We live in a neoliberal regime that works to dismantle social institutions and eradicate forms of collective gathering. Over and against this state of affairs, Collectivity in Struggle revisits a crucial moment in recent history when the formation of collectivity sat at the heart of a radical emancipatory struggle and called for a creative endeavor, both artistic and political. The book examines two projects developed in the 1970s vis-à-vis the Palestinian revolt: Jean-Luc Godard's cinematic engagement with the Palestinian forces and Jean Genet's textual enterprise alongside them. Through an inverse reading that uncovers from the seemingly discrete and finalized artworks - Godard's film or Genet’s book - the process of their becoming, Shaul Setter explores the ways in which these projects portray and conceptualize the revolutionary stage of the Palestinian revolt, its abrupt end, and two different modes of prolonging it. Concentrating on their formal experimentation, their potentiality for collective enunciation, their conflicted positioning on the threshold of colonial European culture and the hidden Semitic languages inscribed in them - Setter claims that these two projects insist on the writerly aspects of revolutionary political action.
Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy is for activists engaging with dynamic questions of how to create and support effective movements for visionary systemic change. Chris Crass’s collection of essays and interviews presents us with powerful lessons for transformative organizing through offering a firsthand look at the challenges and the opportunities of anti-racist work in white communities, feminist work with men, and bringing women of color feminism into the heart of social movements. Drawing on two decades of personal activist experience and case studies of anti-racist social justice organizations, Crass insightfully explores ways of transforming divisions of race, class, and gender into catalysts for powerful vision, strategy, and movement building in the United States today. Over the last two decades, activists in the United States have been experimenting with new politics and organizational approaches that stem from a fusion of radical political traditions and liberation struggles. Drawing inspiration from women of color feminism, justice struggles in communities of color, anarchist and socialist movements, the broad upsurges of the 1960s and 70s, and social movements in the Global South, a new generation of activists has sought to understand the past while building a movement for today’s world. Towards Collective Liberation contributes to this project by examining two primary dynamic trends in these efforts: the anarchist movement of the 1990s and 2000s, through which tens of thousands of activists were introduced to radical politics, direct action organizing, democratic decision making, and the profound challenges of taking on systems of oppression, privilege, and power in society at large and in the movement itself; and white anti-racist organizing efforts from the 2000s to the present as part of a larger strategy to build broad-based, effective multiracial movements in the United States. Crass’s collection begins with an overview of the anarchist tradition as it relates to contemporary activism and an in-depth look at Food Not Bombs, one of the leading anarchist groups in the revitalized radical Left in the 1990s. The second and third sections of the book combine stories and lessons from Crass’s experiences of working as an anti-racist and feminist organizer, combining insights from the Civil Rights Movement, women of color feminism, and anarchism to address questions of leadership, organization building, and revolutionary strategy. In section four, Crass discusses how contemporary organizations have responded to the need for white activists to lead anti-racist efforts in white communities and how these efforts have contributed to multiracial alliances in building a broad-based movement for collective liberation. Offering rich case studies of successful organizing, and grounded, thoughtful key lessons for movement building, Toward Collective Liberation is a must-read for anyone working for a better world.
In this book Costas Laoutides explores the collective moral agency involved in secessionist struggles offering a theoretical model for the collective responsibility of secessionist groups. Case-studies on the Kurds and the people of Moldova-Transdniestria illustrate the author’s theoretical arguments as he seeks to establish how, although the principle of self-determination was envisaged as a means of gradually bestowing political power upon the people, it never managed to realize its full potential because it was interpreted strictly within a framework of exclusionary politics of identity.
From longtime labor organizer Jane McAlevey, a vital call-to-arms in favor of unions, a key force capable of defending our democracy For decades, racism, corporate greed, and a skewed political system have been eating away at the social and political fabric of the United States. Yet as McAlevey reminds us, there is one weapon whose effectiveness has been proven repeatedly throughout U.S. history: unions. In A Collective Bargain, longtime labor organizer, environmental activist, and political campaigner Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions are a key institution capable of taking effective action against today’s super-rich corporate class. Since the 1930s, when unions flourished under New Deal protections, corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the labor movement. And they’ve been winning. Until today. Because, as McAlevey shows, unions are making a comeback. Want to reverse the nation’s mounting wealth gap? Put an end to sexual harassment in the workplace? End racial disparities on the job? Negotiate climate justice? Bring back unions. As McAlevey travels from Pennsylvania hospitals, where nurses are building a new kind of patient-centered unionism, to Silicon Valley, where tech workers have turned to old-fashioned collective action, to the battle being waged by America’s teachers, readers have a ringside seat at the struggles that will shape our country—and our future.
