Antifascist Roundtable: Feminist & Anticolonial Resistance

Tuesday, October 4th | 7pm

Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse

3128 Greenmount Avenue

Baltimore, MD 21218

https://redemmas.org

This roundtable will offer a compelling cultural and political exploration of the feminist & anticolonial dimensions of antifascism, an insightful look at the rise of right-wing authoritarianism locally and globally, the roots of fascism in patriarchy and ongoing (settler) colonialism, and an exploration of a range of political initiatives and resistances against it. 

A lively conversation will be lead by scholar-activists, organizers, and writers on the subject, based on two recent publications: On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death and For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis. Both On Microfascism and For Antifascist Futures offer original and penetrating insight into today’s swell of fascist and reactionary cultural forces and links its expressions to important dimensions of racialized masculinity and gender politics, as well as global dimensions of ongoing colonialism and racial capitalism. 

About the presenters

Alyosha Goldstein is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century, the editor of Formations of United States Colonialism, and has coedited special issues of Social Text, Theory & Event, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Goldstein is completing a book manuscript on colonialism, racial capitalism, and histories of Native and Black dispossession in what is presently called the United States.

Jack Z. Bratich is professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University. He is author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture and coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality. 

Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.

Liz Mason-Deese is an editor at Viewpoint Magazine, a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective, and a member of the translation collective Territorio de Ideas. She is a long-time translator of and participant in feminist movements in Latin America.

Making Worlds Book Launch and Discussion: The Feminist Subversion of the Economy, with Liz Mason-Deese and Maximilian Alvarez

Please register in advance here.

In the face of unending economic crises and climate catastrophe, we must consider, what does a dignified life look like? Feminist intellectual and activist Amaia Pérez Orozco powerfully and provocatively outlines a vision for a web of life sustained collectively with care, mutualism, and in balance with our ecological world. That vision is a call to action to subvert the foundational order of racial capitalism, colonial violence, and a heteropatriarchal economy that threatens every form of life.

The Feminist Subversion of the Economy makes the connection between the systems that promise more devastation and destruction of life in the name of profit—and rallies women, LGBTQ+ communities, and movements worldwide to center gender and social reproduction in a vision for a balanced ecology, a just economy, and a free society.

Newly translated and updated in collaboration with Liz Mason-Deese, who has won a PEN translation award for her work on feminist economics, The Feminist Subversion of the Economy shows the urgent need to radically and democratically discuss what we mean by a dignified life and how we can organize to sustain life collectively.

In addition to a dialogue with Liz Mason-Deese, Maximilian Alvarez will share from his recent collection The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke

As COVID-19 swept across the globe with merciless force, it was working people who kept the world from falling apart. Deemed “essential” by a system that has shown just how much it needs our labor but has no concern for our lives, workers sacrificed—and many were sacrificed—to keep us fed, to keep our shelves stocked, to keep our hospitals and transit running, to care for our loved ones, and so much more. But when we look back at this particular moment, when we try to write these days into history for ourselves and for future generations, whose voices will go on the record? Whose stories will be remembered?

In late 2020 and early 2021, at what was then the height of the pandemic, Maximillian Alvarez conducted a series of intimate interviews with workers of all stripes, from all around the US—from Kyle, a sheet metal worker in Kentucky; to Mx. Pucks, a burlesque performer and producer in Seattle; to Nick, a gravedigger in New Jersey. As he does in his widely celebrated podcast, Working People, Alvarez spoke with them about their lives, their work, and their experiences living through a year when the world itself seemed to break apart. Those conversations, documented in these pages, are at times meandering, sometimes funny or philosophical, occasionally punctured by pain so deep that it hurts to read them. Filled with stories of struggle and strength, fear and loss, love and rage, The Work of Living is a deeply human history of one of the defining events of the 21st century told by the people who lived it.

About the presenters

Liz Mason-Deese is an editor at Viewpoint Magazine, a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective, and a member of the translation collective Territorio de Ideas. She is a long-time translator of and participant in feminist movements in Latin America. Liz is translator and editor of Feminicide and Global Accumulation (Common Notions, 2021) and The Feminist Suversion of the Economy (Common Notions, 2022).

