After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region

After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region Review

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After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region Feature

"Compton pushes us to look beneath the surface—past those comforting tales of nationhood and racial solidarity—to the more nebulous and ever-shifting truth. This is a brilliant and original work that should be mandatory reading for any student of race and history."—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia

After Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed African Canadian poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous twentieth century. Written from the perspective of someone who was born and lives outside of African American culture, it riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or "Canaan") encoded in African American myth and song since the days of slavery. These varied essays, steeped in a kind of history rarely written about, explore the language of racial misrecognition (also known as "passing"), the failure of urban renewal, humor as a counterweight to "official" multiculturalism, the poetics of hip hop turntablism, and the impact of the Obama phenomenon on the way we speak about race itself. Compton marks the passing of old modes of antiracism and multiculturalism, and points toward what may or may not be a "post-racial" future, but will without doubt be a brave new world of cultural perception.

After Canaan is a brilliant and thoughtful consideration of African (North) American culture as it attempts to redefine itself in the Obama era.

Wayde Compton's previous books include the poetry collections 49th Parallel Psalm and Performance Bond. He teaches English in Vancouver, BC.

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Dont Fence Me In: Essays on the Rational Truant

Dont Fence Me In: Essays on the Rational Truant Review

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Dont Fence Me In: Essays on the Rational Truant Feature

One of the most intriguing ideas advanced in this book is that, at least in some circumstances, truancy represents a rational choice, a better and more productive use of time than the pointless tedium of the classroom. If that is true rigid enforcement of attendance is not only oppressive but also irrational.' John Clarke

Dont Fence Me In: Essays on the Rational Truant assumes that most truancy is the logical outcome of rational decisions made by students in the face of the circumstances that characterise their school experience. It declines to attribute and consign all acts of truancy to the dustbin of deviance and anti-social behaviour. While it does not seek to absolve young people from responsibility for their actions, it seeks to show that structural weaknesses in the state-supported school system play a significant role in the causation of truancy both from class and school.

The book consists of a series of essays written from a perspective that seeks to explain and understand truancy rationally. Some contributors report on recent research including the relation of teaching style to truancy, the incidence of truancy as a function of ethnic group and linguistic proficiency, the student as consumer, and the importance of establishing a literate order to decrease truancy rates. Other essays are more speculative and theoretical, including an assessment of political attitudes to truancy, a personal account by a recalcitrant former truant, a study of conflicting explanations of the phenomenon, an examination of the measurement of truancy and an account of truant and its numerous synonyms.

Dont Fence Me In is intended for those who have a critical interest in education and schooling including teachers, headteachers and principals, administrators, students of education, education departments, inspectors and superintendents and not least citizens with a commitment to good education.

The University of Buckingham Press

The University of Buckingham is the only independent university in the UK and our publishing program reflects the tenets of the university and the principles of its founding fathers:

-Liberty
-Freedom of the individual
-Freedom from state intervention

The University of Buckingham Press provides a forum for the exchange of views and a vehicle for rigorous academic research to disseminate the values which underpin the university in the subject areas at which the university excels:

-Law
-Education
-Business
-Education

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Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature

Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature Review

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Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature Feature

The relentless pace of urbanization since the industrial revolution has inspired a continuing effort to view, read, and name the modern city. "We are now at a point of transition to a new kind of city", write William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "and thus we are experiencing the same crisis of language felt by observers of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities." "Visions of the Modern City" explores the ways in which artists and writers have struggled to define the city during the past two centuries and opens a new perspective on the urban vision of our time.

In their introduction, the editors outline three phases in the evolution of the modern city-- each having its own distinctive morphology and metaphor-- and argue that a new vocabulary is needed to describe the sprawling "urban field" of today. Eric Lampard draws a detailed demographic and geographic picture of urbanization since the late eighteenth century, culminating with the "decentered" city of the 1980s. Other contributors examine the representation of cities from the London and Paris of 1850 to the New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo of the present. Deborah Nord and Philip Collins follow Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens, respectively, through the urban underworld of Victorian London. Theodore Reff traces the double life of Paris expressed in the work of Manet, while Michele Hannoosh shows bow Baudelaire influenced the Impressionists by transferring the aesthetic implications of the term nature to urban experience. Thomas Bender and William Taylor focus on tensions between the horizontal and the vertical in the architectural development of New York City, and Paul Anderer investigates the private, domestic spaces that represent Tokyo in postwar Japanese fiction. Steven Marcus analyzes the breakdown of the city as signifying system in the novels of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon, writers who question whether the indecipherable contemporary city has any meaning left at all.

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