatization of public life and the pervasive culture of cynicism is most obvious in the debates over educational reform and the speed at which public schools and colleges have become training grounds for corporate agendas. As Jeffrey Williams rightly argues, universities have become licensed storefront[s] for name brand corporations ... reconfigured according to corporate management, labor, and consumer models and delivering a name brand product .... The traditional idea of the university as a not-for-profit institution that offers a liberal education and enfranchises citizens of the republic, not to mention the more radical view that the university should foster a socially critical if not revolutionary class, has been evacuated without much of a fight. …

93 citations

Performance
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No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
202317
202227
20215
202016
201936
201853