Portside

The March 18 killing of 22-year old Stephon Clark by Sacramento Police once again calls our attention to the racist aspect of the problem of civilians murdered by law enforcement. Angie Thomas's award-winning Young Adult novel is among the most recent literary responses to this crisis.

The late Marta Russell was singular in viewing the marginalization of people with disabilities through the lens of political economy. The book's contributors offer a body of work that builds on her legacy and on the rising political insurgency of people with disabilities.

This new defense of a humanities education is a must read, says reviewer Meranze, "for anyone concerned with the relationship between humanistic activity and American democracy."

Movements from below challenging the status quo are nothing new, reflecting eons of class conflict and class formation. The book under review traces the common threads of resistance through the Middle Ages in Europe and into the modern age.

This classic treatment of the 1960s-1970s avant-garde jazz in the United States is an essential guide to one of the most dramatic, significant, and fruitful of modern American artistic movements. That movement's impact is still felt in music played in all styles all over the world.

Once the provenance of teens, counterculturalists or authors who were fans, comics are now entrenched in academic discourse in what the essayist calls, "the theorizing of a kind of artistic poetics." The book under review ably looks at nonfiction comics as apt reflections on modern social ills.

This review focuses on a riveting novel about an African American couple caught up in the criminal justice system.

On the 50th anniversary of G. William Domhoff’s Who Rules America, the author and 11 others take stock of the book’s findings about class and power in the United States, focusing on the drive to privatize public schools, extend power abroad...

Yascha Mounk argues that democracy and liberalism are not synonymous and counsels Americans to look to the examples of Hungary, India and Turkey.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.