In June 2010 activists opposing the G20 meeting held in Toronto were greeted with arbitrary state violence on a scale never before seen in Canada. Whose Streets? is a combination of testimonials from the front lines and analyses of the broader context, an account that both reflects critically on what occurred in Toronto and looks ahead to further building our capacity for resistance. Featuring reflections from activists who helped organize the mobilizations, demonstrators and passersby who were arbitrarily arrested and detained, and scholars committed to the theory and practice of confronting neoliberal capitalism, the collection balances critical perspective with on-the-street intensity. It offers vital insight for activists on how local organizing and global activism can come together.
This is a catalog that accompanies the multimedia photojournalism exhibit "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" featuring the work of 37 independent photographers who documented demonstrations, protests and riots in New York City between 1980 and 2000. The exhibit debuted at the Bronx Documentary Center in 2017. This expanded version of the catalog includes essays by historians Tamar W. Carroll and Victoria W. Wolcott that provide context for the photographs and explore the role of documentary photography in furthering social movements and democratic participation in urban governance.
The Best American Magazine Writing 2021 presents outstanding journalism and commentary that reckon with urgent topics, including COVID-19 and entrenched racial inequality. In “The Plague Year,” Lawrence Wright details how responses to the pandemic went astray (New Yorker). Lizzie Presser reports on “The Black American Amputation Epidemic” (ProPublica). In powerful essays, the novelist Jesmyn Ward processes her grief over her husband’s death against the backdrop of the pandemic and antiracist uprisings (Vanity Fair), and the poet Elizabeth Alexander considers “The Trayvon Generation” (New Yorker). Aymann Ismail delves into how “The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd” dealt with the repercussions of the fatal call (Slate). Mitchell S. Jackson scrutinizes the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and how running fails Black America (Runner’s World). The anthology features remarkable reporting, such as explorations of the cases of children who disappeared into the depths of the U.S. immigration system for years (Reveal) and Oakland’s efforts to rethink its approach to gun violence (Mother Jones). It includes selections from a Public Books special issue that investigate what 2020’s overlapping crises reveal about the future of cities. Excerpts from Marie Claire’s guide to online privacy examine topics from algorithmic bias to cyberstalking to employees’ rights. Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s perceptive Paris Review columns explore her family history in Detroit and the toll of a brutal past and present. Sam Anderson reflects on a unique pop figure in “The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic” (New York Times Magazine). The collection concludes with Susan Choi’s striking short story “The Whale Mother” (Harper’s Magazine).
Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.
Hilary Plum's grave and elegant novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets is a bold meditation on human suffering and the sorrowful challenges of men and women striving for collective change.
When a family hunting trip collides with a terror plot in the Colorado Valley, a father and his sons must fight for their lives in this survival thriller. Military veteran Tony Acero would do anything to help his two sons succeed. With his thirteen-year-old floundering at his new Kansas prep school, and his older son on a downward spiral, Tony decides to take both of them on an elk hunt in Colorado. Meanwhile in Boston, another pair of brothers are plotting an expedition of their own. Radical anarchists, Pel and Moom Adams have contracted with Chechen terrorists to shoot down Air Force One as the president descends into Aspen for a G-8 Summit. When these two parties collide in the Colorado wilderness, the terrorists must Tony and his sons suddenly become the hunted.
A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it. Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the repose to Michael Brown's death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Brown's family and the families of other victims other victims' families as well as local activists. By posing the question, "What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?" Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Studded with moments of joy, and tragedy, They Can't Kill Us All offers a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, showing that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. As Lowery brings vividly to life, the protests against police killings are also about the black community's long history on the receiving end of perceived and actual acts of injustice and discrimination. They Can't Kill Us All grapples with a persistent if also largely unexamined aspect of the otherwise transformative presidency of Barack Obama: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to those Americans most in need of both.
Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the "indignados" protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest. Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a "cyberspace" detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around "occupied" places such as Cairo's Tahrir Square or New York's Zuccotti Park. An exciting and invigorating journey through the new politics of dissent, Tweets and the Streets points both to the creative possibilities and to the risks of political evanescence which new media brings to the contemporary protest experience.
