Abolition Democracy

Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609801032
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Book Description
Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners. Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609801040
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery

Author: W. Caleb McDaniel
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807150193
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
Garrison signaled the importance of these ties to his movement with the well-known cosmopolitan motto he printed on every issue of his famous newspaper, The Liberator: "Our Country is the World--Our Countrymen are All Mankind." That motto serves as an impetus for McDaniel's study, which shows that Garrison and his movement must be placed squarely within the context of transatlantic mid-nineteenth-century reform. Through exposure to contemporary European thinkers--such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Giuseppe Mazzini, and John Stuart Mill--Garrisonian abolitionists came to understand their own movement not only as an effort to mold public opinion about slavery but also as a measure to defend democracy in an Atlantic World still dominated by aristocracy and monarchy. While convinced that democracy offered the best form of government, Garrisonians recognized that the persistence of slavery in the United States revealed problems with the political system.

10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF & World Bank

Author: Kevin Danaher
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609801520
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
A veritable "Globalization for Dummies," 10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF & World Banklays bare the most common myths of globalization in a clear and understandable way. Looking with hope to grassroots movement-building on a global scale, Danaher presents ten arguments for abolishing the IMF and World Bank and replacing them with democratic institutions that would make the global economy more accountable to an informed and active citizenry. Conceived as an effort to educate the public about how international institutions of "free trade" are widening the gap between the rich and poor globally, Danaher reveals how the lending policies of the IMF and the World Bank fail to benefit Third World peoples, and instead line the pockets of undemocratic rulers and western corporations while threatening local democracies and forcing cuts to social programs. Through anecdotes, analysis, and innovative ideas, Danaher argues that the IMF and the World Bank undermine our most basic democratic values, and calls for reframing the terms on which international economic institutions are operated using the principles of environmental sustainability, social justice, and human rights.

Women, Culture & Politics

Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030779850X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
A collection of speeches and writings by political activist Angela Davis which address the political and social changes of the past decade as they are concerned with the struggle for racial, sexual, and economic equality.

Abolition. Feminism. Now.

Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642593788
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This pathbreaking book also features illustrations documenting the work of grassroots organizers embodying abolitionist feminist practice. Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated out of vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. highlights necessary historical linkages, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to imagine a future where we can all thrive.

Bleeding Afghanistan

Author: Sonali Kolhatkar
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609800931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
Through in-depth research and detailed historical context, Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls report on the injustice of U.S. policies in Afghanistan historically and in the post-9/11 era. Drawing from declassified government documents and on-the-ground interviews with Afghan activists, journalists, lawyers, refugees, and students, Bleeding Afghanistan examines the connections between the U.S. training and arming of Mujahideen commanders and the subversion of Afghan democracy today. Bleeding Afghanistan boldly critiques the exploitation of Afghan women to justify war by both conservatives and liberals, analyzes uncritical media coverage of U.S. policies, and examines the ways in which the U.S. benefits from being in Afghanistan.

Global Governance

Author: Kristin Dawkins
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 9781583225806
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
In Global Governance, policy analyst Kristin Dawkins offers a refreshingly hopeful and astute roadmap towards a democratic future, framing the respective roles and accomplishments of corporations, governments, and citizen activists in light of the day-to-day needs of communities around the world. Written with an eye to the realities of power, Global Governance explores the origins and current state of play in the major global institutions, the rising dominance of global corporations and the growing wealth of the world’s political elite. In describing the impacts of international trade, aid and development loans on Southern economies and communities, Dawkins carefully explains the way governmental policies overseas become instruments of coercion in the context of globalization. Writing with a passionate commitment to justice and democracy, Dawkins points out that the U.S. government is becoming increasingly hostile to the UN – even though many of the UN’s institutions and treaties were designed to address poverty and the other problems created by globalization. At a time when the UN’s very survival is being questioned, Global Governance is an urgent call to revitalize multilateralism and to build powerful new tools for democratic global governance.

The Slave's Cause

Author: Manisha Sinha
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300182082
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 809

Book Description
“Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America.”—Florida Courier Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. “A full history of the men and women who truly made us free.”—Ira Berlin, The New York Times Book Review “A stunning new history of abolitionism . . . [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anticapitalist protest.”—The Atlantic “Will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era.”—The Wall Street Journal “A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States . . . as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles.”—The Boston Globe

The Prisoner's Wife

Author: Asha Bandele
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439125198
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
As a favor for a friend, a bright and talented young woman volunteered to read her poetry to a group of prisoners during a Black History Month program. It was an encounter that would alter her life forever, because it was there, in the prison, that she would meet Rashid, the man who was to become her friend, her confidant, her husband, her lover, her soul mate. At the time, Rashid was serving a sentence of twenty years to life for his part in a murder. The Prisoner's Wife is a testimony, for wives and mothers, friends and families. It's a tribute to anyone who has ever chosen, against the odds, to love.