This book counters most of our prevailing views about literacy. It says that literacy, rather than enfranchising people, is violent, ulterior, and uniquely devoted to Western economic ends. It claims that the literacy profession perpetuates injustice, whether it knows it or not. This is a book for anyone who thinks that reading and writing are important to learning. In this respect, it's a book for everyone, but it's primarily for people on the hotseat - English teachers, especially composition/writing/rhetoric teachers, and teachers of dropouts and adults and minorities. The book addresses economics and social class, the political structure in which English teaching fits, the character of labor, the psychology or psychotherapy of literacy, and the future of social freedom in America. This is an angry book written by an angry English teacher: The author is angry that literacy is the center of the storm; angry that the center of the storm foments nothing but itself; angry that most of what we do, even the good that we do, remains academic, powerless, and self-serving. What solutions are offered? The author argues that literacy is not the solution. she argues that economics is the agenda, that the ability to read and write is less important than the ability to pay. The reality is that whose who set the agenda use literacy and literacy standards to maintain privilege and parcel disadvantage. The violence of literacy becomes, therefore, the customary domain of those who foresee no real change while foretelling it.

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.

This anthology brings together classic perspectives on violence, putting into productive conversation the thought of well-known theorists and activists, including Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Osama bin Laden, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Hobbes, and Pierre Bourdieu. The volume proceeds from the editors’ contention that violence is always historically contingent; it must be contextualized to be understood. They argue that violence is a process rather than a discrete product. It is intrinsic to the human condition, an inescapable fact of life that can be channeled and reckoned with but never completely suppressed. Above all, they seek to illuminate the relationship between action and knowledge about violence, and to examine how one might speak about violence without replicating or perpetuating it. On Violence is divided into five sections. Underscoring the connection between violence and economic world orders, the first section explores the dialectical relationship between domination and subordination. The second section brings together pieces by political actors who spoke about the tension between violence and nonviolence—Gandhi, Hitler, and Malcolm X—and by critics who have commented on that tension. The third grouping examines institutional faces of violence—familial, legal, and religious—while the fourth reflects on state violence. With a focus on issues of representation, the final section includes pieces on the relationship between violence and art, stories, and the media. The editors’ introduction to each section highlights the significant theoretical points raised and the interconnections between the essays. Brief introductions to individual selections provide information about the authors and their particular contributions to theories of violence. With selections by: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Osama bin Laden, Pierre Bourdieu, André Breton, James Cone, Robert M. Cover, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Engels, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Mohandas Gandhi, René Girard, Linda Gordon, Antonio Gramsci, Félix Guattari, G. W. F. Hegel, Adolf Hitler, Thomas Hobbes, Bruce B. Lawrence, Elliott Leyton, Catharine MacKinnon, Malcolm X, Dorothy Martin, Karl Marx, Chandra Muzaffar, James C. Scott, Kristine Stiles, Michael Taussig, Leon Trotsky, Simone Weil, Sharon Welch, Raymond Williams

Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Zizek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in the world.

In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture. Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.

This multi-disciplinary anthology explores the topic of violence from a wide variety of perspectives. It looks at state violence, anti-state violence and criminal violence such as armed robbery.