The Cultural Matrix seeks to unravel a uniquely American paradox: the socioeconomic crisis, segregation, and social isolation of disadvantaged black youth, on the one hand, and their extraordinary integration and prominence in popular culture on the other. Despite school dropout rates over 40 percent, a third spending time in prison, chronic unemployment, and endemic violence, black youth are among the most vibrant creators of popular culture in the world. They also espouse several deeply-held American values. To understand this conundrum, the authors bring culture back to the forefront of explanation, while avoiding the theoretical errors of earlier culture-of-poverty approaches and the causal timidity and special pleading of more recent ones.There is no single black youth culture, but a complex matrix of cultures―adapted mainstream, African-American vernacular, street culture, and hip-hop―that support and undermine, enrich and impoverish young lives. Hip-hop, for example, has had an enormous influence, not always to the advantage of its creators. However, its muscular message of primal honor and sensual indulgence is not motivated by a desire for separatism but by an insistence on sharing in the mainstream culture of consumption, power, and wealth.This interdisciplinary work draws on all the social sciences, as well as social philosophy and ethnomusicology, in a concerted effort to explain how culture, interacting with structural and environmental forces, influences the performance and control of violence, aesthetic productions, educational and work outcomes, familial, gender, and sexual relations, and the complex moral life of black youth.

Product Description: Originally published in 1967, An Absence of Ruins is a poignant portrayal of a man shaped by the colonial education of the Caribbean intellectual class. Orlando Patterson offers a devastating critique of middle-class intellectualism through the self-condemning perceptions of the main character, Alexander Blackman, and the vibrant reality of the world he is unable to embrace—the world of the Jamaican working class...read more

Product Description: A bleak portrayal of life on the Dungle—the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat—this beautifully poetic, existentialist novel turns an unwavering eye to life in the Jamaican ghetto. By interweaving the stories of Dinah, a prostitute who can never quite escape the circumstances of her life, and Brother Solomon, a respected Rastafarian leader who allows his followers to think that a ship is on its way to take them home to Ethiopia, this brutally poetic story creates intense and tragic characters who struggle to come to grips with the absurdity of life...read more

Looks at relations between African American men and women, and the media portrayal of African Americans

'This work establishes the fact that slavery has existed since ancient times and tries to dispel the myth that slaves are only people of color. Designed to complement the two-volume Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery (1997), it is much more than a mere chronology of world slavery. The work in divided into six geographical sections (ancient world, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States), each with an introduction and chronology. More than 100 brief sidebar essays interspersed throughout the book enhance its readability. Extremely useful are 80 full-text historical and legal documents ranging from ancient times to the present, covering topcs from the 'Code of Hammurabi' to 'the Brazilian Government Recognizes Slave Labor' (1985). An extensive index and 50-page bibliography appear at the end of the work. Recommended for all libraries.'--'Outstanding reference sources 2000', American Libraries, May 2000. Comp. by the Reference Sources Committee, RUSA, ALA.Examines the institution of slavery in all regions of the world throughout history and includes primary source documents from a variety of time periods (view table of contents)

Examines American misperceptions about race, and discusses social and political strategies for addressing the challenges of integration

Product Description: Book by Levine, Philip, Patterson, Orlando, Rush, Norman

Argues that the concept of personal freedom developed as it did only in the Western world because of the role of women, along with slaves and foreigners, as outsiders, but that the Christian concept of spiritual freedom led to the justification of socialhierarchies

Product Description: This is the first full-scale comparative study of the nature of slavery. In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time...read more