Best of
Social-Movements

2018

The New American Revolution: The Making of a Populist Movement


Kayleigh McEnany - 2018
    Through candid, one-on-one conversations, they discussed their deeply personal stories and the issues that are most important to them, such as illegal immigration, safety from terrorist attacks, and religious freedom. The New American Revolution chronicles both the losses of these grassroots voters, as well as their ultimate victory in November 2016. Kayleigh also includes interviews with key figures within President Trump’s administration—including Ivanka Trump, Secretary Ben Carson, Jared Kushner, and many more—and their experiences on the road leading up to President Trump’s historic win. Kayleigh’s journey takes her from a family cabin in Ohio to the empty factories in Flint, Michigan, from sunny Florida to a Texas BBQ joint—and, of course, ends up at the White House. The collective grievance of the American electorate reveals a deep divide between leaders and citizens. During a time of stark political division, Kayleigh discovers a personal unity and common thread of humanity that binds us nevertheless. Through faith in God and unimaginable strength, these forgotten men and women have overcome, even when their leaders turned their heads. An insightful book about the triumph of this powerful movement, The New American Revolution is a potent testament to the importance of their message.

We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women's Coming-Of-Age Ceremonies


Cutcha Risling Baldy - 2018
    You will never be alone. We are dancing for you." So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy's deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women's coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe's Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum archives, anthropological records, and oral histories.Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization, including the accounts of young women who have participated in the Flower Dance. Using a framework of Native feminisms, she locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of women's coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.

The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools


Vanessa Siddle Walker - 2018
    King, Georgia politicians, and even U.S. presidents—of one Dr. Horace Tate, a former Georgia school teacher, principal, and state senator. In a sweeping work “that reads like a companion piece to ‘Hidden Figures,’” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), post-Brown generations will encounter invaluable lessons for today from the educators behind countless historical battles—in courtrooms, schools, and communities—for the quality education of black children.For two years, an aging Tate told Siddle Walker fascinating stories about a lifetime advocating for racial justice in schools. On his deathbed, he asked her return to his office in Atlanta, where upon his passing she discovered an attic filled with a massive archive documenting the underground actors and covert strategies behind the most significant era of the fight for educational justice. Until now, the courageous tale of how black Americans in the South won so much and subsequently fell so far has been incomplete. The Lost Education of Horace Tate is “a powerful reminder of the link between educators and the struggle for equality and justice in American history” (The Wall Street Journal).

Feminist Freedom Warriors: Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope


Chandra Talpade Mohanty - 2018
    These engaging interviews with sister comrades such as Angela Davis, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Himani Bannerji, and more will inform, inspire, and activate the imagination to explore what a just world might look like. Each woman’s story illustrates their lifelong commitment to challenging oppressive practices and forming solidarities across borders to transform unjust structures around the globe. The book features interviews with activists from movements spanning the last seven decades in the United States, India, Mexico, Palestine, Nigeria, South Africa, and beyond.

Preaching as Resistance: Voices of Hope, Justice, and Solidarity


Phil Snider - 2018
    In this provocative and powerful collection of sermons from diverse pastors across America, hear the brave and urgent voice of Christians calling for radical change rooted in love, solidarity, and justice. Preaching as Resistance resists, confronts, and troubles the dangerous structures of authoritarianism and oppression crashing in from all sides - and proclaims the transformation, possibility, and hope stirring in the gospel of Christ. From big-steeple churches in big cities to rural congregations in red states, preaching as resistance is practiced in a wide variety of social contexts and preaching styles, inspiring and equipping listeners to respond to the call of justice. Ideal for pastors and church leaders, Preaching as Resistance also provides the opportunity to experience hopeful, welcoming Christian voices rooted in the gospel values of love, solidarity, and justice. In these challenging times when Christianity is so often misrepresented, misunderstood, and misused for unjust agendas, take heart and find your own voice in this collection of resistance sermons from everyday pastors across the country.

