History. Published 25 years ago, this is an early book by a prominent historian of US social movements. Examines everyday resistance and/or cultural politics and their interface with more formal social movements in a number of African American contexts across the 20th century, from everyday struggles on public transit in Birmingham under Jim Crow, to African American participation in the Spanish Civil war, to the politics of early gangsta rap, and lots more. Definitely very useful for my own current task of thinking through how to write about everyday resistance and more deliberate and collective modes of resistance, and the ways those scales can be and are in relation to one another. I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago that really reminded me of the ways in which, today, a certain subset of progressive academics and left activists sometimes deploy a romanticized notion of everyday resistance that is abstracted and mostly read in a symbolic register, and detached at least to an extent from the lived urgency of actually winning changes in material conditions – a tendency that seems both very neoliberal in its individualization of resistance, and the product of an era where left victories are few and far between so there is an (understandable) emotional need to find hints of possibility wherever we can. This book is a good antidote to that tendency. Yes, it focuses on everyday resistance and cultural politics, and on the ways that these really can be part of forcing material changes both in conditions of oppression and in the ways that more formalized collective movements themselves not infrequently exist at a bit of a remove from the everyday lives of the most marginalized. But it stays grounded and does not romanticize…though interestingly, in an Afterword written a few years after the book first came out, Kelley was already complaining about how people were reading “naive optimism” about everyday resistance as “superior modes of resistance for all times and all places” into the book when it is so clearly “as much about losing battles as it is about winning very small victories,” and it works so hard to illustrate how deeply and unavoidably contextual (and therefore not easily transferable) any particular approach to everyday resistance has to be. Anyway, very useful to me, and a pleasure to read – whenever I get a chance to pick up a book of well-written history, I always remember how much I enjoy reading it, and this was no exception.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.