audiobook Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (South Asia Across the Disciplines) by J. Barton Scott in History

Description

Stories of Newark’s postwar decline are easy to find. But in The Fixers; Julia Rabig supplements these tales of misery with the story of the many imaginative challenges to the city’s decline mounted by Newark’s residents and suburban neighbors. In these pages; we meet the black nationalists whose dynamic organizing elected African American candidates in unprecedented numbers. There are tenants who mounted a historic rent strike to transform public housing and renegade white Catholic priests who joined black laywomen to pioneer the construction of low-income housing and influence housing policy. These are just a few of the “fixers” we meet—people who devised ways to work with limited resources and pull together the threads of a patchwork welfare state. Rabig argues that fixers play dual roles. They support resistance; but also mediation; they fight for reform; but also more radical and far-reaching alternatives; they rally others to a collective cause; but sometimes they broker factions. Fixers reflect longer traditions of organizing while responding to the demands of their times. In so doing; they end up fixing (like a fixative) a new and enduring pattern of activist strategies; reforms; and institutional expectations—a pattern we continue to see today.