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20th century Analytic theory Anarchism Anti-racism Books Capitalism Feminism South and Central America Statism - Representationism Strategic theory

Anarchist Cuba : Countercultural Politics in the Early 20th Century (2019)


Author(s)

Kirwin Shaffer


Contents

“By taking a sociocultural approach—an approach detailed later in this introduction and in chapter 1—this book arrives at three overarching conclusions.

First, when anarchists challenged the cultural, economic, political, and religious institutions, they did so not only during the eight-to fourteen-hour workday in the workplace but also through their writings, rallies, and alternative health and educational initiatives; anarchists challenged Cuba’s power holders throughout the rest of the day outside the workplace and inside the daily cultural milieu.

Second, this anarchist challenge reflected how the international anarchist movement operated within the context of a unique national situation in which Cuba’s political culture was shaped by the wars for independence, the U.S. occupations following independence, and the foreign domination of the economy. As anarchists engaged and criticized the larger hegemonic culture and created their own counterculture, anarchists modified the larger impulses and issues of international anarchism to fit the specific cultural, ethnic, and political realities on the island; thus, they “Cubanized” anarchism. As a result, one becomes aware of how anarchists, via their cultural critiques and initiatives, struggled to create their own specific sense of cubanidad (Cubanness).

Third, this study sheds light on Cuba’s leftist revolutionary heritage by illustrating an important but largely ignored early chapter of that heritage. In the early twentieth century, Cuba’s anarchists played important roles in shaping the Cuban Left by agitating for not only labor reforms but also socialist internationalism, worker-initiated health reforms, radical education, revolutionary motherhood, and gender equity while rejecting the political system, capitalism, and religion.”

Kirwin Shaffer

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20th century 21st century Analytic theory Anti-racism Books Europe Feminism Patriarchy Strategic theory Values theory White supremacy

To Exist is to Resist – Black Feminism in Europe (2019)


Author(s)

Akwugo Emejulu

Francesca Sobande


Contents

“How might we theorise and practise Black feminism and Afrofeminism in Europe today? This is a provocative question for Black women, as our politics are too often erased from or misrecognised in the European imagination.

We define Black feminism as a praxis that identifies women racialised as Black as knowing agents for social change. Black feminism is both a theory and a politics of affirmation and liberation. Black feminism names and valorises the knowledge production and lived experiences of different Black women derived from our class, gender identity, legal status and sexuality, for example.

This insistence on Black women as human, as agents and as knowers is critical to any kind of Black feminist thought. It radically dissents from and subverts the hegemonic con-structions of Black women as either irrelevant and invisible objects or alien Others who disrupt the taken for granted racialised and gendered social and economic order. Crucially, Black feminism is also a politics of liberation. Our struggle for our humanity is revolutionary political action that imagines another world is possible beyond the plunder, exploitation and expropriation that are the bedrock of liberal democracies.

It is important to stress that Black feminism does not merely operate against violence and exclusion but creates and fosters a different way of seeing and being in this world. Black feminism is always a creative and dynamic production of thinking and living otherwise.”

Akwugo Emejulu & Francesca Sobande

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20th century 21st century Analytic theory Anarchism Anti-racism Books Capitalism Colonialism Direct democracy Futures theory Global Indigenous rights Longue durée North America Statism - Representationism Strategic theory Values theory White supremacy

Our History is the Future (2019)

Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

Author(s)

Nick Estes


Contents

“Thanksgiving is the quintessential origin story a settler nation tells itself : ‘peace’ was achieved between Natives and settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts, where Mayflower pilgrims established a colony in 1620, over roast turkey and yams.

To consummate the wanton slaughter of some 700 Pequots, in 1637 the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford, proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day be celebrated ‘in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won’.

Peace on stolen land is borne of genocide.

[…] But as colonialism changes throughout time, so too does resistance to it. By drawing upon earlier struggles and incorporating elements of them into their own experience, each generation continues to build dynamic and vital traditions of resistance. Such collective experiences build up over time and are grounded in specific Indigenous territories and nations.”

Nick Estes

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