current reading

I'm midway through the following:

• Nedra Reynolds, Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. I'm late getting to this superb analysis of writing as a spatial process. Reynolds: "identities take root from particular sociogeographical intersections, reflecting where a person comes from and, to some extent, where she is allowed to go." I'm revising for jac an article on intersectionality and identity politics and Reynolds' book is helpful, to say the least, for moving from studies of 'place' to studying 'persons-in-a-place.' Rhetorics of place often critique (rightly) "identity" to the detriment, I believe, of the possibility of understanding intersections.
• Julie Lindquist, A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar. I'm re-reading this because I'm teaching Lindquist's ethnography in my honors course, the first time using her book in an undergraduate class. We start discussing Place to Stand this evening and I'm hoping for great things, as Lindquist pulls together threads we've been weaving: the heterogeneity of working-class politics, politics as identity marker/the use of politics as euphemism for (too illusive) working-class identity.
• Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. In preparation for this coming weekend's trip down to the march on the SOA in Georgia, the Army's training facility for international military leaders and assassins. Sobering and disturbing reading.
• Paul Loeb, The Soul of a Citizen. This is also a kind of a pre-protest reading for me. I never heard of Loeb's book but a colleague lent it to me last week after reading my 'Writing as Civic Engagement' course proposal (hopefully on the books next fall). Sometimes Loeb's guilty of a kind-of liberal move where he attempts to naturalize all his own civic commitments as common-sensical. That rhetorical move always bugs me, but, still, Loeb offers an engaging 'rhetoric' of community-building to combat disengagement from the political process.
• Jeffrey Eugendies, Middlesex: A Novel. Cool Detroit novel that's taking me forever to read. (Not a reflection on the book but rather 1) my tendency to start a hundred things at once, and 2) my addiction to Ugly Betty, Lost, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.)