Left Out: A Political Journey - Hardcover

Duberman, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465017444 ISBN 13: 9780465017447

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

For the past thirty-five years, activist and historian Martin Duberman has been witness to our country's tumultuous confrontations with a formidable array of shifting issues - equality for people of color, the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, the gay/lesbian and AIDS political formations. This selection of his previously published and revised work charts Duberman's own lifeline as well as those of the varied movements that tried to change the country's priorities and equalize its privileges. All of these essays, articles, and reviews, first published in such periodicals as The Nation, the New York Times , and The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review , have been amended for this publication and divided into pertinent categories. Duberman has written a special introduction, as well as introductory essays to each section of the book.

About this title

About the Author

Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor of History at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the University of New York. He is the founder and first director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School. Duberman is the author and editor of over thirty-five books, including In White America and Stonewall. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

An award-winning historian who has written extensively on the African-American civil rights struggle, feminism, American imperialism and gay and lesbian liberation, Duberman is also a playwright (In White America) and distinguished professor of history at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. This collection of 31 essays, book reviews and commentaries (many of which appear here in revised versions) chart nearly four decades of political conflict in the United States, in what amounts to an extended meditation on how "exclusion" has functioned as a pivotal force in U.S. history. A self-proclaimed radical who considers himself "a confirmed if qualified patriot... dismayed at our shortcomings... but a tempered optimist about our potential," Duberman sensitively portrays how the struggle for individual and collective freedom coexists with severe state and social oppression. In a 1964 essay, "The Northern Response to Slavery," he discusses why many antislavery Northerners refused to become abolitionists. In "The (Contested) New History of Gays and Lesbians," a 1998 piece in which he examines the philosophical and historical ramifications of labeling historical figures "gay," Duberman combines traditional academic research with common sense and finely tuned moral persuasion. From the student rebellions of the 1960s to the Vietnam War to the racism of the gay movement, he elucidates both the contradictions and shortcomings, as well as the enormous successes, of American radicalism and political struggles for freedom. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A grab bag of scholarly essays on aspects of American history and politics. Martin Duberman (Stonewall, 1993; Midlife Queer, 1996; etc.) is among the leading students of Americas gay history; he founded the City University of New Yorks well-regarded Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and he has published widely. Here he gathers work from three decades, much of it centering on little-explored topics that make for fascinating reading. In one essay, for instance, he explores the dual life of Donald Webster Cory, who, writing under that name in the 1950s, spoke up to defend homosexuality against those who deemed it a socially pathological diseasebut who also, writing as Edward Sagarin a decade later, derided the emergent view that homosexuals are as healthy as anyone else. In another, Duberman recounts the controversy that surrounded his biography of the African American singer and actor Paul Robeson, which met with opposition from activists who claimed that a white man had no business writing about a black one, and that a gay man could not possibly understand the life of a straight one. (Duberman rightly dismisses these views as species of bigotry.) Other pieces address the history of slavery, American politics in the 1960s, and the nations shameful record of racism and oppression. Individually those essays are fine, engaged pieces of work, but because Duberman has not done much to unite them under one cover, that they do not add up to much more than a greatest-hits assemblage for followers of his work. Thematically various, the essays share only Dubermans decided convictions: the baleful influence of corporate culture, the iniquity of many aspects of American foreign policy, the tenacity of white racism, the non-pathological nature of same-gender desire, the crippling falsity of the traditional male/female binary. Duberman honors those convictions with interesting insights, but the book would have benefited from a sharper focus. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465017444
• ISBN 13: 9780465017447
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496