Economic Injustice Research Articles

The Case of Dwelling Narrowness

This paper illustrates the process of class formation depicted in and through the popular 2009 television drama series Dwelling Narrowness against the backdrop of spectacular accumulation in neo-liberalising urban China. The article points out the lines of tension and affinity that are emerging out of the processes of class formation inside China’s “society of spectacle”: the divide between the aspiring middle class and the working class, and the alliance between the urban middle class, the ruling political class, as well as the domestic and transnational capitalist classes. On the one hand, one witnesses a reified class interests-based hegemonic unity of party-state power holders, domestic private capitalists and transnational capitalists, and the emerging middle class. On the other hand, profound economic divisions and social injustices continue to arouse resistance amongst the working class, which are largely mediated by the Chinese state’s socialist ideological legacies.

An Expenditure Saved Is an Expenditure Earned: Fanny Fern's Humoring of the Capitalist Ethos

Among the many ridiculous characters in Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time, the heroine's mother-in-law, Mrs. Hall, stands out as the most comical with her supply of unhelpful cliches and suggestions. One of her sayings in particular, Waste want not, taken from Benjamin Franklin, sums up her role as one of the many spokespeople for economy in Ruth Hall (31). In this role, she complains that her new daughter-in-law's frilly underwear and silk stockings reveal a profound disregard for economy, and even suggests that Ruth apply something to straighten her curls because one should avoid everything that looks frivolous (30-31). Her husband, Dr. Hall, counts the pieces of firewood the servant uses each night and spends his dinner hour [narrating] the market prices he paid for each article of food upon the table (36, 38). Dr. and Mrs. Hall betray a trait common in the novel's abundant stereotypical characters: Although they stand in the privileged position to spend, they compulsively save at the cost of everyone around them. During the brief phase in the novel when the heroine, Ruth, is married and financially supported, these characters serve as comical nuisances that cause familial tension; however, when Ruth's husband dies and leaves her penniless, these characters threaten to deprive the widow and her children of their basic necessities. The satirized stereotypes of Ruth Hall are powerful figures who blame Ruth's financial hardships and their refusal to help her on her lack of economy. Old Mrs. Hall's Waste want not becomes a motto through which the empowered attribute poverty to sufferers' thriftlessness and thereby absolve themselves of responsibility (87). In contradistinction to these cliched characters with their secure cultural positions, Ruth Hall must make her own way through nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. The novel's title pays tribute to her singularity amid the generic masses. As ambassadors of acquisition and conservation, old Mrs. Hall and her fellow economizers are finally laughed off once Ruth learns how to negotiate the financial world herself. Ruth Hall's heroine-turned-capitalist negotiates a comfortable position for herself and her daughters. Even as the novel resolves economic injustices thematically, its techniques of humor express the cultural pressures that these now-marginalized characters represent--namely, the pressure to save time and energy. (1) Drawing on Sigmund Freud's The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trace how Ruth Hall's comical stereotypes and wordplay enable readers to save the exertion required to understand new characters or ideas, to pursue a chain of reasoning, or to feel a certain way. However, rather than helping the reader accrue and conserve capital--the motivation for saving that the elder Halls and the novel's plot resolution ultimately endorse--the savings of the comical are expended in laughter. Through this process, Fern renders the comic a space of resistance by way of its overt, nonproductive consumption of energy. This technique aligns the novel's comical episodes with its sentimental passages: Both modes of writing solicit audience expenditures, one in the form of laughter and the other in the form of affect. Paving the way for the techniques of the comic, Ruth Hall's preface justifies formal choices through a socioeconomic concern for efficiency. Fern writes: I have compressed into one volume what might have expanded into two or three. have avoided long introductions and descriptions, and have entered unceremoniously and unannounced, into people's houses, without stopping to ring the bell (iii). Thus, even before introducing characters who enforce thriftiness, Fern reveals that saving time and space motivates the narrative. With chapters that are often the length of newspaper sketches--the form through which the heroine will build her own capital--the narrative frequently lets the information exchanged in conversation drive the plot forward without reiteration or explanation. …

Bernice Lott: Award for Distinguished Senior Career Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest.

