[COMM-ORG] new book on community action

[Discussion list for COMM-ORG]

[ed: congrats to Alyosha on the new book. ]

From: "Alyosha Goldstein" <agoldste at unm.edu>


Dear Comm-Org List readers,

I wanted to let you all know about my new book _Poverty in Common_, just 
published this month, which is about the politics of community-based 
antipoverty programs (primarily during the mid-20th century).

Alyosha Goldstein
POVERTY IN COMMON: The Politics of Community Action during the American 
Century
(Duke University Press, 2012)

"Poverty in Common is a highly original and nuanced study of how 'the 
government of poverty' at home and abroad became central to postwar US 
liberalism and its distinctive precipitates of violence and reform, 
force and freedom, democracy and empire."
—Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Black Is a Country

After the Second World War, the idea that local community action was 
indispensable for the alleviation of poverty was broadly embraced by 
policymakers, social scientists, international development specialists, 
and grassroots activists. Governmental efforts to mobilize community 
action in the name of democracy served as a volatile condition of 
possibility through which poor people and dispossessed groups negotiated 
the tension between calls for self-help and demands for 
self-determination in the context of the Cold War and global 
decolonization. Poverty in Common suggests new ways to think about the 
relationship between liberalism, government, and inequality with 
implications for current debates over the “end of welfare” and 
neoliberalism in the United States.

Drawing on oral histories, local program records, community newspapers, 
policy documents, and records of public hearings, Alyosha Goldstein 
analyzes a compelling but often overlooked series of historical 
episodes: Progressive era reform as a precursor to community development 
during the Cold War; how the language of “underdevelopment” articulated 
ideas about poverty and foreignness; the use of poverty as a crucible of 
interest group politics; and how radical groups critically reframed the 
question of community action in anticolonial terms. He shows how 
approaches to poverty were linked to the racialized and gendered 
negotiation of boundaries — between foreign and domestic, empire and 
nation, violence and order, dependency and autonomy — in the 
mid-twentieth-century United States.

About the author:

Alyosha Goldstein is Associate Professor in the Department of American 
Studies at the University of New Mexico.

https://www.facebook.com/PovertyInCommon



_________________________________

Alyosha Goldstein
Associate Professor
American Studies Department
University of New Mexico
Humanities 436, MSC 03 2110
Albuquerque, NM 87131
Tel. 505.277.3929 (Office Adm.)
Fax. 505.277.1208
_____________________