Maximillian Alvarez is the Editor-in-Chief of The Real News Network in Baltimore and the host of Working People, “a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today.” Prior to joining The Real News, he was an Associate Editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and graduated with a dual-PhD in History and Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in a range of outlets, including The Nation, In These Times, Boston Review, Truthout, and The Baffler. He is the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk about Their Lives and the Year the World Broke (OR Books, 2022).

Saturday, October 1st | 7:30pm

May Day Space

https://maydayspace.org

176 St Nicholas Ave

Brooklyn, NY 11237

We must take antifascism as a major imperative of movements for social change. For Antifascist Futures takes seriously what is new in this moment of politics, exploring what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist and antiracist social movement coalitions. By focusing on the long history of Black and Brown antifascist resistance that has been overlooked in both recent conversations about racial justice as well as antifascist resistance, the essays, interviews, and documents included here make clear how racialized and colonized peoples have been at the forefront of theorizing and dismantling fascism, white supremacy, and other modes of authoritarian rule. 

Linking a deep engagement, both scholarly and practical, of racial justice movements with an antifascist frame, and a global analysis of capitalism, the editors and contributors of For Antifascist Futures assemble a powerful toolbox for our struggles.

About the presenters

Johanna Fernández is associate professor of History at Baruch College (CUNY) and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, recipient of the New York Society Library’s New York City Book award and three Organization of American Historians (OAH) awards: the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner award for best first book in history, the Liberty Legacy Foundation award for best book on civil rights and the Merle Curti award for best Social History. Dr. Fernández’s 2014 Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD, led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, including those of Malcolm X. She is editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal and writer and producer of the film, Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Her awards include the Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and North Africa, which took her to Jordan; and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in the Scholars-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center. She directed and cocurated, ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York an exhibition in three NYC museums.  She’s the host of A New Day, WBAI’s morning show, from 7-8am, M-F, at 99.5 FM in New York.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and author who works at the intersections of authoritarianism, the visual arts, extractivism, and the environmental and decolonial humanities. Her books include Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents, and The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Her in-progress book is At the Sea’s Edge: Liquidity Beyond Colonial Extinction. She is Founding Director of the Global South Center (globalsouthcenter.org) and Chairperson of Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She has published in Social Text, GLQ, and numerous other journals and art catalogs, and is coeditor with Diana Taylor of Duke University Press Series, Dissident Acts.

Alyosha Goldstein is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century, the editor of Formations of United States Colonialism, and has coedited special issues of Social Text, Theory & Event, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Goldstein is completing a book manuscript on colonialism, racial capitalism, and histories of Native and Black dispossession in what is presently called the United States.

Simón Ventura Trujillo is an assistant professor in the English Department at New York University. He is the author of Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press 2020).

For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis

Friday, September 30th | 5pm (film screening) and 6pm (book discussion)

Making Worlds Cooperative Bookstore 

210 South 45th Street

Philadelphia PA 19104

https://www.makingworldsbooks.org

We must take antifascism as a major imperative of movements for social change. For Antifascist Futures takes seriously what is new in this moment of politics, exploring what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist and antiracist social movement coalitions. By focusing on the long history of Black and Brown antifascist resistance that has been overlooked in both recent conversations about racial justice as well as antifascist resistance, the essays, interviews, and documents included here make clear how racialized and colonized peoples have been at the forefront of theorizing and dismantling fascism, white supremacy, and other modes of authoritarian rule. 

Linking a deep engagement, both scholarly and practical, of racial justice movements with an antifascist frame, and a global analysis of capitalism, the editors and contributors of For Antifascist Futures assemble a powerful toolbox for our struggles.

The evening starts with a screening of Mangrove School (34 mins, 2022), directed by Filipa César and Sónia Vaz Borges.

About Mangrove School

We went again to Guinea Bissau this time to research the conditions of the students in the guerrilla schools in the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the learners and the first lesson was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

About the presenters

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is focused on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is currently at work on her second book, which is focused on the ways in which state violence limits activist research and writing.
Sónia Vaz Borges is an interdisciplinary militant historian and social-political organizer. She received her Ph.D. in History of Education from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is the author of the book Militant Education, Liberation Struggle; Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963-1978 (Peter Lang, 2019). In September 2021 she joined the History Department as assistant professor in Africana Studies at Drexel University. As part of her academic work, Vaz Borges is developing a book proposal focused on her concept of the “walking archive.” 

