CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

No detailed description available for "Linguistics in North America, 1".

Exploration of Bambara’s practices of liberation that encourage resistance to oppression and solidarity. "Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation studies the works of Bambara (1939–1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis's analysis serves as a cultural biography, examining the liberation impulses in Bambara's writing, which is concerned with practices that advance the material value of the African American experience and exploring the introspection between artist production and social justice. This is the first monograph that focuses on Bambara's unique approach and important literary contribution to 1970s and 1980s African American literature. It explores her unique nationalist, feminist, Marxist, and spiritualist ethos, which cleared space for many innovations found in black women's fiction. Divided into five chapters, Lewis's study relies on Bambara's voice (from interviews and essays) to craft a "spiritual wholeness aesthetic"—a set of principles that comes out of her practices of liberation and entail family, faith, feeling, and freedom—that reveals her ability to interweave ethnic identity, politics, and community engagement and responsibility with the impetus of balancing black male and female identity influences and interactions within and outside the community. One key feature of Bambara's work is the concentration on women as cultural workers whereby her notion of spiritual wholeness upends what has become a scholarly distinction between feminism and black nationalism. Bambara's fiction situates her as a pivotal voice within the Black Arts Movement and contemporary African American literature. Bambara is an understudied and important artistic voice whose aversion to playing it safe both personified and challenged the boundaries of black nationalism and feminism. "Black People Are My Business" is a wonderful addition to any reader's list, especially those interested in African American literary and cultural studies.

A BLACK FIRST: The Blackness Continues... Is a thought-provoking book about the existence of Black lives, successes therein, and the questioning of that combination. At the end of this book, author Peter E. Carter asks, "How do Black Lives Succeed?". As an immigrant, prominent educator, loved and loathed leader, and Black male, he is the epitome of that question. The answer, "By being exceptionally good at what you do" were the words of his mother he always carried with him. As the title states, Mr. Carter continues his autobiographical journey, starting from his 2004 retirement to this day in 2021, where the conversations, challenges, and controversies feel like the experiences he shared in his first book, A Black First. An Expert Witness, Interim Superintendent, and advocate for children, his post-career service to education with temporary acceptance to some buildings and denied entry to others, provides readers a peek behind the curtain to learn what school leaders do to ensure all children have the resources to succeed.Fans of the first book, educators struggling to understand the nuances of educating black children alone, and along side white children, human beings trying to analyze child abuse, and those being the 'first' and the realities of not being 'next', will be inspired by this book, and that while life appears black and white, exceptional has no color.