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 …
Essays that use memoir in a mode the author describes as “fictionalized nonfiction” (20) to explore migration, (non)belonging, becoming, and the hypocrisies, indignities, and violence of white-supremacist, colonial, multi-cultural Canada. The author was born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, grew up in Edmonton, has lived in and travelled to many parts of Canada, and for many …
[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 …
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 …
A short, thoughtful, and somewhat meandering book about the politics of memory and legacy and, specifically, archives. The author was part of the New Left in the UK – he went by “Dr. John” in those years and was a central figure in the London Street Commune – and went on to become “a cultural …
A short book by an English academic that explores “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2). In order to build movements that can once again threaten to transform capitalism, we must …
I noticed during my year-end/new-year reflections this year that I had fallen into a common-to-me pattern: Most of my nonfiction reading in the previous six months had been things that I selected for their content not for their writing. I get why this happens, because I do often need to read a lot of things …