Alyosha Goldstein is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century, the editor of Formations of United States Colonialism, and has coedited special issues of Social Text, Theory & Event, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Goldstein is completing a book manuscript on colonialism, racial capitalism, and histories of Native and Black dispossession in what is presently called the United States.

Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/for-antifascist-futures-against-the-violence-of-imperial-crisis-tickets-421623275567

For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis

Thursday, September 29th | 6pm
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th floor
New York University

We must take antifascism as a major imperative of movements for social change. For Antifascist Futures takes seriously what is new in this moment of politics, exploring what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist and antiracist social movement coalitions. By focusing on the long history of Black and Brown antifascist resistance that has been overlooked in both recent conversations about racial justice as well as antifascist resistance, the essays, interviews, and documents included here make clear how racialized and colonized peoples have been at the forefront of theorizing and dismantling fascism, white supremacy, and other modes of authoritarian rule.

Linking a deep engagement, both scholarly and practical, of racial justice movements with an antifascist frame, and a global analysis of capitalism, the editors and contributors of For Antifascist Futures assemble a powerful toolbox for our struggles.

About the presenters

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Anthropology, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology. Her third book (Verso 2022) is a study of the figure of the traumatized soldier in the American social imaginary and its central role in reproducing contemporary American militarism.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and author who works at the intersections of authoritarianism, the visual arts, extractivism, and the environmental and decolonial humanities. Her books include Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents, and The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Her in-progress book is At the Sea’s Edge: Liquidity Beyond Colonial Extinction. She is Founding Director of the Global South Center (globalsouthcenter.org) and Chairperson of Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She has published in Social Text, GLQ, and numerous other journals and art catalogs, and is coeditor with Diana Taylor of Duke University Press Series, Dissident Acts.

Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, and Founding Faculty Director of the NYU Prison Education Program. A historian of race, empire, and culture in the twentieth-century United States, Singh is the author, most recently, of Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press, 2017). He is also the author of the award-winning book, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004), and author and editor with Jack O’Dell of Climin’ Jacob’s Ladder; The Black Freedom Movement Writing of Jack O’Dell. A new book Exceptional Empire: Race, Colonialism and the Origins of US Globalism is in-progress, and forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Singh’s writing and historian interviews have appeared in a number of places including New York Magazine, TIME, the New Republic, and on NPRs Open Source and Code Switch.

Charisse Burden-Stelly, assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College, is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and historical sociology. She is the coauthor, with Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Antiblackness, Anticommunism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the United States, which examines the rise of the United States to global hegemony between World War I and the early Cold War at the intersection of racial capitalism, Wall Street imperialism, anticommunism, and antiblackness. Burden-Stelly is also the coeditor, with Jodi Dean, of the forthcoming volume Organize, Fight, Win: Three Decades of Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022) and the coeditor, with Aaron Kamugisha, of the forthcoming collection of Percy C. Hintzen’s writings titled Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean and the Postcolonial State (University of Mississippi, 2022). She guest edited the “Claudia Jones: Foremother of World Revolution” special issue of The Journal of Intersectionality. Her published work appears in journals including Small Axe, Monthly Review, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, and the CLR James Journal.

Alyosha Goldstein is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century, the editor of Formations of United States Colonialism, and has coedited special issues of Social Text, Theory & Event, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Goldstein is completing a book manuscript on colonialism, racial capitalism, and histories of Native and Black dispossession in what is presently called the United States.
Simón Ventura Trujillo is an assistant professor in the English Department at New York University. He is the author ofLand Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press 2020).

Free Mumia! Free Them All! is a political film screening event about abolition and political prisoner liberation, focusing on the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Leading with a teach-in by Campaign to Bring Mumia Home organizer, Johanna Fernandez, we will screen two short films—I’m Free Now, You Are Free (director Ash Goh Hua, producer Arielle Knight, creative producer Mike Africa Jr) and By Your Side (directors Mike Africa Sr & Debbie Africa)—followed by a conversation between the filmmakers and Kazembe Balagun about the importance of cultural work to support political organizing.

