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Tales from the Below-par Economy
We Don’t Play Golf Here!, directed by Saul Landau, is a series of vignettes exposing the impact of globalization on working-class people on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border. The opening story documents the struggle between the people of Tepoztlán and the golf-crazy elites and their developers, who planned to construct an eighteen-hole course, chalets and country club.
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Music of Oppression, Music of Resistance
The conditions of an oppressed group’s lived experience are directly connected to the kind of resistance songs that the members of that group will produce. For example, “La Marseillaise” became the anthem of French revolutionaries in the late eighteenth century at about the same time as revolutionary Haitian slaves were gathering in the hills above Port-au-Prince to play their instruments and invoke the spirits of their ancestors.
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Rockers in a Straight Man’s World
Galaxy is a very good band that happens to be made up of a trio of two lesbians and a bisexual. Vocalist/guitarist Katie Stelmanis explains: “I’m totally fine with being a gay band and having that label, just as long as people know that we’re just as good, if not better, than all the other rock bands.” Katie and her collaborator, Emma McKenna (vocals and guitar), understand the importance of identifying with a specific community while fighting their way through Toronto’s crowded indie scene, but they don’t always agree when it comes to how being gay women affects playing rock music.
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Motherhood Organizing
Of the many social movements that have struggled for social justice and equality, the history of activism by mothers of disabled children has been sorely neglected. Ever since the 1950s, when Pearl S. Buck wrote The Child Who Never Grew (1950) and Dale Evans Rogers wrote Angel Unaware (1953) about their respective disabled daughters, women’s narratives have provided a documentary trail to that history. Given the social stigma attached to disability at the time, the impact of two prominent mothers claiming disability in their family cannot be underestimated. By “coming out,” they boosted the many parent-led charities that were beginning to form to advocate for certain disabling conditions. Despite the “official” reference to parents, it was primarily young mothers who founded and joined these groups. They looked for mutual support to challenge century-old institutional provisions and establish services in the community. Right from the beginning, it was mothers who led the way. These activist mothers likely never considered themselves activists at all; they were just doing what needed to be done. Yet, they organized in the domestic space women occupied — their homes and, primarily, their kitchens.
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Jazz and Radical Politics
Major social changes in the United States have fundamentally determined the evolution of jazz music, just as they have other art forms. The 1930s were the period of the rise of jazz and the organized Left. Concretely, this meant big bands and the Communist Party. Notwithstanding some early dogmatic opposition to jazz from cultural commissar Mike Gold, the party soon threw itself into proselytizing for jazz and fighting segregation in the music business.
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The Resistible Rise of the Creative Class
“The Creative City” should immediately strike one as an odd phrase, one that we could very well do without. Because it has become such a buzz word since the publication of American consultant Richard Florida’s urban economic policy manual The Rise of the Creative Class, however, not everyone may feel this way. Indeed, we forget too easily in the company of our “bohemian” neighbours that cities have been creative places for much of human history, and especially so after the rise of capitalism; and that creativity itself is a fundamental feature of human nature, at least according to Karl Marx’s view on the matter.
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