Traditional African American foods, also referred to as “soul food,” are often given a blanket label of “poor food choices.” The cultural value of these ethnic foods may be disregarded without sufficient study of their nutrient content. This study showed that of the various foods perceived as traditionally African American by the local sampled population, greens were the most often identified as such by 78% and the most frequently consumed (22%) by the subjects. 37% perceived chitterlings as a traditional food, (...) yet only 30% consumed them, and only on an occasional basis. Okra, yams, and black-eyed peas had relatively high consumptions but were not often perceived as traditional African American foods. The latter may suggests a lack of historical food facts, relating to indigenous African foods or may indicate the mainstreaming of these foods. Cowpeas or black-eyed peas, okra, sesame seeds, and watermelon seeds were originally brought to North America from Africa. The literature contains scant information on this particular topic, which leaves unanswered: (1) the current consumption of traditional foods by African Americans, (2) certain availability of these foods; and (3) the positive contributions to the diet that these foods may contribute. The author recognizes that “African American” is the most appropriate and preferred term used widely today, to refer to African descendants in North America, however “Black” and “Black American” will be used interchangeably, to reflect consistency of literature cited herein. First, this article will define traditional African American foods and relate their historical significance. Secondly, it will present data on current food consumption from a sample population of African Americans surveyed in San Diego. Lastly, this article will explore possible applications of the research itself. (shrink)

This new edition of Drucilla Cornell's highly acclaimed book includes a substantial new introduction by the author, which situates the book within current feminist debates. In Beyond Accommodation, Drucilla Cornell offers a highly original vision of what feminist theory can give contemporary women. She challenges essentialist and naturalist accounts of feminine sexuality, arguing that any attempt to affirm woman's value and difference by either emphasizing her maternal role or repudiating the feminine only entraps women, once again, in a (...) container that curtails feminine sexual difference, legitimates the masculine fantasy of woman, and reinstates, rather than dismantles, the gender hierarchy. (shrink)

Cornell takes readers on a highly original exploration of what it would mean for women politically, legally, and culturally, if they took the ideal of freedom seriously--if, in her words, they learn to recognize that "hearts starve as well as bodies". Challenging, passionate, and powerfully argued, Cornell's book is certain to have a major impact on the course of feminist thought.

In dialogue with afro-caribbean philosophy, this book seeks in Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms a new vocabulary for approaching central intellectual and ...

In a unique rethinking of political transformation, Drucilla Cornell argues for the crucial role of psychoanalysis in social theory in voicing connection between our constitution as gendered subjects and social and political change.

Deconstruction both by its friends and enemies has come to be associated with a set of cliches that completely misunderstands its ethical aspiration. It is particularly within the field of law that we can see the ethical force of deconstruction, and also illuminate its concrete and practical importance. In The Philosophy of the Limit Drucilla Cornell examines the relationship of deconstruction to questions of ethics, justice and legal interpretation. She argues that renaming deconstruction "the philosophy of the limit" will (...) allow us to be more precise about what deconstruction actually is philosophically and hence to articulate more clearly its significance for law. Cornell explores the ethical and juridical significance of the so-called postmodern rebellion against metaphysics. A shared ethical rebellion links philosophers as different as Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas. Together they present a new ethical configuration, new in its difference from both the critical social theory of J$u$urgen Habermas and the analytic jurisprudence of Nagel and Rawls. A key aspect of this newness is the centrality given to the relationship between questions of ethics and sexual difference. Cornell argues that the appeal of Lacan's analysis to feminists is that it helps to explain the profound hold the gender hierarchy has over Western culture, including its theories of political transformation. Under a Lacanian analysis the law of gender identity will be replicated in the laws of an existing legal system. This means that we cannot hope to sustain legal reforms unless the gender hierarchy is challenged. Cornell examines Derrida's position on the significance of the gender hierarchy in philosophy and explores its ethical and political importance. Derrida's intervention against legal positivism has important implications for the legal reforms necessary to protect marginalized groups. His emphasis on the limit, she argues, is crucial to thosewhose well-being and very lives may depend on legal transformation, women and homosexuals, for example. In an important contribution to legal philosophy, Cornell explores the affinities of Derrida's writings with recent liberal analytic jurisprudence. She also explores the differences. Comparing Rawls's and Derrida's accounts of justice, she argues that Derrida gives greater attention to the necessary utopian moment in his insistence on maintaining the divide between law, established norms, and justice. Cornell's focus on the importance of the limit and the centrality of the gender hierarchy allows her to offer a view of jurisprudence different from both critical social theory and analytic jurisprudence. As we watch the long-fought-for civil rights of women systematically overturned, we have reason to think about how the connections she makes shed light on an underlying truth of our social, political, and legal reality. (shrink)