By screening short films made by members of the political community and hosting a powerful teach-in by movement leaders, the event will make the urgency of abolition and freedom accessible through a lens of culture.

Event will begin promptly at 3pm and end at 6pm. Please only RSVP if you're 100% sure you can attend. Space is limited due to COVID restrictions. This event requires participants to be fully vaccinated and must show a vaccine card, in accordance with NYC law.

REGISTER HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/free-mumia-free-them-all-tickets-177409575817

Location

Mayday Space is a multi-story organizing center and social hub in Bushwick. Mayday is both a neighborhood resource and a citywide destination for engaging programming, a home for radical ideas and debate, and a welcoming gathering place for people and movements to work, learn, celebrate and build together. 

Bios

Johanna Fernández teaches 20th Century US history and the history of social movements in the Department of History at Baruch College (CUNY). Fernández is also the author of the award winning book, The Young Lords: A Radical History (UNC, 2020). The Organization of American Historians presented Fernández with not only the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, which recognizes a first scholarly book dealing with American history, but also two others: The Merle Curti Social History Award and the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. In 2014, Dr. Fernández sued the NYPD for its failure to honor her research-driven Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request. Her suit led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance documents in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, including those of Malcolm X. Professor Fernández is the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (City Lights, 2015) and an organizer with the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home.

Kazembe Balagun is a writer, cultural historian and activist from the Bronx, New York City. He was involved in the movement to Free Mumia Abu Jamal and to end the prison industrial complex during the 1990s as a member of the Student Liberation Action Movement.

I'm Free Now, You Are Free is a short documentary about the reunion and repair between Mike Africa Jr and his mother Debbie Africa—a formerly incarcerated political prisoner of the MOVE9. In 1978, Debbie, then 8 months pregnant, and many other MOVE family members were arrested after an attack by the Philadelphia Police Department; born in a prison cell, Mike Africa Jr. spent just three days with his mother before guards wrenched him away, and they spent the next 40 years struggling for freedom and for each other. “I realized that I had never seen her feet before,” was a remark he made when he reflected on Debbie’s homecoming. This film meditates on Black family preservation as resistance against the brutal legacies of state sanctioned family separation. 

By Your Side highlights the story of Mike Sr. and Debbie — how they maintained their relationship through the harsh Rizzo era, and the 40 years they spent in prison separated from each other, their children, families, and freedom. This story tells of their determination and commitment to never giving up.

For any questions about the event please email us at jcarrera90@protonmail.com.

Livestream Link for tonight’s launch of Feminicide and Global Accumulation with Silvia Federici, Susana Draper, Liz Mason-Deese, and Otras Negras ... y ¡Feminizes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YEAw0YDxW0

Join Silvia Federici, Susana Draper, Liz Mason-Deese, and Otra Negras...y ¡Feministas! as they discuss how these struggles against racism, capitalism, and patriarchy show how crucially linked the land, water, and resource extraction projects crisscrossing the planet are to devaluing labor and nature and how central Black and Indigenous women and trans leadership is to resisting them.

Monday, October 4th, 6-7:30pm

The Word Is Change: Books, Used + New
368 Tompkins Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 112316
www.thewordischange.com

Feminicide and Global Accumulation (Common Notions) reflects, in a collective fabric, the communitarian and enraged struggles of women, trans, and gender non-conforming communities who commit themselves to the transformation of their communities by directly challenging the murder and assassination of women and violence in all its forms.

Feminicide and Global Accumulation brings us to the frontlines of an international movement of Black, Indigenous, popular, and mestiza women’s organizations fighting against violence—interpersonal, state sanctioned, and economic—that is both endemic to the global economy and the contemporary devalued status of racialized women, trans, and gender non-conforming communties in the Global South.

The new edition of Family, Welfare, and the State by Mariarosa Dalla Costa will also be celebrated.

Schedule, Registration, and COVID Protocols Space is limited. This is a masked event and requires participants to be fully vaccinated and show vaccine card. We Keep Us Safe.

