Books about Lipsitz from Amazon.com

"Time Passages is a far-reaching-and perhaps permanent-contribution to cultural studies." San Francisco Review of Books

"This high take on 'low' culture examines the complex web of popular narratives that arise from and create the American collective memory. Studying the period from the end of World War II to the present, Lipsitz . . . inventively explores the popular canon, turning variously to television, rock music, film, novels, and the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans." Publishers Weekly

"What really separates Lipsitz from earlier critics of popular culture is that he got his rock diploma from the high-school gym, not the Frankfurt School. Lipsitz knows the color of the labels, the B-sides, the cover versions." Boston Phoenix Literary Section

"In a series of provocative and finely crafted essays on film, rock 'n' roll, early television, popular novels, New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations, and other aspects of popular culture, Lipsitz argues that popular culture has been, and remains, an arena of hope, possibility, criticism, and even resistance for millions of ordinary people." American Studies

George Lipsitz is professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, where he serves as director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute. He is the author of many books, including Time Passages (see right), The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998), and Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (1997)..
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Covering the highlights of a destination, these affordable pocket-sized guides include all the attention to detail found in a full-size Frommer’s Guide in a pint-size package.

• Outspoken opinions on which attractions are worthwhile—and which aren’t

• Exact prices to help travelers plan the perfect trip, no matter what their budget

• The best hotels and restaurants in every price range, with candid reviews

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In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary, Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.

Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and perhaps most importantly, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city's image as a tourist party town..
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In this book, a leading theorist on sex and gender discusses how hidden assumptions embedded in our cultural discourses, social institutions, and individual psyches perpetuate male power and oppress women and sexual minorities. Sandra Lipsitz Bem argues that these assumptions, which she calls the lenses of gender, shape not only perceptions of social reality but also its more material aspects-like unequal pay and inadequate daycare. Her penetrating and articulate examination of these hidden cultural lenses enables us to look at them rather than through them and to better understand recent debates on gender and sexuality..
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Attacking the common view that whiteness is a meaningless category of identity, Lipsitz shows that public policy and private prejudice insure that whites wind up on top of the social hierarchy

Passionately and clearly written, this wide-ranging book probes into the social and material rewards that accrue to "the possessive investment in whiteness." Lipsitz sums up the ways that public policy has virtually excluded communities of color from everything that American society defines as desirable: first-rate education, decent housing, asset accumulation, political power, social status, satisfying work, and even the power to shape and narrate their own history. White supremacy is no thing of the past, no fringe movement. It is a pervasive and pernicious system that restricts the political and cultural agency of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Latinos every day. Unearned and unacknowledged, race-based advantages, not greater merit or a superior work ethic, account for white privilege.

Lipsitz's ultimate point is not to condemn all white people as racists but to challenge everyone to begin a principled examination of personal actions and political commitments. Exposing the system of unfairness is not enough. People of all groups-but especially white people because they benefit from that system-have to work toward eradicating the rewards of whiteness..
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What becomes of "national knowledge" in our age of globalization? If dramatic changes in technology, commerce, and social relations are undermining familiar connections between culture and place, what happens to legacies of learning that put the nation at the center of the study of history, culture, language, politics, and geography? In short, what remains of American Studies? At a critical moment, this book offers a richly textured historical perspective on where our notions of national knowledge-and our sense of American Studies-have come from and where they may lead in a future of new ideas about culture and community. The America that seems to be disappearing before our very eyes is, George Lipsitz argues, actually the cumulative creation of yesterday's struggles over identity, culture, and power. With examples from statistics and history, poster designs and music lyrics, Lipsitz shows how American Studies has been shaped by the social movements of the 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s. His analysis reveals the sedimented history of social movement contestation contained in contemporary popular music, visual art, and cinema.

Finally, Lipsitz identifies the ways in which the globalization of commerce and culture are producing radically new understandings of politics, performance, consumption, knowledge, and nostalgia; the changing realities present not so much a danger as a clear challenge to a still-evolving American Studies-a challenge that this book helps us to confront wisely, flexibly, and effectively.

George Lipsitz is professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, where he serves as director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute. He is the author of many books, including Time Passages (see right), The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998), and Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (1997).

Critical American Studies Series, volume 1.
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An intelligent survey of world music's inter-cultural fusions. In a wild tour across the globe, touching down in Havana, Port-au-Prince, Kingston, Budapest, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, George Lipsitz explores the fusion of immigrant and mainstream cultures displayed in world music, including rap, jazz, reggae, zouk, bhangra, juju, swamp pop, and Puerto Rican bugalu and Chicago punk..
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This book tells the story of Ivory Perry, a black worker and community activist who, for more than thirty years, has distributed the leaflets, carried the picket signs, and planned and participated in the confrontations that were essential to the success of protest movements. Using oral histories and extensive archival research, George Lipsitz examines the culture of opposition through the events of Perry’s life of commitment and illumines the social and political changes and conflicts that have convulsed the United States during the past fifty years..
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