Capital punishment and the human face.
Reviews
Kari Jo Verhulst 1-01-1994
Warrior Marks, the recently released Alice Walker-Pratibha Parmar collaboration, continues the exploration of female genital mutilation begun in Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy.
Aaron McCarroll Gallegos 8-01-1992
In the past several years, the two largest Spanish-language television networks in the United States, Telemundo and Univision, have faced protests from Latinos..
Andrea Ayvazian 6-01-1992
Our individual and collective inability (or at least reluctance) to discuss the issue of racism openly and frankly—and to struggle actively with it with colleagues, family members, parishioners, and friends—keeps the cycle of oppression repeated and reinforced. Joseph Barndt's Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America will be greeted with gratitude and relief by anyone who has tried to wrestle with the issue of racism in a personal relationship or a professional setting.
Barndt—a pastor in New York City and co-director of Crossroads, a ministry working to dismantle racism and build a multicultural church and society—has been working on issues of racial justice for decades. In Dismantling Racism, he has boiled down years of experience, insight, and wisdom into a clear, readable, no-nonsense, and honest volume.
Barndt's overall analysis is superb. He addresses the social, political, and economic realities in this country with such simplicity and clarity that reading this book is like looking through a camera lens at a vista that at first appears blurry but is suddenly, dramatically, brought into focus.
In the first chapter, Barndt discusses what he calls the "continuing evil of racism"—how the roots of racism are "embedded and intertwined in the life and history of the United States." A dynamic tension is created between the despair and disappointment of the past and a sense of hope for the future.
Kevin Charles Peterson 6-01-1992
Throughout the greater part of this century, the political and military leadership of Western nations seemed convinced that expansionary-minded totalitarian governments posed the most serious threat to American and European democracy. Favored freedoms—the right to vote, to dissent, to pursue one's economic self-interest, and to choose one's lifestyle—were believed to be in constant jeopardy from the regimes of such leaders as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao.
The members of that feared foursome are now all dead. The Soviet Union is no longer one entity. And China, despite the remonstrations of its twentysomething intelligentsia, is currently being wooed by President Bush and the NATO (or New World) cabal. To be sure, the reunification of Germany and open dialogue with the former Soviets and China hardly presage an era of utopian relaxation. Yet the lifting of animosities attending international relations provides ample opportunity to eye an even more formidable threat to freedom on the domestic front. The enemy is now within; and it is television.
In his book Television and the Crisis of Democracy, philosopher Douglas Kellner examines the historical and present-day relationship between democracy and the television industry, delivering a five-chapter study divided into two separate but equally important parts. Part one of the book delivers a well-constructed post-Frankfurt School theoretical analysis that explores the destructive and regressive (and even totalitarian) role television plays in contemporary society. The second part offers its readers a succinct blueprint of the medium's potentials and "alternative" uses.
Anthony A. Parker 6-01-1992
Mississippi Masala is neither great nor completely bad. It sort of trundles along at a nice, comfortable, and familiar pace. And that's the problem with Mississippi Masala. The viewer has been down this road before. There is a lot going on in this film: love, lust, broken taboos, humor, and poignancy. Unfortunately, none of these themes are developed to any reasonable or believable extent.
Mississippi Masala is a love story between Demetrius (Academy Award-winner Denzel Washington), a young black man born, raised, and tired of Greenwood, Mississippi, and Mina (newcomer Sarita Choudhury), a younger Indian woman whose family lives and works in a hotel run by an extended family of Indians. They meet quite by accident, fall in lust, and ostensibly in love, break all the cultural and regional taboos, and run away together to parts unknown to do whatever they are going to do (the film doesn't say).
If you haven't guessed it already, I was not impressed with this movie. At least I was not impressed with the young Afro-Asian lovers. The Afro-American aspects of the film--relationships among Demetrius' family, Southern black ways of being, etc.--didn't move me because I know them, lived them, and have seen them before on film. But what did intrigue me was the relationship between Mina's father Jay (Roshan Seth) and his homeland, Uganda.
Jay is an Indian, but only because his parents were Indian. He was born, raised, and educated in Uganda. His closest friend, Okelo, is a black African. Jay has built a reputation as a lawyer defending blacks throughout the country. He and his wife, Kinnu, who is Indian, and a very young Mina are "living large" in Kampala among the "natives." But that comes to an abrupt halt in 1972 when now long-deposed dictator Idi Amin comes to power and decrees that all Indians living in Uganda must leave within 90 days.
Judy Coode 6-01-1992
In her newest book, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (University of Illinois Press, 1992), Duke University professor Anne Firor Scott carefully investigates and discusses one of our society's most overlooked and underrated assets, the female voluntary group.
Most of the groups Scott mentions (including benevolent societies established in coastal towns in the 1790s, mid-1800s temperance unions, and community improvement groups of the early 20th century) had some common features: Often the wives and daughters of the communities' most powerful middle- and upper-middle-class men banded together out of a sense of "Christian duty" (though a few non-religiously oriented groups existed) to change their society as they saw fit.
By the mid-1800s the emphasis on benevolence toward individuals had shifted to a more community-focused vision. Many women volunteers, having begun to educate themselves through their organizations, started to work for an end to slavery and for women's suffrage. (The debate over which issue was of greater importance was sometimes heated and ugly.) Later women added concern for labor laws and policies regarding housing and education to their agenda.
The groups did have some problems. They tended to be classist, and integration with groups of activist black women was largely unsuccessful. Also, most of the religious-oriented groups were Protestant; Jewish and Catholic women had their own small organizations, with interaction infrequent.
Karen Lattea 6-01-1992
Gerald G. May's new book, The Awakened Heart: Living Beyond Addiction (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, $16.95, cloth) has the capacity to rekindle hope in wary hearts—real hope, rooted in honesty and faith, not in retreat from reality or creative conformity. But it takes a certain willingness to read these pages, for May's blended background of psychiatry and spiritual guidance enables him to challenge our deepest insecurities and disillusionment even as he nurtures our courage and dreams.
The Awakened Heart offers a spirituality that calls us to listen more to our hearts and less to our heads, to place more priority on love than on efficiency in our lives. May recognizes the "gentle warfare" between love and efficiency, saying, "The enemy is that which would stifle your love: your fear of being hurt, the addictions that restrict your passion, and the efficiency worship of the world that makes you doubt the value of love."
Addiction in May's lexicon is an expansive term. Building on his last work, Addiction and Grace (Harper, 1988, $9.95, paper), May writes, "Attachment nails the energy of our passion to someone or something, producing a state of addiction." He suggests that asking ourselves "freedom questions" is necessary for discerning how much we've allowed addiction to enter into our loves. "The difference is between attachment binding desire," he writes, "and commitment honoring desire." The "Freedom and Intention" chapter concludes with a very encouraging discussion of prayer—a turning toward the "source of love" in which complete freedom exists.
