Whose Detroit or Queer Globalizations

Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City

Author: Heather Ann Thompson

America's urbanites have engaged in many tumultuous struggles for civil and worker rights since the Second World War. Heather Ann Thompson focuses in detail on the struggles of Motor City residents during the 1960s and early 1970s and finds that conflict continued to plague the inner city and its workplaces even after Great Society liberals committed themselves to improving conditions.

Using the contested urban center of Detroit as a model, Thompson assesses the role of such upheaval in shaping the future of America's cities. She argues that the glaring persistence of injustice and inequality led directly to explosions of unrest in this period. Thompson finds that unrest as dramatic as that witnessed during Detroit's infamous riot of 1967 by no means doomed the inner city, nor in any way sealed its fate. The politics of liberalism continued to serve as a catalyst for both polarization and radical new possibilities and Detroit remained a contested, and thus politically vibrant, urban center.

Thompson's account of the post-World War II fate of Detroit casts new light on contemporary urban issues, including white flight, police brutality, civic and shop floor rebellion, labor decline, and the dramatic reshaping of the American political order. Throughout, the author tells the stories of real events and individuals, including James Johnson, Jr., who, after years of suffering racial discrimination in Detroit's auto industry, went on trial in 1971 for the shooting deaths of two foremen and another worker at a Chrysler plant.

Whose Detroit? brings the labor movement into the context of the literature of Sixties radicalism and integrates the history of the 1960s into the broader political history of the postwar period. Urban, labor, political, and African-American history are blended into Thompson's comprehensive portrayal of Detroit's reaction to pressures felt throughout the nation. With deft attention to the historical background and preoccupations of Detroit's residents, Thompson has written a biography of an entire city at a time of crisis.

Library Journal

Using as a pivot the spectacular riots that gripped Detroit in July 1967, Thompson (history, Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte) casts the Motor City turned murder capital as a symbol of America's post-1945 urban crisis. She traces Detroit's fragmented civic, labor, and racial politics from the 1930s through the 1980s to argue that more than black-white racial polarization determined the transformation of American inner cities. Thompson argues that Detroit and other northern cities in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were battlegrounds between contradictory visions of a revolutionary, uplifting Great Society and of a reactionary, repressive, law-and-order society. The clashes were no less divisive and fierce than those of the Civil Rights Movement, which were occurring in the South at that time. On city streets and shop floors and in courtrooms, the struggle for equitable housing, worker dignity, and an end to discrimination and police brutality enlisted a biracial cast of reformers, she argues, while featuring the determination of a militant black middle class. Thompson's engrossing work challenges an array of interpretations about postwar urban America, race relations, labor relations, the triumph of Reagan conservatism, and more. Essential for any collection on the history, politics, or society of post-World War II America. Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Table of Contents:

Abbreviations
Introduction: Reassessing the Fate of Postwar Cities, Politics, and Labor
Chapter 1 Beyond Racial Polarization: Political Complexity
in the City and Labor Movement of the 1950s
Chapter 2 Optimism and Crisis in the New Liberal Metropolis
Chapter 3 Driving Desperation on the Auto Shop Floor
Chapter 4 Citizens, Politicians, and the Escalating War
for Detroit's Civic Future
Chapter 5 Workers, Officials, and the Escalating War for
Detroit's Labor Future
Chapter 6 From Battles on City Streets to Clashes in the Courtroom
Chapter 7 From Fights for Union Office to Wildcats in the Workplace
Chapter 8 Urban Realignment and Labor Retrenchment:
An End to Detroit's War at Home
Conclusion: Civic Transformation and Labor Movement Decline in
Postwar Urban America
Epilogue
Notes from the Author
Notes
Index

New interesting book: Event Marketing or The Art and Science of Negotiation

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Author: Arnaldo Cruz Malav

"Intellectual and political project." —Signs

Globalization has a taste for queer cultures. Whether in advertising, film, performance art, the internet, or in the political discourses of human rights in emerging democracies, queerness sells and the transnational circulation of peoples, identities and social movements that we call "globalization" can be liberating to the extent that it incorporates queer lives and cultures. From this perspective, globalization is seen as allowing the emergence of queer identities and cultures on a global scale.

The essays in Queer Globalizations bring together scholars of postcolonial and lesbian and gay studies in order to examine from multiple perspectives the narratives that have sought to define globalization. In examining the tales that have been spun about globalization, these scholars have tried not only to assess the validity of the claims made for globalization, they have also attempted to identify the tactics and rhetorical strategies through which these claims and through which global circulation are constructed and operate.

Contributors include Joseba Gabilondo, Gayatri Gopinath, Janet Ann Jakobsen, Miranda Joseph, Katie King, William Leap, Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, Bill Maurer, Cindy Patton, Chela Sandoval, Ann Pellegrini, Silviano Santiago, and Roberto Strongman.