Presents a short biography of the winner of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Senior Career Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. The 2012 winner is Bernice Lott. Lott's commitment to the public interest has always guided her career, as her groundbreaking research on gender, ethnicity, and race demonstrates. Her leadership on issues of economic injustice paved the way for attention to little-explored dimensions of psychology's social justice agenda: classism and poverty. She was a catalyst for APA initiatives such as the Resolution on Poverty and Socioeconomic Status, and she was instrumental in the establishment of APA's Committee on Socioeconomic Status. Thanks to Lott's vision, APA has a formal structure that institutionalizes poverty-related work as well as a brilliant body of scholarship to inform those efforts. Lott's Award citation and a selected bibliography are also presented.

Ernest Poole's The Harbor as a Source for O'Neill's The Hairy Ape

Ernest Poole's <i>The Harbor</i> as a Source for O'Neill's <i>The Hairy Ape</i>

Social justice and critical peace education: Common ideals guiding student teacher transformation

The primary objective of this paper is to report on two teacher educators’ development and assessment of a framework and workshop to introduce student teachers to social justice and peace education ideals within the domains of teachers’ work during student teachers’ first full-time experience of teaching in diverse schools in a major city in the Pacific region. The framework builds from a critical re-constructionist perspective and aims to raise student teachers’ critical consciousness of social and economic injustice, human rights, and defects in schooling and inspire a resolve to act on them to promote social justice (Bajaj 2008). Adopting an action research methodology, the authors/instructors assessed student teachers’ perceptions of their learning after a two-hour workshop that introduced a social justice and peace education framework. Secondary student teachers participated in workshops in two consecutive years. Student teachers reported positive outcomes from the workshop in Likert scale responses and open-ended remarks. The authors concluded that the workshop and framework over the two years offered effective guidance to student teachers in developing an initial understanding of social justice education and an openness to actively contributing toward making their classrooms and schools more just in the future. To continue to promote student teachers’ reflection and action to higher levels, the authors began efforts to infuse the seminar curriculum with social justice and peace education.

Re-Reading the Prophets through Corporate Globalization: A Cultural-Evolutionary Approach to Economic Injustice in the Hebrew Bible, by Matthew .J M. Coomber

Re-Reading the Prophets through Corporate Globalization: A Cultural-Evolutionary Approach to Economic Injustice in the Hebrew Bible, by Matthew .J M. Coomber

Religious Peace-building in South Africa: From Potential to Practice

While post-conflict peace-building is a much-researched topic, the potential of religious actors to contribute to the process remains underexplored. This article examines this neglected dimension of peace-building through a particular focus on South Africa and its Christian churches. Emphasizing the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’, it contrasts the negative role that many churches played during the apartheid years with some of the very valuable peace-building work that is taking place today—particularly the empowering of communities, the development of antiviolence strategies and psycho-social healing. Arguing, however, that much of this work is often undertaken in a very compartmentalized way, it advocates a more holistic approach to peace-building that reaches across racial and class divides. It also emphasizes that for religious peace-building to achieve its full potential, South African society must address pervasive structural violence; there can be no reconciliation in the face of massive economic injustice and inequality. This research is based on 6 weeks of fieldwork in South Africa and semistructured interviews with various religious actors.

Build a Bridge Out of Her

This poem uses the structure, aesthetics, and meanings of bridges to engage contemporary political and ethical challenges, including war and economic injustice.

Migrant Rights in an Era of Globalization

Global economic policies have augmented profits for a few people, while exacerbating inequalities for large segments of the world's population. These growing inequalities reach U.S. cities in the form of unauthorized migration, as uprooted farmers and dislocated workers migrate as a survival strategy. Similar to other periods of history in which immigrants have been subjected to social and economic injustice, the social work profession is called to live up to its mission and values and advocate for new policies that honor our tradition as a country of immigrants and uphold the profession's commitment to family unity, community well-being, and human rights.

Is prophetic discourse adequate to address global economic justice?

This article outlined key features of prophetic discourse and investigated whether this form of moral discourse adequately addresses issues of economic injustice. It is shown that the strength of prophetic discourse is its ability to denounce instances of injustice whilst at the same time announcing a God-willed alternative future. The ‘preferential option for the poor’ in Latin American liberation theologies is treated as a case study of the influence of prophetic discourse in contexts of perceived economic injustice. Also the core weaknesses of prophetic discourse are investigated, specifically its incomplete moral argument, weak moral analyses, silence on transition measures, and its inability to take a positive stance on reforms in the system from which itself benefits. In the final section it is concluded that prophetic discourse plays an indispensable role in addressing issues of global economic justice, but – taken by itself – it is not an adequate form of moral discourse to address concrete matters of justice.