Feminist economists have demonstrated that interrogating hierarchies based on gender, ethnicity, class and nation results in an economics that is biased and more faithful to empirical evidence than are mainstream accounts. This rigorous and comprehensive book examines many of the central philosophical questions and themes in feminist economics including: · History of economics · Feminist science studies · Identity and agency · Caring labor · Postcolonialism and postmodernism With contributions from such leading figures as Nancy Folbre, Julie Nelson and Sandra (...) Harding, Toward a Feminist Theory of Economics looks set to become the book on feminist economics for some time to come and will be greatly appreciated by all those interested in gender studies, economic methodology and social theory. (shrink)

In this posthumously published interview, conducted on February 4, 2021, philosopher and activist Drucilla Cornell (1950–2022) discusses the importance of Reiner Schürmann’s work and reminisces on the seminars they led together with Jacques Derrida in the early 1990s.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Influential political theorist Drucilla Cornell challenges readers to rethink the class struggle and the battle against racialized capitalism, and to reconceptualize the ideas of revolution, liberation and rebellion themselves, by focusing on the great revolutionary theorist CLR James.

Business Ethics is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the single-semester business ethics course. This title includes innovative features designed to enhance student learning, including case studies, application scenarios, and links to video interviews with executives, all of which help instill in students a sense of ethical awareness and responsibility."--OpenStax.

In this article I review Amaryta Sen’s powerful critique of transcendental institutionalism and his own ‘realization-focused comparison’ as an alternative way to think about justice. While deeply sympathetic with his critique of John Rawls I also argue that the role of the Kantian imagination is extremely important in figuring ideals of justice, which must guide ‘realization-focused comparison’. To do so I turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his development of what he calls ‘aesthetic ideas’ as ways of representing the (...) great ideals such as freedom and equality, which can be aesthetically represented but never fully known. (shrink)

In this essay, we revisit the concept of “political spirituality” that we developed in our book The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man (2016) in light of the profound political upheavals that have happened since its publication. We begin with theories about the breakdown of neoliberalism and the “return of politics” with the rise of so-called populist movements. We argue that notions of the “demos” and the “people” miss the dimension of transindividuality central to our thinking of (...) political spirituality. The second aspect of political spirituality missing from current critical theory is transcendence, or the desire to go beyond the limits of who and what we are. We capture both these dimensions through a notion of “relational finitude,” demonstrating both the poverty of European philosophy in this respect, and celebrating the contribution of feminism, decolonial theory, and African philosophy toward a new praxis of being human. (shrink)

: This essay is about women being crucial to the constitution of the state and the construction of the ideal of the nation. It argues that the role of actual women as reproducers of the nation and as iconic representations of mythological figures at the helm of nation building is bound up with a certain psychical fantasy of woman. It argues further that Women in Black and other political activist groups have developed embodied feminist politics that not only bring the (...) feminine body into public view during wartime but also undermine the place of the good woman as the reproducer of the nation who mourns only for the lost soldiers of her people. (shrink)

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg brings together a global community of writers to revisit key aspects of Luxemburg’s thought, from the accumulation of capital, to the mass strike, to her debate with Vladimir Lenin on the meaning of socialism, and her searing critiques of colonialism as inherent to capitalist accumulation.

