An asset for educators interested in feminism and pop-culture pedagogy.
Brooklyn-based educator and speaker Allred delivers a book-length extension of a college class he designed, “Politicizing Beyoncé,” including texts, references, and broader theoretical frameworks.
This project fits in the educational tradition of including analysis of popular culture as a teaching strategy, now widely regarded as an access point for students to engage with critical theory. Focusing on black feminism, Allred builds a thorough and detailed critical study of how Beyoncé’s catalog reflects, connects to, and is informed by literary and theoretical work. He interrogates Beyoncé’s music and videos to explore the complicated spaces where racism, sexism, and capitalism collide. Using the singer’s work as a canon, Allred analyzes how her lyrical and visual texts handle such themes as self-definition, love, and resistance. With a referential scope that includes Sojourner Truth, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, bell hooks, the Combahee River Collective, and many others, Allred effectively demonstrates how Beyoncé’s work aligns with and advances many elements of black feminism. Throughout, the author offers well-grounded insights into the political and cultural significance of Beyoncé’s work and provides an expansive base from which to view it. Yet the enthusiasm that may spark lively class discussion does not necessarily translate onto the page, and offering a single class as an academic model may work against the broader purpose of accessibility common to pop-culture pedagogy. While Allred cites the work of the African-American women and scholars examining Beyoncé’s feminist influences and appeal, this text functions more as monologue about a class than a dialogue with the current rich scholarship on the topic. Still, the author’s emphasis on instructional methods positions this work amid important existing trends connecting education to contemporary society. Acclaimed poet and black feminist activist Cheryl Clarke provides the introduction.
An asset for educators interested in feminism and pop-culture pedagogy.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-936932-60-3
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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