Author: Sonja Thomas File Type: pdf Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-, race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing on Syrian Christian women, Sonja Thomas explores how this community illuminates larger questions of multiple oppressions, privilege and subordination, racialization, and religion and secularism in India. In Privileged Minorities, Thomas examines a wide range of sources, including oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and legislative assembly debates, to interrogate the relationships between religious rights and womens rights in Kerala. Using an intersectional approach, and US women of color feminist theory, she demonstrates the ways that race, caste, gender, religion, and politics are inextricably intertwined, with power and privilege working in complex and nuanced ways. By attending to the ways in which inequalities within groups shape very different experiences of religious and political movements in feminist and rights-based activism, Thomas lays the groundwork for imagining new feminist solidarities across religions, castes, races, and classes. **Review In her study of power and patriarchy in Kerala, Thomas expertly weaves caste, race, and religion into her analysis, attending closely to the roles that denominational myths, histories, and politics play in the formation of Keralas gender dynamics.Corinne Dempsey, author of Kerala Christian Sainthood Collisions of Culture and Worldview in South India Sheds light on the complex dynamics of majority minority populations in India through an intersectional feminist analysis of Syrian Christianity in Kerala.Meena Khandelwal, author of Women in Ochre Robes Gendering Hindu Renunciation Till now there has been little scholarly analysis of a minority within the minority. Sonja Thomas breaks new ground by illuminating both the privileges that Syrian Christian women enjoy and the subjugation they experience, reflecting on the implications of their complex identities for feminist theory and activism.Amrita Basu, Paino Professor of Political Science and Sexuality, Womens, and Gender Studies, Amherst College About the Author Sonja Thomas is assistant professor of womens, gender, and sexuality studies at Colby College.

Author: Gordon Lafer File Type: pdf In the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens United decision, its become commonplace to note the growing political dominance of a small segment of the economic elite. But what exactly are those members of the elite doing with their newfound influence? The One Percent Solution provides an answer to this question for the first time. Gordon Lafers book is a comprehensive account of legislation promoted by the nations biggest corporate lobbies across all fifty state legislatures and encompassing a wide range of labor and economic policies. In an era of growing economic insecurity, it turns out that one of the main reasons life is becoming harder for American workers is a relentlessand concertedoffensive by the countrys best-funded and most powerful political forces corporate lobbies empowered by the Supreme Court to influence legislative outcomes with an endless supply of cash. These actors have successfully championed hundreds of new laws that lower wages, eliminate paid sick leave, undo the right to sue over job discrimination, and cut essential public services. Lafer shows how corporate strategies have been shaped by twenty-first-century conditionsincluding globalization, economic decline, and the populism reflected in both the Trump and Sanders campaigns of 2016. Perhaps most important, Lafer shows that the corporate legislative agenda has come to endanger the scope of democracy itself. For anyone who wants to know what to expect from corporate-backed Republican leadership in Washington, D.C., there is no better guide than this record of what the same set of actors has been doing in the state legislatures under its control. **