Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising

ISBN-13: 9780415907354 / Angielski / Miękka / 1993 / 288 str.

Robert Gooding-Williams

Opis

The Rodney King incidents - the beating, the trial and the uprising - raised a number of questions about the connections between poverty, racial ideology, economic competition, and the exercise of political power. What is the relationship between the beating of Rodney King and the workings of racism in America? How was it possible for defence attorneys to convince a jury that the videotape they saw did not depict an excessive or unjustified use of violence? In the burning of Koreatown, what role did racial stereotypes of African Americans and Korean Americans play, and how, are we to understand the fact that not all of Los Angeles' various Latino communities took part in the uprising? Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising includes essays by prominent philosophers, social scientists, literary critics and legal scholars. They explore these issues from a variety of distinct, theoretical perspectives, offering a complicated picture of the Rodney King incidents. Avoiding reductionism, they illuminate the complex interplay of ideological, political and economic forces impinging on urban America.

Recenzje

". . . very impressive . . . These works are not about race and urban uprising. They are about all of us, not the American Dream but the American Real." -- The San Diego Review
"The book Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising offers a timely reminder that the beating of Rodney King, the outcome of the Simi Valley trial of the police officers involved in it, and the subsequent uprisings in response to the verdict are best understood in social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. The authors demonstrate that a critical analysis of popular representations of these events can illuminate the larger subject of race relations in American society. The book suggests that a multidisciplanary approach is needed to appreciate fully the vast and interlocking dimensions of the problem." -- Gail Lee Dubrow, Journal of the American Planning Association

O autorze

Robert Gooding-Williams is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Black Studies at Amherst College. He is author of the forthcoming book Nietszche's Pursuit of Modernism, to be published by Routledge.