The Year Left Volume 2, Toward a Rainbow Socialism:Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender

Volume Two of <i>The Year Left</i> focuses on questions of race and ethnicity, surveying the prospects for a 'Rainbow Socialism' as well as examining the contemporary trends in Black and Hispanic popular culture.

Essays by Manning Marable, Herb Boyd and Carlos Muñoz provide the first comprehensive chronicle of the Black and Chicano Lefts in the 1980s. Julianne Malveaux contributes an eye-opening critique of the 'feminization of poverty'. Cornel West and Leonard Harris reflect on the limitations of traditional Marxist analyses of racial oppression and Lucius Outlaw argues that socialists must recognize the centrality of Blacks' aspiration 'to live distinctively and self-consciously as people of African descent.'

In a section titled 'The Culture of Color' David James and James Miller offer complementary histories of the postwar Black film from Sidney Poitier to Alice Walker. Nancy Guevara takes a pioneering look at the neglected contributions of women artists in graffiti-writing, rap music and breakdancing. Hortense Spillers exposes the role of racial and sexual domination in American national mythology as seen through the novels of William Faulkner.

A final section reviews the current crisis in Central America and the Caribbean. Carol Smith develops a critique of the applicability of classical Marxist notions to the political struggle in Guatemala. The Caribbean Basin is used by Marc Herold and Nicholas Kaslou to weigh the evidence of a 'new international division of labor' involving a major shift of manufacturing capacity to third-world nations. The volume concludes with Aline Frambes-Buxeda's sobering overview of Puerto Rico under the Reagan Doctrine.