[DOWNLOAD] "Cooperation in the Face of Defection: The Prisoner's Dilemma in Invisible Man." by Nebula ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Cooperation in the Face of Defection: The Prisoner's Dilemma in Invisible Man.
- Author : Nebula
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 365 KB
Description
The death of Rosa Parks on October 24, 2005 reminded us that the 1950s were not just the post-war calm before the anti-war storm of the 1960s. As Morris Dickstein writes, "In the standard views of American culture after the war, and especially of the 1950s, the arts and intellectual life turned deeply conservative, reflecting the imperatives of the cold war, the migration to the suburbs, the new domesticity, and the rise of McCarthyism" (125). Of course, the Brown v Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954, the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, not to mention the 381-day Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott initiated by Parks's refusal to relinquish her seat, are just a few of the events that combine to signal a sociopolitical turbulence that did not require the zeal of a petty junior senator from Wisconsin for their lasting historical significance. The memorializing of Parks, the first woman and only the second African American ever to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, signifies how much things have changed since the day of her protest, but also suggests how complicated the questions remain around the issues that inspired her to stay seated on December 1, 1955 when asked by a white man to take her ostensibly proper place at the back. Published in 1952, and awarded the National Book Award in 1953, Invisible Man is very much a novel of the 1950s. (1) African Americans returning from Europe with the belief that their service abroad would result in improved treatment at "home," instead encountered "all those acts, legal, emotional, economic and political, which we label Jim Crow," (2) as Ellison writes in his 1949 essay, "The Shadow and the Act." The elaborate complex of subtle and overt rules that comprised Jim Crow put great pressure on the everyday decisions made by African American citizens. One form this pressure took was the knowledge that the results of one's own decisions would necessarily be qualified, perhaps even nullified, by decisions made by those in positions of power, whether official power, or merely power based on the caprice of skin colour. The prisoner's dilemma, a fascinating game theory model for analyzing how one's decisions affect oneself as well as the wellbeing of someone else, emerges from the 1950s and enables an analysis of the signal event in the life of Ellison's narrator, (3) his expulsion from college.