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In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights paints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation.

The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights.

He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.

 In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery. Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives--from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations--she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life. Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery, Laboring Women is a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

Dworkin begins with the question that is at the heart of the whole legal system: in difficult cases how do (and how should) judges decide what the law is? He shows that judges must decide hard cases by interpreting rather than simply applying past legal decisions, and he produces a general theory of what interpretation is—in literature as well as in law—and of when one interpretation is better than others. Every legal interpretation reflects an underlying theory about the general character of law: Dworkin assesses three such theories. One, which has been very influential, takes the law of a community to be only what the established conventions of that community say it is. Another, currently in vogue, assumes that legal practice is best understood as an instrument of society to achieve its goals. Dworkin argues forcefully and persuasively against both these views: he insists that the most fundamental point of law is not to report consensus or provide efficient means to social goals, but to answer the requirement that a political community act in a coherent and principled manner toward all its members. He discusses, in the light of that view, cases at common law, cases arising under statutes, and great constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, and he systematically demonstrates that his concept of political and legal integrity is the key to Anglo-American legal theory and practice.

In recent years, I have been led to think that the juridical - understood in the guise of the judiciary, with its written laws, its tribunals, its judges, and the pronouncement of the sentence in which the law is said - offered the philosopher the opportunity to reflect on the specificity of law, in its proper place, halfway between morality and politics. To give a dramatic turn to the opposition that I am making here between a political philosophy where the question of law is obscured by the fear of the incoercible presence of evil in history, and a philosophy where law is recognized in its specificity not violent, I propose to say that war is the haunting theme of political philosophy, and peace that of the philosophy of law.

Brahim, enfant, a perdu son sourire : à peine arrivé de sa Kabylie natale, ensanglantée par la guerre, il a vu tomber au quartier Latin l'un de ses frères, lors de la manifestation du 17 octobre 1961. En grandissant, il prend conscience, avec ses copains de la cité-béton, des dures réalités de l'émigration. "Dans la France des années 60-80, l'itinéraire d'un adolescent d'origine maghrébine en quête d'une identité partagée entre deux cultures, comme deux plaies jamais refermées." - Electre Un article de Maria Petrescu : "Conflit et intégration dans Le Sourire de Brahim de Nacer Kettane et Kiffe Kiffe demain de Faïza Guène" est lié à cette notice.

Salie vit en France. Son frère, Madické, rêve de l’y rejoindre et compte sur elle. Mais comment lui expliquer la face cachée de l’immigration, lui qui voit la France comme une terre promise où réussissentles footballeurs sénégalais, où vont se réfugier ceux qui, comme Sankèle, fuient un destin tragique ? Les relations entre Madické et Salie nous dévoilent l’inconfortable situation des « venus de France », écrasés par les attentes démesurées de ceux qui sont restés au pays et confrontés à la difficulté d’être l’autre partout. Distillant leurre et espoir, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique charrie entre l’Europe et l’Afrique des destins contrastés. Car, même si la souffrance de ceux qui restent est indicible, il s’agit de partir, voguer, libre comme une alguede l’Atlantique. Ce premier roman, sans concession, est servi par une écriture pleine de souffleet d’humour.

In the early years of the People's Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China's post-socialist era.

Contrary to the image presented by China's media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men.

In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China's economy, politics, and development.

In this well-known critique, Duncan Kennedy argues that legal education reinforces class, race, and gender inequality in our society. However, Kennedy proposes a radical egalitarian alternative vision of what legal education should become, and a strategy, starting from the anarchist idea of workplace organizing, for struggle in that direction. Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy is comprehensive, covering everything about law school from the first day to moot court to job placement to life after law school. Kennedy’s book remains one of the most cited works on American legal education.

Printemps 1956. Pour l'Algérie, c'est le temps de la guerre et de la lutte pour l'indépendance. Dans cette ville au flanc d’une montagne, ceux qui combattent risquent l'exil, la prison, la torture, la mort. Les femmes regardent le maquis où leurs maris font la révolution. Assia Djebar fait entendre les cris et les silences de ces femmes qui, tout autant que les maquisards, se sont battues pour voir leur pays libre.

Assia Djebar, one of the most distinguished woman writers to emerge from the Arab world, wrote Children of the New World following her own involvement in the Algerian resistance to colonial French rule. Like the classic film The Battle of Algiers--enjoying renewed interest in the face of world events--Djebar's novel sheds light on current world conflicts as it reveals a determined Arab insurgency against foreign occupation, from the inside out. However, Djebar focuses on the experiences of women drawn into the politics of resistance. Her novel recounts the interlocking lives of women in a rural Algerian town who find themselves joined in solidarity and empower each other to engage in the fight for independence. Narrating the resistance movement from a variety of perspectives--from those of traditional wives to liberated students to political organizers--Djebar powerfully depicts the circumstances that drive oppressed communities to violence and at the same time movingly reveals the tragic costs of war.