RSVP to secure your spot or to get remote link

For more about the book

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2021 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT

Inspired by the recent publication of Marcello Tarì’s There Is No Unhappy Revolution (Common Notions, 2021), this panel takes up the concept of ‘destituent communism.’ Drawing upon the thought of Walter Benjamin, Colectivo Situaciones, Mario Tronti, and Giorgio Agamben, this communism of destitution calls forth a radical rethinking of revolution for our time. Against the grain of a traditional orthodoxy that can only see uprisings as constituent processes, destitution offers us a perspective from which we can weigh the contemporary wave of revolts on their own terms, beyond the horizon of representation.

Idris Robinson, Richard Braude, Gerardo Muñoz, Andrés Guzmán, and Alessandra Renzi in conversation. Moderated by Erika Biddle.

Sponsored and hosted by our comrades at Red May (Seattle). Go to the Red May 2021 website for more information and subscribe to their youtube channel, @RedMayTV to tune it.

Red May is a month-long spree of red arts, red theory, and red politics based in Seattle, Washington.

After this “plague year” what lessons and challenges required the immediate attention of revolutionary forces?  Participants will draw on historical and current examples of intertwined ecological and workers' struggles to address the realities and struggles that come next: wildfires, resource extraction, food insecurity, climate change, ecological collapse and the need for a radical movement of working-class and common peoples to create new worlds. 

Join panelists Peter Linebaugh, Eleanor Finley, CounterPower (authors of Organizing for Autonomy), Out of the Woods Collective (authors of Hope Against Hope), and more with facilitator Kevin Van Meter. 

This event will be live-streamed. Please click here to register for the link to join the event.

Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic. He is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective and the author of The London Hanged: crime and civil society in the eighteenth century, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (with Marcus Rediker), The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, and many other works. 

Eleanor Finley is a writer, speaker, municipalist, and Ph.D. candidate in anthropology.  Her writing appears in outlets such as ROAR Magazine, In These Times, and OpenDemocracy. Eleanor has been helping build Symbiosis, a network of community organizations building radical municipalism across North America. 

CounterPower is a revolutionary organization committed to building the power of working and oppressed people, from below and to the left.

Out of the Woods is a transnational political research and theory collective, a loose grouping of decolonial, small-c communist, antiracist queer-feminist thinkers working together to think through the problem of ecological crisis.

Decolonization or Extinction

Join authors of The Red Deal for a roundtable conversation on Climate Justice and Decolonization.

The Red Deal is a political program for liberation that emerges from the oldest class struggle in the Americas—the Indigenous fight for decolonization. Offering a profound vision for a decolonized society, The Red Deal is not simply a response to the Green New Deal nor a “bargain” with the elite and powerful. It is a deal with the humble people of the earth; an affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for human and other-than-human life to live with dignity. It is a pact with movements for liberation, life, and land for a new world of peace and justice that must come from below and to the left. Join five of its authors from The Red Nation for a conversation about the book and its wider significance.

Jennifer Marley is a Ph.D. student in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She holds a B.A. with a double major in Native American Studies and American Studies from UNM. Influenced by her upbringing as a citizen of San Ildefonso Pueblo, Jennifer’s research explores the unique way heteropatriarchy has manifested in Pueblo communities and how this shapes and reshapes Pueblo identity and kinship, as well as relationships to the state.

Orien Longknife (they/them/theirs) is an Ndee, Aaaniiih, and Chippewa Cree person who organizes with the Red Nation. They are based in the territories of the Tewa people in the city known as Santa Fe. WIth their role in the Red Nation they contribute by editing and writing as well as speaking on various positions and work of the Red Nation, including the Red Deal.

Kiley Guy is from the Navajo Nation. She has been a member of The Red Nation Southwest Freedom Council since 2018 and is the Program Director of Red Media.

Justine Teba is from the Pueblos of Santa Clara, Tesuque, and Acoma. She has been a member of The Red Nation since 2018, and is Red Media’s Marketing Director.

Hosted by Red Media / Part of the Radical May festival

This event will be live-streamed on Red Media social media channels. Please click here to register for the links to join the event.

