Scholarly. Postcolonial, feminist, invested in dismantling our current oppressive formation of “the human.” In particular, its focus is “mastery,” which it understands as a sort of shared logic that links and informs many different scales of phenomena, contexts, practices, and experiences, including those that are easily legible as instances of oppression and domination but lots …
Did not at all intend this, but somehow this is my second LA-based, relationship-focused contemporary which draws heavily on the film industry of this year. Felt a little more substantive in some respects than a lot of the non-literary contemporaries I’ve read in the last few years. I liked the characters and the relationships and …
Alicia-Marie and Faduma are community activists and co-founders of the Ottawa Black Diaspora Coalition. Scott Neigh interviews them about the group’s work to bring Ottawa’s Black communities together and to oppose anti-Black racism in the city. The group came together in 2016, broadly informed by Black Lives Matter – not necessarily with any particular connection, …
Graphic memoir. A self-identified tomboy looking back on the frictions, frustrations, and traumas of gender she experienced growing up. Thoughtful, readable, and interesting. Both an engaging story and a useful entry into thinking about gender – I can imagine, for instance, it being a useful teaching tool with students who had not really thought about …
Rebecca Keetch has been an autoworker at the General Motors (GM) assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario since 2006. GM has said they will close the plant by the end of the year. Tiffany Balducci is the president of the Durham Region Labour Council. Both are involved in Green Jobs Oshawa, a joint labour-community campaign involving …
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 …
Memoir. Short. Focused on the body. Thoughtful and theoretical and nonlinear and lyrical, a la Maggie Nelson (who also happened to blurb it). Ran across it while I was investigating another book and justified picking it up with the idea that it might be vaguely relevant to some work that I’m doing. It’s not, sadly, …
Thank you to Lisa and Sakura of the Halifax Workers’ Action Centre for the interview just now! Listen to us talk about the centre’s work to support marginalized workers and to organize for change later in October on Talking Radical Radio. Originally posted to Scott’s author page on Facebook.
Karen Cocq is a long-time grassroots organizer who has recently been doing popular education and communications work with the Migrant Rights Network, a cross-Canada alliance of migrant worker, refugee, and immigrant organizations devoted to fighting against racism and for migrant justice. Scott Neigh interviews her about racism and xenophobia in Canada, both in general and …
Silkpunk. Short. A land of elemental magic, twin children born to a cruel empress and given to a monastery, and an uprising in which the intertwining of magic and new technologies is becoming ever more destructive. Really like the world building, and the writing is effective, but the story felt like it wasn’t enough. On …