Signs of the Times: Religious Pluralism and Economic Injustice – By Gregory Baum

Signs of the Times: Religious Pluralism and Economic Injustice – By Gregory Baum

With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (review)

Reviewed by: With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry Lewis Glinert With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry, edited by Tal Nitzan and Rachel Tzvia Back. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. 169 pp. $14.95. Hebrew protest poetry has a long track record. Political and social protest was at the top of the Biblical prophets' and psalmists' job description and frequently came close to costing them their lives, as they had no fear of criticizing their own. On occasion, the poets even took on the Almighty: "Why dost Thou forsake us for eternity?" concludes the author of Lamentations. Many of these notes echoed down the ages. Ephraim of Regensburg, David bar Meshullam of Speyer, and other Ashkenazi elegists turned all their fury on the Crusader enemy—and in The Martyrs of Blois, Barukh of Magenza hurled protests at God himself. It was with this kind of poetry ringing in his ears that Bialik, in On the Slaughter (following the Kishinev pogrom), famously intoned: "Let heaven rot with eternal evil." Social protest verse stretches all the way from Ibn Gabirol's On Leaving Saragossa to Gordon's feminist tour de force Kotzo shel Yud (1878). Israeli authors have not lacked what to critique—ethnic and [End Page 179] religious grievances, economic injustice, a hostile World. But, until recently, they have protested in prose. The Modern Hebrew poem became the domain of the lyrical, the personal, the symbolic. Often, admittedly, poets had Jewish destiny or the Jewish State in mind—but there was clearly a strong aversion to the rhetoric or preaching stance that had been a keynote of Victorian-Bieder-meyer-Haskalah poetry. This all changed briefly in the 1970s and 1980s. The reasons were many and varied: the rise of the Israeli Right, controversial wars, the siren songs of Ginsberg, Dylan, Theodorakis. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War and the Israeli offensive in Lebanon, Israeli poets mounted the verbal barricades. Reuven Ben-Yosef 's Voices on the Golan (1976) and the 1983 anthologies No End to Casualties and Killing and Border Crossing by Ron & Hever and Yehudit Kafri, respectively, took aim at the entire Zionist system, the Israeli public and the private soldier included. However, the better poets soon retreated from the barricades, leaving them to songwriters and lesser versifiers. As Esther Raizen shows in her masterly introduction to her anthology of Israeli war poetry, No Rattling of Sabers (Austin, 1995), and confirmed by Harvey Shapiro's Poets of World War Two (New York, 2003), war poetry has produced many works of value, often distinguished by quiet strength and simple words. Political protest poetry, however, does not commonly make significant poetry. Feelings are too blunt and strident, time too pressing; the nuance and reflection, the tightness and creativity that our modern post-Victorian aesthetic has come to expect are not easily found in political poetry. With an Iron Pen fails on many counts. The subtitle notwithstanding (Twenty Years Of Hebrew Protest Poetry), this hardly does justice to Israeli protest—I could find just one treatment of poverty. Rather, this is, to quote the jacket, "a collective protest to [sic] the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Palestinian territories." But as poetry, it is largely pontification or cliché. Some accomplished poets do appear, mixed in with lesser names, but as the later Wordsworth and Hugo sadly showed, good poets can write lousy verse. As scholarship, the volume editors Tal Nitzan and Rachel Tzvia Back have short-changed us. The brief introduction adds up to a political rant, some hype for the book, and a few shallow generalizations about the poems themselves. A serious consideration of these poems would have problematized the remarkable absence of dilemmas of war. Sensitivity or reflection are in short supply. (Bejerano's Stripes of Light on the Wall and Ronen's Curfew, Variation #5 are notable exceptions.) We find no representation of Arab hostility, let alone enemy terror (where is Agi Mishol's Shahida, exploring a suicide bomber as a person with a narrative?), and no room for Jewish memory or values or [End Page 180] links to the Holy Land—save as ironized...