Women's Experiences in the Holocaust: In Their Own Words


Agnes Grunwald-Spier - 2018
    It explains why women’s difficulties were different to those of men. Men were taken away and the women were left to cope with children and elderly relatives and obliged to take on new roles. Women like Andrew Sachs' mother had to deal with organising departure for a foreign country and making choices about what to take and what to abandon. The often desperate hunt for food for themselves and those in their care more often than not fell to the women, as did medical issues. They had to face pregnancies, abortions and, in some camps, medical experiments. Many women wrote diaries, memoirs, letters and books about their experiences and these have been used extensively here. The accounts include women who fought or worked in the resistance, like Zivia Lubetkin who was part of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Dr Gisella Perl was a doctor in Auschwitz under the infamous Dr Mengele. Some young girls acted as Kashariyot, underground couriers between ghettos. Their varied experiences represent the extremities of human suffering, endeavour and courage. The author herself is a survivor, born in 1944. Her mother struggled to keep her safe in the mayhem of the Budapest Ghetto when she was a tiny baby and dealt with the threat from Russian soldiers after the liberation of Budapest in January 1945.

Decolonizing the University


Gurminder K. Bhambra - 2018
    Their battle cry, #RhodesMustFall, sparked an international movement calling for the decolonization of universities all over the world.             Today, as the movement develops beyond the picket line, how might it go on to radically transform the terms upon which universities exist? In this book, students, activists, and scholars discuss the possibilities and the pitfalls of doing decolonial work in the heart of the establishment. Subverting curricula, demanding diversity, and destroying old boundaries, this is a radical call for a new era of education.             Offering resources for students and academics to challenge and resist colonialism inside and outside the classroom, Decolonizing the University provides the tools for radical change in our disciplines, our pedagogies, and our institutions.

Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State


Stephen Dillon - 2018
    imperialism, global capitalism, and a repressive racial state. In Fugitive Life Stephen Dillon examines these activists' communiqués, films, memoirs, prison writing, and poetry to highlight the centrality of gender and sexuality to a mode of racialized power called the neoliberal-carceral state. Drawing on writings by Angela Davis, the George Jackson Brigade, Assata Shakur, the Weather Underground, and others, Dillon shows how these activists were among the first to theorize and make visible the links between conservative "law and order" rhetoric, free market ideology, incarceration, sexism, and the continued legacies of slavery. Dillon theorizes these prisoners and fugitives as queer figures who occupied a unique position from which to highlight how neoliberalism depended upon racialized mass incarceration. In so doing, he articulates a vision of fugitive freedom in which the work of these activists becomes foundational to undoing the reign of the neoliberal-carceral state.

We Matter: Athletes and Activism


Etan Thomas - 2018
    "Etan confronts our collective challenges and reminds us that life is not just a game, but demands a constant struggle for justice."--Amy Goodman, Democracy NowFeaturing interviews by former NBA star Etan Thomas with over fifty athletes, and interwoven with essays and critiques by Thomas, We Matter, shares the personal tales and opinions of Russell Westbrook, Jamal Crawford, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, John Carlos, Craig Hodges, Swin Cash, Chamique Holdsclaw, Torrey Smith, and many more.This volume will be an inspiration for many different people: sports junkies, young readers who need words of encouragement from their favorite athletes; parents seeking positive messages for their children; activists who want to hear athletes using their voices to address social justice; and schools that need motivational material for their students.

Abolishing Carceral Society (Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics)


Abolition Collective - 2018
    The journal publishes work that engage with the meaning, practices, and politics of abolitionism in a range of historical and geographical context.Our inaugural issue articulates a wide interpretation of abolitionism, including: prison and police abolitionism, decolonization, slavery abolitionism, anti-statism, anti-racism, labor organizing, anti-capitalism, radical feminism, queer and trans* politics, Indigenous people’s politics, sex worker organizing, migrant activism, social ecology, animal rights and liberation, and radical pedagogy. Recognizing that the best movement-relevant intellectual work is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize, the journal aims to support activists, artists, and scholars whose work amplifies such grassroots activity. Abolition features a range of formats and approaches from scholarly essays, art, poetry, multi-media, interviews, field notes, to documentary sketches each presented in an accessible manner.

Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict


Phil A. Neel - 2018
    The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead. Urgent and unsparing, this book opens our eyes to America’s new heart of darkness. Driven by an ever-expanding socioeconomic crisis, America’s class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty, and production. The center has fallen. Riots ricochet from city to city led by no one in particular. Anarchists smash financial centers as a resurgent far right builds power in the countryside. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, from the Occupy movement to the wave of riots and blockades that began in Ferguson, Missouri, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail. Inaugurating the new Field Notes series, published in association with the Brooklyn Rail, Neel’s book tells the intimate story of a life lived within America’s hinterland.

The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution


Waitman Wade Beorn - 2018
    First introducing Jewish life as it was lived before the Nazis in Eastern Europe, the book chronologically surveys the development of Nazi policies in the area over the period from 1939 to 1945. This book provides an overview of both the German imagination and obsession with the East and its impact on the Nazi genocidal project there. It also covers the important period of Soviet occupation and its effects on the unfolding of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. This text also treats in detail other themes such as ghettoization, the Final Solution, rescue, collaboration, resistance, and many others. Throughout, Beorn includes detailed examples of the similarities and differences of the nature of the Holocaust in various regions, in the words of perpetrators, witnesses, collaborators, and victims/survivors. Beorn also illustrates the complex nature of the Holocaust by discussing the difficult subjects of collaboration, sexual violence, the use of slave labour, treatment of Soviet POWs, profiteering and others within a larger narrative framework. He also explores key topics like Jewish resistance, Jewish councils, memory, and explanations for perpetration, collaboration, and rescue. The book includes images and maps to orient the reader to the topic area. This important book explains the brutality and complexity of the Holocaust in the East for all students of the Holocaust and 20th-century Eastern European history.

Herlands: Exploring the Women's Land Movement in the United States


Keridwen N. Luis - 2018
    Rooted in 1970s feminist politics, they continue to thrive in a range of ways, from urban households to isolated rural communes, providing spaces where ideas about gender, sexuality, and sociality are challenged in both deliberate and accidental ways. Herlands, a compelling ethnography of women’s land networks in the United States, highlights the ongoing relevance of these communities as vibrant cultural enclaves that also have an impact on broader ideas about gender, women’s bodies, lesbian identity, and right ways of living.As a participant-observer, Keridwen N. Luis brings unique insights to the lives and stories of the women living in these communities. While documenting the experiences of specific spaces in Massachusetts, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Ohio, Herlands also explores the history of women’s lands and breaks new ground exploring culture theory, gender theory, and how lesbian identity is conceived and constructed in North America. Luis also discusses how issues of race and class are addressed, the ways in which nudity and public hygiene challenge dominant constructions of the healthy or aging body, and the pervasive influence of hegemonic thinking on debates about transgender women. Luis finds that although changing dominant thinking can be difficult and incremental, women’s lands provide exciting possibilities for revolutionary transformation in society.

The Emotions of Protest


James M. Jasper - 2018
    The Women’s March, held the day after Trump’s inauguration, may have been the largest in American history, and resonated around the world. Between Trump’s tweets and the march’s popularity, it is clear that displays of anger dominate American politics once again. There is an extensive body of research on protest, but the focus has mostly been on the calculating brain—a byproduct of structuralism and cognitive studies—and less on the feeling brain. James M. Jasper’s work changes that, as he pushes the boundaries of our present understanding of the social world. In The Emotions of Protest, Jasper lays out his argument, showing that it is impossible to separate cognition and emotion. At a minimum, he says, we cannot understand the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or pro- and anti-Trump rallies without first studying the fears and anger, moral outrage, and patterns of hate and love that their members feel. This is a book centered on protest, but Jasper also points toward broader paths of inquiry that have the power to transform the way social scientists picture social life and action. Through emotions, he says, we are embedded in a variety of environmental, bodily, social, moral, and temporal contexts, as we feel our way both consciously and unconsciously toward some things and away from others. Politics and collective action have always been a kind of laboratory for working out models of human action more generally, and emotions are no exception. Both hearts and minds rely on the same feelings racing through our central nervous systems. Protestors have emotions, like everyone else, but theirs are thinking hearts, not bleeding hearts. Brains can feel, and hearts can think.

