Our Culture Is Our Resistance: Repression, Refuge, and Healing in Guatemala is a stunning document of this tiny Central American country, revealing stories of life and death, of hope and despair, and of struggles for survival, respect, and truth. For the past ten years Jonathan Moller has photographed communities uprooted by war in Guatemala. The beauty and strength of Moller's one hundred forty-seven tritone portraits and the accompanying texts not only document and preserve the faces and events associated with this land and its history, but also display for the viewer the humanity and dignity of these largely Mayan indigenous peoples. Sponsors and official endorsers of the book include Amnesty International, the Soros Foundation, Global Exchange, The Nation Institute, the Photo Review, Witness for Peace, and Cultural Survival.
''... brilliantly original ... brings cultural and post-colonial theory to bear on a wide range of authors with great skill and sensitivity.' Terry Eagleton
In everyday life--in relationships, in various institutions, in texts--cultural premises influence and sometimes limit individuals’thoughts, actions, and ideas. Cultural Resistance: Challenging Beliefs About Men, Women, and Therapy analyzes cultural constraints and encourages therapists, individuals, and communities to practice cultural resistance on a daily basis, allowing for the realization of diverse and suppressed knowledges. Cultural Resistance shows general patterns by which some ideas in a culture become accepted and others are marginalized. It proposes ways individuals and communities can resist the hold of limiting ideas on their lives. In the postmodern tradition, Editor Kathy Weingarten brings together authors who ask and offer answers to the question, “What is not present in our thinking?” Each chapter invites therapists to extend their thinking about the scope of their work. Topics covered include: challenging cultural beliefs about mothers transforming masculine identities lesbian and gay parents a narrative approach to anorexia/bulimia perspectives on the Black woman and sexual trauma, focusing on Thomas v. Hill opening therapy to conversations with a personal god new conversations on controversial issues The chapters in Cultural Resistance first describe cultural premises that constrain the lives of women, men, and/or therapists and then develop an approach to resisting these constraints. A response follows each chapter in an effort to promote discourse, extend meanings, and encourage learning between professionals. Cultural Resistance yields new perspectives on the nature of social change and the relationships between individuals and culture. It offers valuable insights to family therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers who want to broaden their thinking and approach. It gives therapists a fresh, new way of thinking about themselves, others, and their conversations through applications which may be professional, personal, or both.
A collaboration of political activism and participatory culture seeking to upend consumer capitalism, including interviews with The Yes Men, The Guerrilla Girls, among others. Coined in the 1980s, “culture jamming” refers to an array of tactics deployed by activists to critique, subvert, and otherwise “jam” the workings of consumer culture. Ranging from media hoaxes and advertising parodies to flash mobs and street art, these actions seek to interrupt the flow of dominant, capitalistic messages that permeate our daily lives. Employed by Occupy Wall Street protesters and the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot alike, culture jamming scrambles the signal, injects the unexpected, and spurs audiences to think critically and challenge the status quo. The essays, interviews, and creative work assembled in this unique volume explore the shifting contours of culture jamming by plumbing its history, mapping its transformations, testing its force, and assessing its efficacy. Revealing how culture jamming is at once playful and politically transgressive, this accessible collection explores the degree to which culture jamming has fulfilled its revolutionary aims. Featuring original essays from prominent media scholars discussing Banksy and Shepard Fairey, foundational texts such as Mark Dery’s culture jamming manifesto, and artwork by and interviews with noteworthy culture jammers including the Guerrilla Girls, The Yes Men, and Reverend Billy, Culture Jamming makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of creative resistance and participatory culture.
In a time of compromise and disillusionment, God is calling his people to a movement of beautiful resistance. We live in a time when our culture is becoming increasingly shallow, coarse, and empty. Radical shifts in the areas of sexuality, ethics, technology, secular ideologies, and religion have caused the once-familiar landscape of a generation ago to be virtually unrecognizable. Yet rather than shine as a beacon of light, the church often is silent or accommodating. This isn’t a new phenomenon. During World War II, pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was deeply troubled by the compromise in the German church. Their capitulation to the Nazi party brought shame and dishonor to the gospel. In response, he helped create an underground movement of churches that trained disciples and ultimately sought to renew the church and culture of the day. In our compromised church, we need new underground movements of discipleship and resistance. Widely respected New York pastor Jon Tyson unveils a revived vision for faithful discipleship—one that dares to renew culture, restore credibility, and replace compromise with conviction. For all who have felt this conflict in the soul between who we are and who God calls us to be, Beautiful Resistance is a bold invitation to reclaim what’s been lost—regardless of the cost. Praise for Beautiful Resistance “Beautiful Resistance is one of the most compelling and defiant books I’ve read in a long time. I love Jon’s radical, no-messing vision of the church as a prophetic community. This is a wake-up call for us all from the heart of a man who lives his message, loves his city, and serves his Lord with a passion and intelligence destined to become less rare.”—Pete Greig, founder of the 24-7 Prayer movement
Discussions about the Sabbath often center around moralistic laws and arguments over whether a person should be able to play cards or purchase liquor on Sundays. In this volume, popular author Walter Brueggemann writes that the Sabbath is not simply about keeping rules but rather about becoming a whole person and restoring a whole society. Importantly, Brueggemann speaks to a 24/7 society of consumption, a society in which we live to achieve, accomplish, perform, and possess. We want more, own more, use more, eat more, and drink more. Keeping the Sabbath allows us to break this restless cycle and focus on what is truly important: God, other people, all life. Brueggemann offers a transformative vision of the wholeness God intends, giving world-weary Christians a glimpse of a more fulfilling and simpler life through Sabbath observance.
Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.
In this sophisticated study of power and resistance, Jean Comaroff analyzes the changing predicament of the Barolong boo Ratshidi, a people on the margins of the South African state. Like others on the fringes of the modern world system, the Tshidi struggle to construct a viable order of signs and practices through which they act upon the forces that engulf them. Their dissenting Churches of Zion have provided an effective medium for reconstructing a sense of history and identity, one that protests the terms of colonial and post-colonial society and culture.
From the Diggers seizing St. George Hill in 1649 to Hacktivists staging virtual sit-ins in the 21st century, from the retributive fantasies of Robin Hoods to those of gangsta rappers, culture has long been used as a political weapon. This expansive and carefully crafted reader brings together many of the classic texts that help to define culture as a tool of resistance. With concise, illuminating introductions throughout, it presents a range of theoretical and historical writings that have influenced contemporary debate, and includes a number of new activist authors published here for the first time. Cultural Resistance Reader is both an invaluable scholarly resource and a tool for political activists. But most importantly it will inspire everyday readers to resist.
Awards: One Book South Dakota Common Read, South Dakota Humanities Council, 2022. PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, PEN America, 2020. One Book One Tribe Book Award, First Nations Development Institute, 2020. Finalist, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, 2019. Shortlist, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, 2019. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto. Now available in paperback on the fifth anniversary of its original publication, Our History Is the Future features a new afterword by Nick Estes about the rising indigenous campaigns to protect our environment from extractive industries and to shape new ways of relating to one another and the world. In this award-winning book, Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the present campaigns against fossil fuel pipelines, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan “Mni Wiconi”—Water Is Life—was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even with the encampment gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue. While a historian by trade, Estes draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires) and his own family’s rich history of struggle.