Caught in the Crossfire? Economic Injustice and Prophetic Motivation in Eighth-Century Judah

Prophetic complaints against landownership abuse that are attributed to eighth-century Judah pose an interpretive problem: their contextual ambiguity. Passages like as Isa. 5.8-10 decry land seizures but lack key socio-economic variables: motivations and the identities of perpetrators and victims. Faced with scarce archaeological and biblical evidence pertaining to landownership in the eighth century, several scholars have turned to the social sciences for clues. Marvin Chaney and D.N. Premnath have found interpretive value in cultural-evolutionary theory. Cultural-evolutionary theorists, like Gerhard Lenski and Timothy Earle, find that recurring patterns tend to emerge as agrarian societies experience rapid economic development and increased trade, including an abandonment of subsistence strategies, land consolidation, and a hoarding of the benefits amongst elites. While Chaney and Premnath have successfully used this model to explore economic abuses attributed to eighth-century Judah, when the region was absorbed into the Assyrian trade nexus, the effects of these recurring societal patterns on religious institutions have yet to be explored by biblical scholars. Religious practices and norms that support outmoded economic strategies tend to be overturned during these transitional periods to accommodate new economic goals. While some religious leaders are forced to choose between either honouring long-held traditions or capitulating to a new economic environment, others find that their place in society is rendered obsolete. Through considering these cultural-evolutionary patterns alongside Hezekiah’s religious reforms, this paper explores the possibility that prophetic authors who condemned the displacement of farmers may have also been protesting their own displacement in an evolving Judean society.

The Grace of Good Food and the Call to Good Farming

This essay argues that a good and faithful agriculture, and the healthy eating practices made possible by it, should play a vital role in the healing of creation. The interconnectedness of ecological problems means that if we get our eating right, much other environmental good will follow. What good eating and good agriculture look like are developed in terms of God's own example as the One who plants and gardens the world. Today's industrial agriculture and our culture's obsession with cheap and convenient food are shown to lie behind much of the world's degradation and economic injustice. I suggest that Christians can play an important role in the healing and celebration of creation by participating in God's caring, gardening ways with the world, and that we can do this most effectively in the eating we choose to do. Churches should take a leading role in the promotion of a God-honoring agriculture and in the advocacy of economic and political priorities that serve the well being of all creation's eaters.

Identity Politics and the Fragmenting of the 1970s Evangelical Left

AbstractIn the early 1970s, a group of progressive evangelicals challenged the mid-century cultural conservatism of their tradition. Activists associated with Reformed, Anabaptist, and neo-evangelical institutions denounced militarism, racism, sexism, economic injustice, and President Richard Nixon's “lust for and abuse of power.” When this coalition met in 1973 to issue the Chicago Declaration, delegates effused a profound sense of optimism. The evangelical left held very real potential for political impact.Within a decade, however, the movement seemed to be in disarray. This article suggests the centrality of identity politics to evangelicalism in the 1970s and outlines the fragmentation of the progressive evangelical coalition along gender, racial, and theological lines. The formation of the Evangelical Women's Caucus, the growing stridency of the National Black Evangelical Association, and the divergence of Anabaptist-oriented Evangelicals for Social Action and the Reformed-oriented Association for Public Justice sapped the evangelical left of needed resources and contributed to its impotence into the 1980s. The forces of identity politics, which also plagued the broader political left, were powerful enough to sabotage even a group of evangelicals with remarkably similar theological convictions, religious cultures, and critiques of conservative politics. The story of the fragmenting evangelical left, however, reflects more than broader culture's preoccupation with identity. It points to often-overlooked religious elements of the broader left. And alongside the New Left and the New Right, the evangelical left's debates over racial, sexual, and theological difference added to the disruptions of the liberal consensus in the 1960s and 1970s.

Developing Contemporary Marxian Theory and Practice – a Role for Trotsky?: Saccarelli’s Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism

Developing Contemporary Marxian Theory and Practice – a Role for Trotsky?: Saccarelli’s Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism Jacinda Swanson (bio) Emanuele Saccarelli. Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition. Routledge: 2007. $39.95 (paper) $105.00 (cloth). 312 pages. ISBN-10: 041587338X In light of the severe economic crises and injustices associated with capitalism, Emanuele Saccarelli is to be applauded for his efforts to contribute to Marxian theory and struggle in his book Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism.1 As Saccarelli complains, Trotsky has been ignored within political theory and political science—although Gramsci and Marxian theory have barely any more of a presence than Trotsky within political science in the United States. Given the lack of serious, widespread concern about economic issues and the paucity of interest in radical economic change within political theory and political science, it is heartening to come across such a book. I also welcome and share Saccarelli’s criticisms of the pressures to conduct research that is (supposedly) neutral and objective and the tendency of so many scholars to ignore contemporary political crises. Despite my appreciation for these aspects of his book, in this essay I would like to raise a variety of concerns about its focus on criticizing Stalinism, its approach to evaluating theorists and to political theory as a practice, and its brevity concerning several of Trotsky’s political and economic ideas. Positivism and Politics Like Saccarelli, I wish more political theorists would explicitly acknowledge their political commitments and “biases” and pursue research that forthrightly stems from them,2 even if they are conservative or classically liberal—at least the bases and goals of their research would then be obvious. More generally, I wish more political scientists, economists, and other academics would candidly acknowledge and examine their own ethical, epistemological, and ontological assumptions and their political and economic consequences. Of course the pressures to be neutral and the tendency not to acknowledge such assumptions stem from many scholars’ positivist epistemology and/or belief in the obviousness of their conventional ethical and ontological assumptions. I have increasingly come to believe that the widespread acceptance of positivist epistemologies among both academics and regular citizens constitutes a major barrier to emancipatory social change. By treating theory (e.g., economic theory) and facts as singular and neutral, those adopting positivist epistemologies are blinded to the partiality, contingency, and thus political nature of their assumptions and arguments. Injustices may be rendered invisible or treated as inevitable and the possibilities for social change obscured, depending on the social explanations and facts a citizen or researcher employs. As long as scholars and citizens deny the historically and socially constructed and multiple nature of knowledges/discourses, they will continue to deny the controversial nature of some of their assumptions and the non-neutral, sometimes oppressive, effects of their arguments. Epistemology is consequently not an arcane academic issue, but has real political consequences, as scholars from a variety of traditions have argued.3 For instance, because positivist discourses that naturalize and/or justify the economic status quo (e.g., neoclassical economics) deny the possibility of alternative economic practices and view alternative economic knowledges (e.g., Marxian theory) as false, the struggle against economic injustice is also epistemological. Leftists therefore need to vigorously criticize positivism inside and outside academia, including within Leftist circles. Saccarelli’s Aims It seems to me that Saccarelli is overly ambitious in what he claims his book does. Namely, I do not believe the book contributes to the “revitalization”—what I would instead call the continued development—of Marxism nearly as much as Saccarelli suggests. This does not in any way undermine or lessen the scholarly contribution the book does make, but it is important to be clear about what the book does and does not do. As I understand it, the book has two primary aims: (1) to demonstrate, in light of his exclusion from the political theory canon, Trotsky’s political insights and consequently how his ideas can contribute to the revitalization of Marxism; (2) to show how Trotsky properly criticized Stalin, whereas Gramsci fell short in this respect, and why Trotsky...

Capitalism Disguised as Democracy: A Theory of “Belonging,” Not Belongings, in the New South Africa

Exploring the relationship between capitalism and the discourse of multicultural democracy that animates the New South Africa's notion of itself as Rainbow Nation, this article attempts to understand why it is impossible for politically progressive postapartheid South African fiction, centrally concerned with social justice, to launch an effective critique of neoliberal capitalism in present day South Africa. Because South Africa's entry onto the global stage in 1994 was conditioned by the pivotal moment of globalization in which its Rainbow Nation democracy was forged, I argue that close readings of three texts—the 1955 Freedom Charter, which formed the basis of the New South African constitution; Phaswane Mpe's 2001 novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow; and the 2006 film Catch a Fire—shed light on globalization as a political-economic-cultural strategy. I suggest that Rainbow Nation democracy enables a sense of metaphorical “belonging” to the nation but not a material redistribution of national belongings in the concrete sense of possessions, private property, and land. Neoliberal globalization working through Rainbow Nation ideology performs a deft, dangerous conflation of capitalism with democracy that serves to further legitimize the persistence of economic injustice, and this conflation has wide reaching consequences for all (aspiring) democracies.

Amos Economics

A major ethical focus of Amos is the issue of economic injustice. The book depicts a situation in Israel of political stability and material prosperity. The wealth of the nation, however, was accumulated in the hands of a few, while the majority of the population lived in desperate poverty. The wealthy not only consumed excessive amounts but also oppressed the poor by exacting from them what little they had. The economic abuse of the underprivileged originated in debt slavery, harsh taxation, extortion in the marketplace, and injustices in the courts. As a result of these abusive practices, the elite lived in luxurious leisure, with no concern for the suffering of the poor. Amos condemned the economic injustices of the land with some of the harshest rhetoric in the Old Testament canon, threatening the utter devastation of the nation. The book of Amos is remarkably relevant for our culture, especially in the current economic malaise. Today the ranks of the poor are growing dramatically, while the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. In such a climate, the church has a solemn responsibility to guard against wanton consumerism, alleviate the suffering of the poor, and combat abusive economic structures.

