UI Press | Edited by Theodore Koditschek, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and Helen A. Neville

Race Struggles

Examining the material conditions of race and its relation to class and gender

This collection is a contribution to the ongoing examination of race and its relation to class and gender. The essays in the volume start with the premise that although race, like class and gender, is socially constructed, all three categories have been shaped profoundly by their context in a capitalist society. Race, in other words, is a historical category that develops not only in dialectical relation to class and gender but also in relation to the material conditions in which all three are forged.

These assumptions underlie the organization of the volume, which is divided into three parts: "Racial Structures," which explores the problem of how race has historically been structured in modern capitalist societies; "Racial Ideology and Identity," which tackles diverse but interrelated questions regarding the representation of race and racism in dominant ideologies and discourses; and "Struggle," which builds on the insight that resistance to structures and ideologies of racial oppression is always situated in a particular time and place.

In addition to discussing and analyzing various dimensions of the African American experience, contributors also consider the ways in which race plays itself out in the experience of Asian Americans and in the very different geopolitical environments of the British Empire and postcolonial Africa.

Contributors are Pedro Cabán, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, David Crockett, Theodore Koditschek, Scott Kurashige, Clarence Lang, Minkah Makalani, Helen A. Neville, Tola Olu Pearce, David Roediger, Monica M. White, and Jeffrey Williams.

"Emphasizing the material bases of racial dynamics and the interplay among race, class, and gender, this stimulating volume provides a challenge and an analytical alternative to contemporary postmodernist discussions of race."--James B. Stewart, coauthor of Introduction to African American Studies: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications

"A provocative, integrative approach to looking at race that takes capitalism seriously. The contributors utilize a range of methodological tools to discuss and analyze race, arguing that race and racial divisions go hand-in-hand with the political economy of capitalism and with globalization today."--James Jennings, editor of Race, Neighborhoods, and the Misuse of Social Capital

Theodore Koditschek is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750-1850. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of America's First Black Town, Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830-1915. Helen A. Neville is a professor of educational psychology and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the coeditor of the Handbook of African American Psychology.