Postmodern Racial Dialectics is a collection of ten essays on African American philosophy. Addressing issues as disparate as why there are no graduate programs in philosophy at the more than one hundred traditionally black colleges and universities in the U.S.—to conceptions of Black utopianism—to the nature of postmodern revolutions, these essays are beyond the bounds of traditional racial discourse. The essays are dialectical in the sense that they are conversations between personal histories, between ideologies, and between changing ways that the races talk to one another. The book is postmodern in that it is beyond modernity’s linear logic. Postmodern Racial Dialectics is also a political entreaty for African Americans to be wary of conventional ways of thinking, and to begin thinking transgressively beyond narrowly prescribed conceptions from both sides of the color line.

This book includes studies by leading philosophers and cultural critics from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The essays represent different philosophical traditions and contrasting cultural viewpoints in the arts, literature, architecture, philosophy, and the global politics of today. In spite of their discrepancies, the authors of these essays agree on one fundamental point: critical forums of this scope are crucial and thus necessary as we enter the twenty-first century. After two World Wars and the rise of Western and Eastern forms of totalitarianism, these core features of Western civilization – critique, modernity, and humanism – have been contested and dismissed as areas of mere academic interest. The contributors to this book challenge such a view. An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism will be of benefit to scholars, college students, and to probing readers interested in a founding Western legacy that seldom appears as the focus of inquiry in a single book, herein divided into three parts: “Critique and Modernity,” “Humanism and the Humanities,” and “Traditions and Global Modernities.” While modernity and modernization have been embraced by nations around the globe, humanism and critique have almost disappeared from contemporary mainstream discourse, at times unjustly set aside as elitist, or as an obsolete domain of a liberal tradition that has failed to grasp the hard realities of our global age. This book disputes these short-sighted and clearly ideological positions, pointing to the radically transforming effects of modernization on the world’s traditional cultures, and the inevitable problems and challenges in areas relative to religious fundamentalisms, weakening political institutions, ecosystems ravaged by global technologies, and world-wide attempts by various nations to achieve economic and political stability. In the debates and tentative conclusions presented in this book, the reader will learn about the on-going dialectic that shapes modernity through a re-imagined humanism and critique, currently indispensable in an emerging world order in which democratic ideals and intercultural understanding are vanishing possibilities.

Multicultural aspects of psychology have received some attention in the literature in the last decade. A number of texts currently address these significant concerns, for example, Counseling the Culturally Different (Sue & Sue, 2008); Handbook of Multicultural Counseling ( Poterotto et l., 2009); and Handbook of Multicultural Counseling Competencies (Pope-Davis & Coleman, 2005). In their most recent editions, several of these books address more nuanced complexities of diversity, for example, the intersections of gender or social class with race-ethnicity. Meanwhile, other texts have addressed gender issues in psychology (Handbook of Counseling Women, Counseling Men), with some attention paid to racial-ethnic and other diversity concerns. Clearly the progression of scholarship in this field reflects the importance of incorporating multiple aspects of diversity within psychology. However, no book currently exists that fully addresses the complexities of race-ethnicity and gender together. Better understanding of the dual impact of race-ethnicity and gender on psychological functioning may lead to more effective conceptualizations of a number of mental health issues, such as domestic violence, addictions, health-related behaviors and achievement. Exploring the impact of race-ethnicity and gender also may provide a broader understanding of self-in-community, as this affects individuals, families and other social groups and work and career development. Topics of interest may include identity development, worldviews and belief systems, parenting styles, interventions for promoting resilience and persistence and strategies for enhancing more accurate diagnostic and treatment modalities. Today’s world is comprised of multiple and intersecting communities that remain in need of psychological models and interventions that support and promote both individual and collective mental health. We believe that utilizing unidimensional conceptual models (e.g. focusing solely on race-ethnicity or gender) no longer adequately addresses psychological concerns that are dynamic, complex and multi-faceted. The proposed Handbook will focus on timely topics which historically have been under-addressed for a number of diverse populations.

Exploring the defence and articulation of free speech in South Africa, Nash examines Dutch attempts to modernize the legacy of the Enlightenment, the existentialism of a generation of Afrikaners during the 1940s and the renewal of Afrikaans literature.

Informed by selected postmodern theories and cultural criticism, this study argues that while American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s bears the outward signs of a return to realism, it also evidences recurring themes of postmodernism, such as alienation, social disintegration, personal despair, historical dislocation, and authorial self-reflexiveness.

Postmodernism has become the orthodoxy in educational theory. It heralds the end of grand theories like Marxism and liberalism, scorning any notion of a united feminist challenge to patriachy, of united anti-racist struggle, and of united working-class movements against capitalist exploitation and oppression. For postmodernists, the world is fragmented, history is ended, and all struggles are local and particularistic. Written by internationally renowned British and American educational theorists Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory--a substantially revised edition of the original 1999 work Postmodernism in Educational Theory--critically examines the infusion of postmodernism and theories of postmodernity into educational theory, policy, and research. The writers argue that postmodernism provides neither a viable educational politics, nor the foundation for effective radical educational practice and offer an alternative 'politics of human resistance' which puts the challenge to capitalism firmly on the agenda of educational theory, politics, and practice.

Canada is battleground to a Western culture war. The seeds for that contest were sown after Karl Marx published the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848. It took just thirty years for that radicalism to cross the Atlantic and invade the New World. Dialectical leftism’s assault on Canada spread like a slow but deadly virus. Before it could be successfully treated, it mutated under subsequent waves of radical ideology. Under its increasing influence, the Canadian state began to realign during the Pierre Elliot Trudeau years. This ideological trajectory was forcefully reinvigorated through Pierre’s eldest son, Justin. Dialectical leftism’s current targets face Neo-Marxist/postmodern accusations of “systemic racism” and “White supremacy.” This woke ideology—the most recent iteration of dialectical leftism—threatens to tear the West apart. How exactly did Canada get to this point? What can we do about it? Find out in the very book you hold!

After half a century exploring dialectical thought, renowned cultural critic Fredric Jameson presents a comprehensive study of a misunderstood yet vital strain in Western philosophy. The dialectic, the concept of the evolution of an idea through conflicts arising from its inherent contradictions, transformed two centuries of Western philosophy. To Hegel, who dominated nineteenth-century thought, it was a metaphysical system. In the works of Marx, the dialectic became a tool for materialist historical analysis. Jameson brings a theoretical scrutiny to bear on the questions that have arisen in the history of this philosophical tradition, contextualizing the debate in terms of commodification and globalization, and with reference to thinkers such as Rousseau, Lukcs, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Althusser. Through rigorous, erudite examination, Valences of the Dialectic charts a movement toward the innovation of a "spatial" dialectic. Jameson presents a new synthesis of thought that revitalizes dialectical thinking for the twenty-first century.

This book offers both a philosophical and sociological model for understanding the constitution of identity in general, and black social identity in particular, without reverting to either a social or racial deterministic view of identity construction. Using a variant of structuration theory (phenomenological structuralism) this work, against contemporary postmodern and post-structural theories, seeks to offer a dialectical understanding of the constitution of black American and British life within the class division and social relations of production of the global capitalist world-system, while accounting for black social agency.

This reader provides a selection of articles and essays by leading figures in the postmodernism debate.