Something Totally Unpredictable

The Art Journal Award, CAA's annual prize for the best article published in the magazine, has been awarded to the current issue's feature on Land art, a group of essays collected and introduced by Kirsten Swenson. It is interesting that the Land art projects discussed by Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott eschew the extremely long view taken by Land artists in the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and other Land artists looked back into prehistory, imagining a epochal stretch so long and slow that it hardly moved, so vast that human civilization was just a flicker within its expanse. The more recent generation considered here focuses on a shorter-term history, directly or obliquely addressing modern life's interaction with nature: airports and the evacuation of rural America, economic injustice in communities along the highway, global tourism and utopia in rural Thailand. Santiago Sierra's Submission, discussed in a separate essay by Kelly Baum, attacks power relationships at the US-Mexican border. Geopolitical reality similarly implodes in Fabian Marcaccio's DIY black hole-dollar sculpture.

Huellas ignotas: Antolog�a de cuentistas centroamericanas (1890-1990) (review)

Reviewed by: Huellas ignotas: Antología de cuentistas centroamericanas (1890-1990) Edward Hood Muñoz, Willy O. Huellas ignotas: Antología de cuentistas centroamericanas (1890-1990). Vol. 1. San José, Costa Rica: EUNED, 2009. Pp. 566. ISBN 978-9968-31-683-5. Muñoz brings together some of the best short stories by Central American women writers for the two volumes of this critical anthology, a collection which follows several individual, national anthologies he has prepared of Costa Rican, Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadoran short stories by female authors. Volume 1 includes texts written between 1890 and 1990 by a diverse group of forty-two writers; volume 2, which is not under consideration here, takes account of short stories produced between 1991 and 2005. Muñoz has arranged his anthology chronologically, by the year of publication of each of the stories he considers to be important and representative of tendencies in Central American women's writing. The title of the collection refers to the anthologist's interest in recovering lost and marginalized female voices and to contribute toward recognizing their place and importance within Central American letters. Muñoz's anthology reflects and is the fruit of a growing interest in this field. Significant research on the region's literature, including the study of its female writers, has emerged during the past two decades, thanks in part to the annual gatherings of the Congreso Internacional de Literatura Centroamericana (CILCA), which have brought together scholars and writers from Central America and around the world, and to venues like the online journal Istmo, which publishes recent research on Central American literature. In his introduction, Muñoz discusses the marginalization of female writers from the literary history of the region and argues that in several cases women have been precursors of literary traditions dominated by male writers. For example, he points out that the theme of imperialism present in the Salvadoran Rafaela Contreras de Darío's exotic short story "Mira la oriental o la mujer de cristal" (1890) predates her famous husband's preoccupation with the territorial ambitions of the United States. He also notes that Berta María Feo of Costa Rica contributed to interest in the psychological short story and that her compatriot Yolanda Oreamuno's writings hastened the abandonment of costumbrismo within Costa Rican literature. [End Page 708] Muñoz has achieved a nice balance of writers born in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and several significant ones born outside the region, including the Salvadoran writer Leda Falconio, who was born in Italy, and Costa Rican writers Tatiana Lobo and Linda Berrón, who were born in Chile and Spain respectively. He has provided brief literary biographies in which he highlights the creative accomplishments of the authors he has selected for inclusion in the anthology. He also contextualizes and discusses the significance of each text. With respect to the themes of the stories of this collection, Muñoz stresses the interest of these writers in the unequal relationship between men and women, as well as their concern for the social, economic, and political issues Central Americans have faced throughout their history. He observes that the negative impact of US military involvement in the region's conflicts has also strongly shaped the perspectives of Central American female authors. He notes that in addressing these themes, women writers have utilized humor and irony as a strategy to assuage the pain of stark social and political realities. Finally, he points out that there has been a growing interest in the themes of eroticism, along with racial and sexual identity, and that writers have employed a wide variety of innovative narrative strategies and styles to incorporate them in their stories. Although there is insufficient space here to comment on all the stories, several stand out for their quality and their presentation of the themes Muñoz discusses in his introduction. The unequal relationship between men and women is found in Costa Rican writer Carmen Lyra's "Estefanía " (1931), which treats the economic injustice and physical abuse faced by poor women. In Linda Berrón's "Al parecer un mendigo" (1989), a beggar narrates his harsh life and downward spiral...