Encyclopedia of diasporas

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Peter Applebome

As we move toward the end of the century, Southern values have become American values. Southern politicians lead both political parties, and the South has powered the rightward shift in American politics over the course of the past three decades. The South is far and away the leading area of population and economic growth in America. People in Michigan are listening to country music and parishioners in California are worshiping at Southern Baptist churches. New Yorkers are lining up to hear Newt Gingrich speak and militia members in Idaho look at Southern neo-Confederates as allies and inspirations. And while the nation wrestles with problems of race, ethnicity, and diversity, no place has grappled with those problems longer, with both tragic and triumphant results, than the South. Applebome takes us on a wild ride through a South that is both undoubtedly new and still shaped by old ways.^ We visit Montgomery, Alabama, where an aging and ill George Wallace looks back and realizes that he's won; Charlotte, North Carolina, where the go-go spirit of the entrepreneurial New South and a vibrant political progressivism live side by side; Nashville, Tennessee, where country music suddenly finds itself the most popular thing on America's radio dial; Honea Path, South Carolina, where the ghosts of murdered strikers still haunt the town - and labor relations - sixty-two years later; Cobb County, Georgia, where old racial issues play out in a new suburban setting; Wilmington, North Carolina, where school segregation is again an issue, only this time those in favor of it are black.^ Applebome also takes us to Selma, Alabama, where veteran civil rights activists gather again to remember the past and wonder about the future; to the Mississippi Delta, where neon-drenched casinos and gourmet catfish farms are neighbors to some of America's most astonishing poverty; and Columbia, South Carolina, where a growing group of Southerners believe that the Confederacy was more than a lost cause - it is one still worth fighting for.

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Jeff Biggers

"Days after President Obama beseeched his fellow lawmakers in the State of the Union to come together as a people, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, "and find common ground, even as we're having some very vigorous debates," the extraordinary effect of Arizona's sagebrush rebellion had already rippled across the country.In the alarming and fascinating State Out of The Union, award-winning author Jeff Biggers shows how the Arizonification of America is in full swing. More than 25 state legislatures have already introduced copycat anti-immigration bills of Arizona's controversial SB 1070. But immigration reform is just the opening salvo-in Arizona, and for the 2012 elections.With one of the most radical Tea Party factions in control of its legislature, Arizona and its growing bevy of wingnut politicians have not only dislodged Sarah Palin as one of the most popular jokes on late night TV shows, but have set in motion one of the most alarming challenges to federal authority in history. The legislature has passed several bills challenging federal authority on gun laws, Medicaid, and the rights of undocumented children to attend school or go to the emergency room. One bill debated in the state congress proposed prohibiting "courts from considering international law or legal percepts of other nations or cultures when making judicial decisions." Another bill required federal environmental inspectors to register with the sheriff whenever its representatives enter one of Arizona's fifteen counties. One Forbes reporter wrote that the bill could be summed up in three words: "Stay outta Arizona." As a precursor to the 2012 election, Arizona defiantly unveiled its vision of a Tea Party America--that may be our future"--

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Édouard Glissant

In Poetics of Relation, French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the islands of the Antilles as enduring an "invalid" suffering imposed by history, yet also as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture in order to provide forms of memory and intent capable of transcending "nonhistory," Glissant therefore defines his "poetics of relation" - both aesthetic and political - as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. In Poetics of Relation, we come to see that relation in all its senses - telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings - is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. The issues raised about identity as built in relation and not in isolation are central to current discussions not only of Caribbean creolization but of U.S. multiculturalism as well.

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James Kirchick

"Once the world's bastion of liberal, democratic values, Europe is now having to confront demons it thought it had laid to rest. The old pathologies of anti-Semitism, populist nationalism, and territorial aggression are threatening to tear the European postwar consensus apart. In riveting dispatches from this unfolding tragedy, James Kirchick shows us the shallow disingenuousness of the leaders who pushed for 'Brexit' examines how a vast migrant wave is exacerbating tensions between Europeans and their Muslim minorities; explores the rising anti-Semitism that causes Jewish schools and synagogues in France and Germany to resemble armed bunkers; and describes how Russian imperial ambitions are destabilizing nations from Estonia to Ukraine. With a new American president threatening to abandon his country's traditional role as upholder of the liberal world order and guarantor of the continent's security, Europe may be alone in dealing with these unprecedented challenges. Based on extensive firsthand reporting, this book is a provocative, disturbing look at a continent in unexpected crisis"--Jacket.