Who Betrayed the Jews?: The Realities of Nazi Persecution in the Holocaust


Agnes Grunwald-Speer - 2018
    In many cases they regarded themselves as a person of their nation first and a Jew second, so persecution came as a terrible shock to them. Many had fought for their country in the First World War, but this offered very little protection – not even for those awarded Germany's Iron Cross. They were forced out of their professions and universities. Their neighbours and school friends betrayed them to the authorities. The authorities ‘legally’ withdrew their rights and stripped them of their businesses under Aryanization policies. Many who professed to be Christian were affected by the Nazis’ racial laws and found themselves and their children categorised as ‘halfbreeds’. Bodies such as the police and railway companies co-operated with the Nazis in transporting Jews to their deaths or to be subjected to unspeakable medical experiments. The betrayal did not end in 1945 as there is evidence of Holocaust survivors being attacked as and when they returned home.Agnes Grunwald-Spier MBE reveals, among other accounts, the story of the slave labourers who toiled for German firms and international companies like Ford; the fate of Jewish Olympians who were murdered; and the impact of Nazi policies on figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Coco Chanel.

#1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests (Social Justice Book, Civil Rights Photography Book)


Sheila Pree Bright - 2018
    Combining portraits of past and present social justice activists with documentary images from recent protests throughout the United States, #1960Now sheds light on the parallels between the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Shelia Pree Bright's striking black-and-white photographs capture the courage and conviction of '60s elder statesmen and a new generation of activists, offering a powerful reminder that the fight for justice is far from over. #1960Now represents an important new contribution to American protest photography.• Puts the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's in direct conversation with Black Lives Matter• Introduction from Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza• Builds on the appeal of #1960Now and @sheepreebright on Instagram Fans of Training School for Negro Girls, Martha Rosler: Irrespective, and Charles White: A Retrospective will love this book.This book is perfect for:• Politically engaged folks of all ages• Fine art photography buffs• Black Lives Matter and Civil Rights era activists • Community organizers

The Movements of Movements: Part 1: What Makes Us Move?


Jai Sen - 2018
    The dazzling diversity of ideas and experiences recorded in this collection capture something of the fluidity within campaigns for a more equitable planet. This book, taking internationalism seriously without tired dogmas, provides a bracing window into some of the central ideas to have emerged from within grassroots struggles from 2006 to 2010. The essays here cross borders to look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global. Contributors include Taiaiake Alfred, Tariq Ali, Daniel Bensaïd, Hee-Yeon Cho, Ashok Choudhary, Lee Cormie, Jeff Corntassel, Laurence Cox, Guillermo Delgado-P, Andre Drainville, David Featherstone, Christopher Gunderson, Emilie Hayes, François Houtart, Fouad Kalouche, Alex Khasnabish, Xochitl Leyva Solano, Roma Malik, David McNally, Roel Meijer, Eric Mielants, Peter North, Shailja Patel, Emir Sader, Andrea Smith, Anand Teltumbde, James Toth, Virginia Vargas, and Peter Waterman.

How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning


George Lakey - 2018
    Now, in this timely and down-to-earth guide, he passes the torch to a new generation of activists hitting the streets. He looks to successful campaigns across the world to help us see what has worked and what hasn’t: from choosing the right target, to designing a creative campaign; from avoiding burnout within your group, to building a movement of movements to achieve real progressive victories. Drawing on the experiences of a diverse set of ambitious change-makers, How We Win shows us the way to justice, peace, and a sustainable economy. This is what democracy looks like.

Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt


A.K. Thompson - 2018
    Inspired by Walter Benjamin and addressing themes ranging from violence and representation to Romanticism and death, Thompson combines scholarship and grassroots grit to disabuse us of cherished certainties. Whether uncovering the unrealized promise buried in mainstream cultural offerings or tracing our course toward the moment of reckoning ahead, the essays in Premonitions are both practical investigations and provocations.