Arise Ye Mighty People!: Gender, Class and Race in Popular Struggles

Bys: Turner, Terisa E. and Ferguson, Bryan J.

Book Overview

This text bears witness to the continuous resistance to the multiple oppressions levelled against women and men of colour throughout the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865433011
• ISBN13: 9780865433014
• Release Date: February 1994
• Publisher: Africa World Pr
• Length: 273 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Women lead social movements for total transformation!

Terisa Turner and the contributors to this collection break new ground in both analysing and predicting directions of social change. The new ground arises from the combined treatment of woman-man relations, race and class in practical cases in contemporary social struggle. Take gender to begin with. Turner's conception, outlined in the first two chapters, is based on the view that unpaid work of women undergrids corporate profits and hence any talk of social class must also include analysis of relations between women and men. The subsequent chapters proceed to document the importance of gender in social movements geared to abolishing exploitation and injustice founded on class. Rastafari in both East Africa, where the Pan-African movement originated, and in the Caribbean where it has flourished, is presented by Turner as a post-capitalist, global way of life which brings together a vast array of social groups united by the value of human life as opposed to profits and speculation. Other analyses of Kenya's social struggles, those of women in Nigeria's oilbelt, those opposed to the 1991 Gulf War take further the book's central thesis: when women's fundamental security is threatened they organize a movement of resistance, and this movement's success depends on a section of their menfolk breaking away from 'male deals' with exploiters and joining women in a struggle for transformational justice. This thesis is expressed in Seth Tobacman's shocking graphics ('the discovery of america and tompkins square park') and in Trinidadian Brother Book's powerful poem, 'message to the intellectuals from the grassroot' The collection of fight-back chronicles was inspired by the high points of the democracy movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s and has never been more relevant as the neo-liberal order crumbles under its own weight and irrationality at the beginning of the new millenium. The marxism of CLR James informs each chapter.