Living with Class Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture

It is clear that the world is in conflict about the status (quo) of capital. Living With Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture addresses and reflects upon the many different ways in which and through which we find ourselves struggling, surviving, and thriving today. The contributors offers diverse considerations, 'ethnophilosophies,' about the force, subtleties, and consequences of the many different ways that capitalism, wealth, and poverty continue to dominate our lives and influence our sense of identity, our understanding of material culture, and our continued maintenance of class status. Following the current debates about wealth and class and the longing for a new discursive engagement with this historically defined concept, they examine the social and cultural phenomena of class from a uniquely innovative philosophical approach and reconsider certain philosophical "givens" within the context of culture in the broadest sense of the word, experientially and theoretically.

Ron Scapp is the founding director of the Graduate Program in Urban and Multicultural Education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, USA, where he is also a professor of humanities and teacher education. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Teaching Values: Critical Perspectives on Education, Politics, and Culture. He is president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies and the editor of the journal Ethnic Studies Review.

Brian Seitz is Professor of Philosophy at Babson College, USA. He is the author of The Trace of Political Representation, co-author of The Iroquois and the Athenians: A Political Ontology (with Thomas Thorp), and co-editor with Ron Scapp of Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality; Etiquette: Reflections on Contemporary Comportment; and Eating Culture.

Introduction: Working Class; Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz
1. Class Dismissed: The Issue Is Accountability; bell hooks
2. Letter from a Lovelorn Pre-Radical: Looking Forward and Backward at Martin Luther King Jr.; Kevin Bruyneel,
3. In Search of a New Left, Then and Now; Dick Howard
4. The Status of Class; Stanley Aronowitz
5. 'Fix the Tired': Cultural Politics and the Struggle for Shorter Hours; Kristin Lawler
6. Literary and Real Life Salesmen and the Performance of Class; Jon Dietrick
7. Money Changes Everything?: African American Class-Based Attitudes toward LBGT Issues; Ravi K. Perry, Yasmiyn Irizarry, and Timothy J. Fair
8. Democracy without Class: Investigating the Political Unconscious of the United States; M. Lane Bruner
9. Re-Forming Class: Wealth, Culture, and Identity in South Africa; Lisa Nell
10. Whiteness as Currency: Rethinking the Exchange Rate; Emily M. Drew
11. Dying with Class: Race, Religion, and the Commodification of a Good Death; Ann Neumann
12. New Materialisms and Digital Culture: Productive Labor and the Software Wars; Ted Kafala
13. Feminist Theory and the Critique of Class; Robin Truth Goodman
14. Criminal Class; Eric Anthamatten
15. Consuming Class: Identity & Power through the Commodification of Bourgeois Culture, Celebrity, and Glamour; Raúl Rubio
16. When Prosperity Is Built on Poverty, There Can Be No Foundation for Peace, as Poverty and Peace Don't Stand Hand in Hand; Pepi Leistyna
17. Solon the Athenian and the Origins of Class Struggle; Thomas Thorp
18. Memories of Class and Youth in the Age of Disposability; Henry A. Giroux