A book about struggles for social change in the Muslim Middle East, mostly focused on Iran and Egypt but with scattered references to other countries as well. The first edition was written not long before the Arab Spring and laid out an analysis that didn’t quite predict the uprising but that described dynamic circumstances allowing …
A book concerned with “positioning sound and its discourses in dialogue with contemporary struggles,” that attempts to seek out “ethical and agentive positions or tactics” grounded in “experiences we have of listening and being heard” (1). It does this by drawing on the scholarly area of sound studies and a range of other theoretical resources, …
A look at the ways in which, in Western societies, binaries organize our thinking and our lives, and at ways we can navigate and perhaps at moments move beyond them. Clever and very accessible, though not without its limitations. I’ve read two books by one of the authors (Barker) before, one focused on relationships and …
Essays about schizophrenia and related conditions. Written by a multiple-award winning author (and highly skilled essayist) with a schizoaffective disorder diagnosis. Draws heavily on memoir, of course. Intense, powerful, honest, sometimes hard to read, occasionally funny, and very well written. I can imagine it would be a topic where it would be easy to overdo …
Memoir shading into dream, everyday life into imagination that reveals truths as it goes beyond fact. Meditations that are melancholy, even bleak, with age and the looming deaths of friends and the state of America in 2016, but that are also, through their weariness, curious and playful and fully engaged with life. I love Smith’s …
A very thoughtful, very well-written book by an artist who lives in California’s Bay Area. A self-proclaimed “field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy” (xi) that is “not anti-technology” but that is “obviously anti-capiatlist” (xii). A book about why we might want to resist the latest generation …
[James C. Scott. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.] A classic from a political scientist of anarchist proclivities doing what amounts to anthropology and studying the fine-grained class relations in a peasant village in Malaysia in the late ’70s and early ’80s, in the …
[Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2009.] A Black feminist classic, and deservedly so. An effort by one of the most prominent Black feminist sociologists in the US to create a sort of overview and synthesis of the rich and varied Black feminist tradition in …
A book with some useful and important ideas, but one I was not as able to like as I’d hoped. It sets out to demonstrate that everyday resistance has been historically pervasive and crucial to successful struggle, and to argue that movements in North America today need to do more to understand how everyday resistance …
This is an eclectic collection “written and gathered” (as the author credit puts it) by organizer, facilitator, and writer adrienne maree brown. It contains many, many different kinds of pieces – both newly written and older re-published work by brown herself; pieces by other people, and pieces where other people are in dialogue with her; …