In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.
Essays on hip-hop feminism featuring relevant, real conversations about how race and gender politics intersect with pop culture and current events. For the Crunk Feminist Collective, their academic day jobs were lacking in conversations they actually wanted. To address this void, they started a blog that turned into a widespread movement. The Collective’s writings foster dialogue about activist methods, intersectionality, and sisterhood. And the writers’ personal identities—as black women; as sisters, daughters, and lovers; and as television watchers, sports fans, and music lovers—are never far from the discussion at hand. These essays explore “Sex and Power in the Black Church,” discuss how “Clair Huxtable is Dead,” list “Five Ways Talib Kweli Can Become a Better Ally to Women in Hip Hop,” and dwell on “Dating with a Doctorate (She Got a Big Ego?).” Self-described as “critical homegirls,” the authors tackle life stuck between loving hip hop and ratchet culture while hating patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism. “Refreshing and timely.” —Bitch Magazine “Our favorite sister bloggers.” —Elle “By centering a Black Feminist lens, The Collection provides readers with a more nuanced perspective on everything from gender to race to sexuality to class to movement-building, packaged neatly in easy-to-read pieces that take on weighty and thorny ideas willingly and enthusiastically in pursuit of a more just world.” —Autostraddle “Much like a good mix-tape, the book has an intro, outro, and different layers of based sound in the activist, scholar, feminist, women of color, media representation, sisterhood, trans, queer and questioning landscape.” —Lambda Literary Review
The focus of this book is on the PingPu peoples in Taiwan and their right to official recognition as "indigenous peoples" by the Taiwanese government. The result of centuries of colonization, indigenous tribes in Taiwan have faced severe cultural repression because of the government's refusal to accept ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity. The PingPu Status Recognition Movement is the result of a decade of activism by impassioned people seeking the right to self-determination, autonomy, and tribal legitimacy from the Han-Chinese-controlled Taiwanese government. This book examines, through in-depth interviews, questionnaires, field observations, and analysis of governmental and United Nations documents, the perspectives of those directly involved in the movement, as well as those affected by "indigenous" status recognition. Study of the PingPu Indigenous movement is vitally important as it publicly declares Taiwanese Indigenous population's humanity and collective rights and provides a more comprehensive analysis of identity-based movements as a fundamental form of collective human rights claims.
The Collectivity of Life is a study of autobiographical writing and oral histories situated in the late twentieth century United States. The central thesis is that by studying how the authors of these narratives articulate space in their stories, we can uncover a recurring critique of meritocratic individualism and reconstruct a counter-mythology that locates social mobility in collectivist experiences. Fourteen autobiographical works are studied, including those of Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Barack Obama, and numerous other from multiple ethnic and several regions of the U.S., ranging from 1964 through 2008. More than 40 oral histories housed in archives in several regions of the country help to establish the book’s goal. By using a concept of space, this book shifts the focus of personal narrative from the internal resources of the individual to networks of support and collective efforts in the formation of their identities and the basis of their life accomplishments.
Amidst epidemics of youth alienation and cultural polarization, community-based artistic practices are sprouting up around the world as antidotes to policies of austerity and social exclusion. Rejecting the radical individualism of the neoliberal era, many artistic projects promote collectivity and togetherness in navigating challenges and constructing shared futures. The Art of Collectivity is about how one such creative social program deployed this approach in service of a post-neoliberal vision. Focusing on a national social circus initiative launched by a newly elected Ecuadorean government to help actualize its “citizens' revolution,” the book explores the intersection between global cultural politics, participatory arts, collective health, and social transformation. The authors include scholars and practitioners of community arts, humanities, social sciences, and health sciences from the Global North and Global South. Sensitive to hierarchical binaries such as research/practice, north/south, and art/science, they work together to provide a multifaceted analysis of the way cultural politics shape policy, pedagogy, and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as their socio-cultural and health-related effects. The largest study of social circus to date, combining detailed quantitative, qualitative, and arts-based research, The Art of Collectivity is a timely contribution to the study of cultural policies, critical pedagogies, collective art-making, and community development.
This innovative book details how knowledge, skills, and dispositions entangle to create collective and individual beliefs, and leads educators to mobilize collective efficacy in the classroom.
