On 11/4/06, Sandwichman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 11/4/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I haven't read this book yet (I'd like to soon!), but racism and
> nativism don't quite explain the absence of a social democratic party
> or any other kind of mass party on the Left in the USA.
Well then perhaps you should read the book before arguing against it
because the book doesn't claim that racism and nativism explain the
absence of a social democratic party in the USA. What the book is
concerned with is the dialectical/historical interaction between race,
class and gender -- if that isn't too telescopic a description of its
thesis.
What particularly impressed me about it was the way that the author
examined cultural forms of expression -- and very centrally the
black-face minstrel show -- as the media through which both change and
stagnation occurred.
I was mainly responding to what the review appears to suggest. I'll
certainly read the book. I like Alexander Saxton's Indispensable
Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, and I'm just
reading his new one Religion and the Human Prospect (out of Monthly
Review Press). The latter will probably be controversial.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
