March 4, 2008
Three makes thirty for Celebrating Scholarship
Clarence Lusane (Photo by Jeff Watts)
Three faculty authors from three AU schools told the stories behind their books last Thursday, during the library’s 30th Celebrating Scholarship program.
Professors Clarence Lusane, School of International Service; Celine-Marie Pascale, College of Arts and Sciences; and Richard Stack, School of Communication; each also paused to sign a book copy that will be placed in the library’s special collections alongside the 92 works previously honored by the unique library program.
“It’s one thing to receive recognition from outsiders, it’s another thing to receive it from within the family—and this is very much within the family,” said Lusane, who was honored for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century.
Lusane’s 2006 book began with an e-mail simply worded: “Would you like to write a book?” that he received from a British publisher while on sabbatical in the United Kingdom. The publisher, who was working on a series about influential African American political leaders, initially pitched a book about the Rev. Al Sharpton, to which Lusane countered: “How about a book about Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell?” The publisher replied, ‘No, this is supposed to be about politically significant black leaders,’” recalled Lusane, as the audience of about 50 people erupted in laughter.
“This initiated a two-hour conversation, after which I finally convinced him that, yes, they’re both black and they’re politically significant,” chuckled Lusane, who’s now researching efforts on another influential African American leader, Barack Obama.
First-time author and sociology professor Pascale described the irony in the fact that her new book is about commonsense, after growing up in a family that chided her for having none.
Clarence Lusane, Celine-Marie Pascale, and Richard Stack (Photo by Jeff Watts)
Pascale, who came to AU in 2003 from the University of California at Santa Cruz, described seven years of intensive research that led to the 2006 release of Making Sense of Race, Class, and Gender: Commonsense, Power, and Privilege in the United States. Her analysis—based on in-depth interviews with 23 people that generated 1,600 pages of transcripts; a review of 413 news stories written over a 15 year span; and the viewing of 180 hours of TV programming, including news and legal shows—proffers that race, class, gender, and sexuality are culturally produced as matters of commonsense.
Pascale told the gathering how that research sparked the idea for her next book, Cartographies of Knowledge, which examines the assumptions academics bring to qualitative research methods. It is slated for release in 2009.
SOC’s Stack was inspired to write Dead Wrong: Violence, Vengeance, and the Victims of Capital Punishment by the film Dead Man Walking. He recalled seeing the film with his wife one Valentine’s Day, (“Very romantic,” he laughed) and going straight from the theatre to the bookstore to pick up a copy of Sister Helen Prejean’s 1994 work.
“One of the footnotes led me to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty,” he said. “I met with the director and said, ‘I don’t know what I can do for you, but I’m sure there’s something.’”
After combing through the organization’s materials, Stack found two groups within the anti-death penalty coalition “who are very powerful, yet have no voice—the exonerated and a group called Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.” Those groups became Stack’s focus.
The stories of the wrongly convicted is “the meat of the book,” he said, while a section penned by Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation adds the “the exclamation mark,” for the argument against the death penalty.