2020 saw one of the largest global uprisings against police and state-sanctioned violence and murder against Black Americans. In Philadelphia, organizers, activists and artists took to the street to meet the moment that years of work in the Black radical tradition and mobilizing for abolition prepared them for. In How We Stay Free, a forthcoming collection from the Paul Robeson House & Museum and Common Notions Press, Fajr Muhammad and Christopher R. Rogers seek to document the many stories of movement work, how 2020 is a step in a long tradition of Black liberation and how Black Philadelphians continue to reckon and do the work toward liberation.

This panel brings together contributors, the editors and the publisher to talk about the unfolding project, its significance, and what it means to try to document an unfinished moment. Featuring work by Sheyla Street, Ewuare X. Osayande, and Rasheed Ajamu (aka Phreedom Jawn).

Register for this free event.

Fajr Muhammad is a writer and editor. She has been awarded fellowships with the Tin House Writers Workshop, Rhode Island Writers Colony and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University. Currently, she is at work on a novel about black liberation and black womanhood.

Christopher R. Rogers serves as the Program Director for the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s Paul Robeson House & Museum, an internationally recognized museum that preserves the legacy of Paul Robeson, including his political commitment to anticolonial struggle and an appreciation of the arts in the fight for social justice.

How is the concept of working-class autonomy — from capitalism and the state apparatus, from the official organizations of the Left (including political parties, nonprofit organizations, progressive religious groups, foundations, etc.) — indebted to Black and Brown liberation movements?

To begin to answer this question, we will revisit the early conversations between CLR James and others about the “autonomy” of black liberation, intertwining of Black liberation struggles and autonomist worker organizing in the lives and work of Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs, and the relationships between black autoworkers and autonomists in Italy.

Speakers include Paul Buhle, Nico Pizzolato, Andrew Anastasi, Kevin Van Meter, and Scott Kurashige

Sponsored and hosted by Red May (Seattle). Sponsored and hosted by our comrades at Red May (Seattle). Go to the Red May 2021 website for more information and subscribe to their youtube channel, @RedMayTV to tune it.

Red May is a month-long spree of red arts, red theory, and red politics based in Seattle, Washington.

Red May (Seattle) celebrates the publication of Red Media’s first book, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth. Authored by two dozen Indigenous revolutionaries, The Red Deal is a political program for liberation that emerges from the oldest class struggle in the Americas—the Indigenous fight for decolonization.

Offering a profound vision for a decolonized society, The Red Deal is not simply a response to the Green New Deal nor a “bargain” with the elite and powerful. It is a deal with the humble people of the earth; an affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for human and other-than-human life to live with dignity. It is a pact with movements for liberation, life, and land for a new world of peace and justice that must come from below and to the left. Join five authors from The Red Nation for a conversation about the book and its significance.

Melanie Yazzie, Orien Longknife, Elena Ortiz, Demetrius Johnson, Cheyenne Antonio.

Sponsored and hosted by our comrades at Red May (Seattle). Go to the Red May 2021 website for more information and subscribe to their youtube channel, @RedMayTV to tune it.

Red May is a month-long spree of red arts, red theory, and red politics based in Seattle, Washington.

In an examination of the American healthcare system, Ours To Heal gathers together films that explore the concepts, actions and institutions involved with caring for and healing people both within and outside of dominant Western practices. Drawing inspiration from the feminist and economic thought of Angela Davis, this series connects how we care for, conceptualize, determine to heal and politicize the human body especially as imbued with the weighted concepts of Blackness, womanhood, and labor.

The Ours to Heal film line up can be viewed at online at the Maysles Documentary Center, and includes:

THE PEOPLES DETOX JENNA BLISS, 2018, 57MIN.

THE CANCER JOURNALS REVISITED LANA LIN, 2018, 98MIN.

THE POWER TO HEAL CHARLES BURNETT & DANIEL LOEWENTHAL, 2018, 56MIN.

I AM SOMEBODY MADELINE ANDERSON, 1970, 30MIN.

DOIN’ WHAT IT TAKES: BLACK FOLKS GETTING AND STAYING HEALTHY DONNA GOLDEN, 1994, 23MIN.

