Dialectical Imaginaries brings together essays that analyze the effects of class conflict and capitalist ideology on contemporary works of U.S. Latino/a literature. The editors argue that recent global events have compelled contemporary scholars to reexamine traditional interpretive models that center on identity politics and an ethics of multiculturalism. The volume seeks to demonstrate that materialist methodologies have a greater critical reach than other methods, and that Latino/a literary criticism should be more attuned to interpretive approaches that draw on Marxism and other globalizing social theories. The contributors analyze a wide range of literary works in fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir by writers including Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria Anzaldúa, Daniel Borzutzky, Angie Cruz, Sergio de la Pava, Mónica de la Torre, Sergio Elizondo, Juan Felipe Herrera, Rolando Hinojosa, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Óscar Martínez, Cherríe Moraga, Urayoán Noel, Emma Pérez, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, Ernesto Quiñónez, Ronald Ruiz, Hector Tobar, Rodrigo Toscano, Alfredo Véa, Helena María Viramontes, and others.

What principles connect—and what distinctions separate—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets? The thought-tormented characters in T. S. Eliot’s early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry. The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths. Together or in tandem, these two principles—dialectic and relativism—constitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliot’s imagination. The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle, undergirding his impulse to move forward by looping back, and the relativism supports his ingrained ambivalence. Brooker considers Eliot’s poetry in three blocks, each represented by a signature masterpiece: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. She correlates these works with stages in the poet’s intellectual and spiritual life: disjunction, ambivalence, and transcendence. Using a methodology that is both inductive—moving from texts to theories—and comparative—juxtaposing the evolution of Eliot’s mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution of style as seen in his poetry—Brooker integrates cultural and biographical contexts. The first book to read Eliot’s poems alongside all of his prose and letters, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of literary modernism.

There are perpetual debates about the extent of freedom in politics. Are we free to choose? Are we overdetermined by our material conditions? Some hybrid between the two? What is more, how are we to comprehend ourselves as creators of history if freedom itself is a problematic concept? And what would it mean if self-comprehension were foreclosed by this problematic? In this text, Austin Hayden Smidt analyzes an oft-overlooked text by Jean-Paul Sartre in order to ground a logical framework for exploring this paradox. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre sought to develop an historical and structural heuristic; one that would enable future theorists and activists alike to assess the pressing problems facing the various milieux of capitalist life. Through this heuristic, his intent was to develop an orientation enabling humans to transform their world in their perpetual creation of themselves (and vice versa). However, the stylistic difficulties of the text, as well as a general agreement among previous interpreters, has prevented the richness of the investigation from taking root. This book sets a new course, and invites further collaboration as – together – we create society as a work of art.

Dialectical Imaginaries brings together essays that analyze the effects of class conflict and capitalist ideology on contemporary works of U.S. Latino/a literature. The editors argue that recent global events have compelled contemporary scholars to reexamine traditional interpretive models that center on identity politics and an ethics of multiculturalism. The volume seeks to demonstrate that materialist methodologies have a greater critical reach than other methods, and that Latino/a literary criticism should be more attuned to interpretive approaches that draw on Marxism and other globalizing social theories. The contributors analyze a wide range of literary works in fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir by writers including Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria Anzaldúa, Daniel Borzutzky, Angie Cruz, Sergio de la Pava, Mónica de la Torre, Sergio Elizondo, Juan Felipe Herrera, Rolando Hinojosa, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Óscar Martínez, Cherríe Moraga, Urayoán Noel, Emma Pérez, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, Ernesto Quiñónez, Ronald Ruiz, Hector Tobar, Rodrigo Toscano, Alfredo Véa, Helena María Viramontes, and others.

Ecotourism and natural resource extraction may be seen as contradictory pursuits, yet in reality they often take place side by side, sometimes even supported by the same institutions. Existing academic and policy literatures generally overlook the phenomenon of ecotourism in areas concurrently affected by extraction industries, but such a scenario is in fact increasingly common in resource-rich developing nations. This edited volume conceptualises and empirically analyses the ‘ecotourism-extraction nexus’ within the context of broader rural and livelihood changes in the places where these activities occur. The volume’s central premise is that these seemingly contradictory activities are empirically and conceptually more alike than often imagined, and that they share common ground in ethnographic lived experiences in rural settings and broader political economic structures of power and control. The book offers theoretical reflections on why ecotourism and natural resource extraction are systematically decoupled, and epistemologically and analytically re-links them through ethnographic case studies drawing on research from around the world. It should be of interest to students and professionals engaged in the disciplines of geography, anthropology and development studies.

Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.

In this classic study, Sidney Fine portrays the dramatic events of the 1936–37 Flint Sit-down Strike against General Motors, which catapulted the UAW into prominence and touched off a wave of sit-down strikes across the United States. Basing his account on an impressive variety of manuscript sources, Fine analyzes the strategy and tactics of GM and the UAW, describes the life of the workers in the occupied plants, and examines the troubled governmental and public reaction to the alleged breakdown of law and order in the strikes. In addition, Fine provides vivid portraits of the major figures on both sides of the conflict: Governor Frank Murphy; Alfred Sloan, Jr.; William Knudsen; Robert Travis; Roy, Victor, and Walter Reuther; Homer Martin; and Wyndham Mortimer. The GM sit-down strike marks the close of one era of labor-management relations in the United States and the beginning of another. A half century after its initial publication, Fine’s work remains the definitive account of that momentous conflict. A new foreword by Kim Moody’s revisits Sit-Down in order to demonstrate its continued relevance to today’s unions, workers, and activists.