Her entry begins:
While I grew up in the Midwest, I have spent the bulk of the last ten years of my life doing research or living in the South. Accordingly, I thought it high time early this year to invest myself more heavily in its lauded literature. I started with Jean Toomer’s Cane, as good of a place as I could begin, although little did I know it at the time. I then moved on to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, but...[read on]About For-Profit Democracy, from the publisher:
A fascinating sociological assessment of the damaging effects of the for-profit partnership between government and corporation on rural AmericansVisit Loka Ashwood's website.
Why is government distrust rampant, especially in the rural United States? This book offers a simple explanation: corporations and the government together dispossess rural people of their prosperity, and even their property. Based on four years of fieldwork, thiseye-opening assessment by sociologist Loka Ashwood plays out in a mixed-race Georgia community that hosted the first nuclear power reactors sanctioned by the government in three decades. This work serves as an explanatory mirror of prominent trends in current American politics. Churches become havens for redemption, poaching a means of retribution, guns a tool of self-defense, and nuclear power a faltering solution to global warming as governance strays from democratic principles. In the absence of hope or trust in rulers, rural racial tensions fester and divide. The book tells of the rebellion that unfolds as the rights of corporations supersede the rights of humans.
Writers Read: Loka Ashwood.
--Marshal Zeringue
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