This collection of essays seeks to expand the parameters of the debate on pornography. In an effort to move away from the divisive frameworks of which side are you on? and who counts as women worthy to be listened to? in feminist debates on pornography, this volume seeks to understand what pornography means to those who consume it, fight against it, work within it, and to those engaged in changing its meaning. By opening up a space for divergent points of (...) view to address the complexityof sexual material, this volume seeks to forge solidarity amongst a diverse array of constituencies, including academics, activists, and sex workers from diverse socio-political contexts. Through seeking to address the relationship between imperialism, the exotic, and the pornographic, the collection moves away from Eurocentric perspectives on pornography, by including the perspectives of women involved in struggles for national liberation in the South. This volume explores a wide range of issues, such as, how the meaning of pornography is shaped by changing historical and political realities; the role law should play, if any, in the sex industry; whether union organizing can change the working conditions in the sex industry; kinds of representational politics available for redefining pornography; and how sexually explicity literature, videos, art, and music can serve the purpose of sexual freedom. Contributors to the volume include Diana Russell, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Wendy Brown, Becki Ross, Mallek Alloula, M. Jacqui Alexander, Victoria Ortiz, bell hooks, Rey Chow, Judith Butler, Candida Royalle, Zoraida Ramirez Rodriguez, amongst others. (shrink)

Moral Images of Freedom resurrects the Kantian project of affirmative political philosophy and traces its oft-forgotten influences found in thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Benjamin. As a whole the book attempts to respond to nihilistic claims about the empty purpose of critical theory in a world so utterly captured by violence in all of its worst forms: economic, social, political, and cultural. Instead, this book draws together a sweeping thread of hope in the varied symbolic (...) forms of freedom persistent throughout the work of a broader range of critical theorists and addresses the burning challenge for such work to respond seriously to the need for a decolonization of critical theory itself and a sustained commitment to the possible future of socialism. (shrink)

Eschatology is where Christian hope comes into focus. Because both the “second coming” and the ultimate reign of God can be associated with bizarre expectations, the temptation is to tame these biblical themes or work around them in both preaching and worship. Classical liturgies and lectionaries new and old encourage second thoughts and deeper reflection.

Neo-liberalism often reduces pluralism to a social fact based on the collapse of the big ideals that once claimed to stand in for the ideal of humanity. Tolerance of inevitable value diversity is all that can be offered by the rationalized modern western state. This understanding of pluralism is completely inadequate in the post colony. Ernst Cassirer offers a philosophical understanding of symbolic plurality that allows us to respect divergent symbolic forms, including myth and religion. This understanding of pluralism opens (...) the space for respect for the customary law and the great indigenous ideals such as uBuntu which has often been denigrated as mythical and thus outdated or, worse yet, not law at all. This denigration is inseparable from colonial violence, and demands a process of transculturation as integral to this struggle to transform the new South Africa into a society that lives up to the Constitution’s call for the respect of all of its citizens. This respect can only be done if there are serious economic reforms and a challenge to the hegemonic neo-liberal capitalism. (shrink)

Strangers to Nature brings together many of the leading scholars who are working to redefine and expand the discourse on animal ethics. This volume will engage both scholars and lay-people by revealing the breadth of theorizing about the human/non-human animal relationship that is currently taking place.

In recent years, feminist and queer theory have effectively disavowed both “the human” and revolutionary politics. In the face of massive geopolitical crisis, posthumanists have called for us to reconsider fundamentally the superiority and centrality of mankind and “the human,” and question how Man can presume to change the world by revolutionary action, particularly when Marx’s dreams seem to have been swept into the dustbin of history. This provocative book reaffirms what is most basic in feminism – the attack on (...) the “universality” and sovereignty of Man – but contends that the only way this can mean anything other than pessimistic rhetoric is to embrace human agency and the struggle against colonialism and capitalism. In a series of “creolized” readings – Foucault with Ali Shari’ati, Lacan with Fanon, and Spinoza with Sylvia Wynter – the authors demonstrate what is at stake in the ongoing debate between humanism and posthumanism, putting this debate in the context of contemporary global crises and the possibilities of revolution. In its defense of “political spirituality,” this book pushes for a new trajectory in response to the gross inequalities of today, one that offers us a very different view of revolution and its present-day potential. (shrink)

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Living and dying in Iraq -- Worlds apart -- Variegated visions of humanity -- Developing human capabilities -- Civilization, progress, and beyond -- Reconsidering nationalism -- Other family stories.