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Books by Jonathan Scott
Socialist Joy in
the Writing of Langston Hughes
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Bio-Sketch
Jonathan Scott
grew up on the southwest side of Detroit where he attended the
public schools and was a member of Messiah Church. In 1990, he
graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a BA
in English, and in 1998 he received a PhD in English studies
from the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he
benefited from the guidance of Amiri Baraka.
He wasa
professor of English at the City University of New York, Borough
of Manhattan Community College where he taught remedial
English, composition, and literature. He has been the
coordinator of the writing program at BMCC since 2001 and a
full-time member of the faculty since 2000. He has taught at
SUNY-Stony Brook, Wayne State University in the City of Detroit,
Lawrence Tech, and Henry Ford Community College, both located in
the Detroit metro area.
Jonathan Scott
is Assistant Professor of English at Al-Quds University
in East Jerusalem. He is the author of
Socialist Joy in
the Writing of Langston Hughes (University of Missouri
Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in Modern
Fiction Studies, Langston Hughes Review,
Minnesota Review, Race & Class, College
Literature, Journal of Teaching Writing,
Rethinking Marxism, and Socialism and Democracy,
and in the e-zines CounterPunch, Black
Commentator, and ChickenBones. At present he
is working on a study of the Palestinian literary
tradition.
jonascott15@aol.com
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Jonathan Scott has written the first
book-length study to analyze the extraordinary range of
Hughes’s creative output, showing that his unassailable
reputation as one of America’s finest “folk poets”
barely scratches the surface of his oeuvre. Scott offers
a robust account of the relations between Hughes and
political activism to show that Hughes’s direct
involvement with the U.S. socialist movement of the
1920s and 1930s was largely responsible for the variety
of his writing. Scott also contends that the goal of
overthrowing white oppression produced a “socialist joy”
that would express itself repeatedly in Hughes’s work
during the anticommunist crusades of the 1950s and
1960s.Socialist
Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes
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For as soon as any prominent white leader
starts criticizing white people’s bad behavior, the white
identity falls apart and then the doors are pushed wide open for
a new multiethnic U.S. populist movement, which remains the
ruling class’ absolute worst nightmare. In this spirit, I have
written the sermon that Reverend Billy Graham would have
delivered on to the heads of white America had he forgotten, for
just a day or two, his own whiteness – if he had been a white
Bill Cosby.
If White America Had a Bill Cosby
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Table
The
underlying issue, as is always the case with Palestine,
is how Americans might respond politically if they came
to know that a significant portion of their tax dollars
is funding the most brutal system of racial oppression
the world has seen since American Jim Crow and apartheid
in South Africa. The thousands of dedicated Palestine
solidarity activists across the U.S. work under the
assumption that once the basic facts of Israeli racial
oppression against the Palestinians are established,
vividly and for the political education of the majority
of Americans, organized opposition to the 60-year old
U.S. pro-Israel policy will spring to life, leading
finally to a just solution of what’s called
euphemistically in the West “the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.”
The Niggerization of Palestine
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The overwhelming success of the right at the level of ideas
makes it unnecessary to elaborate them here in any detail. Their
ideas have become common sense. Big government is bad because it
promotes corruption, incompetence, laziness and inefficiency. An
undeterred capitalist "free market" is the best of all
possible worlds not just because it regulates itself but, more
importantly, because it rewards labor productivity, creative
innovation, and good team work.
The tougher the criminal laws and
punishments, the less likely it is people will commit crimes.
Sex education is a mistake because it encourages young people to
have sex; abstinence is the only solution. The women's movement
has destroyed the moral integrity of the American family. Taxing
corporations is actually a civil rights violation because it
discriminates against rich people.
Multiculturalism is bad because it divides
Americans along ethnic lines, tearing to shreds our society's
wholesome national fabric. Hollywood and the mass media are
controlled by liberals who are probably Satan-worshippers, since
their movies, music, and television programming constantly
advocate sexual immorality and disrespectful and irresponsible
behavior towards adult authority, especially parents and
religious figures.
Notes on Political Education
created 8 May 2007
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updated 2 November 2007
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