On Thursday, May 6th at 6PM EDT Maysles Documentary Center will be hosting a live zoom conversation with filmmakers Lana Lin (The Cancer Journals Revisited) and Jenna Bliss (The People's Detox) and moderated by Kazembe Balagun.

RSVP here.

Copresented with the German Film Office, an initiative of the Goethe-Institut and German Films, as part of 1 Million Roses for Angela Davis – U.S. Edition.

What can experimental art practices linked to popular movements teach us about contemporary anticapitalist and anticolonial struggles in the Americas?

RSVP here. You can view the event by subscribing to the Common Notions youtube channel.

Jennifer Ponce de León presents Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War, a transdisciplinary and transnational study of the roles that art and aesthetics can play in the collective labor of creating and defending another social reality. She will discuss experimental art practices linked to Left social movements and uprisings in Argentina, Mexico, and the U.S. to show how these are part of international and ongoing rebellions against neoliberal capitalism and its violence. Ponce de León will be joined by Macarena Gómez-Barris in a conversation that explores contemporary social struggles in the Americas and the power of aesthetics to both compose and make visible a world beyond capitalism.

Jennifer Ponce de León is Assistant Professor of English and faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop. She is the author of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2021).

Macarena Gómez-Barris is founding Director of the Global South Center and Chair of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute, author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017), Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (University of California, 2009) and coeditor of Toward a Sociology of the Trace (University of Minnesota, 2010). 

Purchase your copy of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2021) here.

Hosted by Making Worlds Bookstore

Cosponsored by Common Notions Press and the Global South Center.

Part of the Radical May festival

The causes and consequences of the deepening care crisis and the possibilities for establishing a new politics of care, boldly reimagined.

Covid-19 has shone all too bright a light onto the problems that beset health and social care. Yet, even before the pandemic, it was clear our health and well-being was far from guaranteed. Years of neoliberal restructuring, austerity measures, the pursuit of profit as well as structural racism have created devastating vulnerabilities and entrenched profound inequalities in the access to care that go hand in hand with a systemic devaluation of the work of caring. 

Join Emma Dowling, author of The Care Crisis, Gregg Gonsalves and Amy Kapczynski, contributors to the Boston Review’s The Politics of Care: From COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter, to discuss the causes and consequences of the deepening care crisis in the US and the UK and the possibilities for establishing a new politics of care and for building new infrastructures of care that are rooted in social solidarity and well-being for all.

Register via Eventbrite. You can view the event by subscribing to the Common Notions youtube channel.

Emma Dowling is a sociologist and political economist currently based at the University of Vienna. She’s previously lived and worked in Britain and she has been active in feminist and global justice movements.

Gregg Gonsalves is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health, Faculty Co-Director of the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership, a core faculty member of the Yale Public Health Modeling Unit and a long-time advocate for health justice and access to medicines both globally and locally.

Amy Kapczynski is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Faculty Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership, and a long-time advocate for health justice and access to medicines both globally and locally.

Purchase Event Books at Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center:

The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It?

The Politics of Care: From COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter

Hosted by Making Worlds Bookstore and Social Center

Cosponsored by Verso Books, Boston Review, and Common Notions Press

A new era of abolitionism has arrived in the United States.

We see the idea of abolition reverberate across the Black Lives Matter and other BIPOC-led racial justice movements, as well as ongoing campaigns against police brutality, criminalization, mass incarceration, migrant detention and deportation, and support for political prisoners. How are today’s abolitionists challenging establishment media in their role in perpetuating racial, class, and social injustice and their responsibilities to redress historic and ongoing harm to racialized communities? What alternative abolitionist media are emerging from a range of communities and social movements?

This event brings scholars and activists into conversation to reflect on the lessons and possibilities for today’s abolitionist movements and their relation to media transformation — both institutionally in terms of the transformation of the existing media system, as well as the media transformations unfolding at the community and movement level that are building abolitionist futures.

Register Here

The discussion will address the questions: What role does the media play in upholding the particular form of penal democracy to which we are asked to consent? How important is freedom to democracy? What other forms of media and democracy are possible? What does a truly free press look like?

Ultimately, we will explore the fundamental question of how the principles of democracy and abolition can guide a just media system and a free society.

About the Speakers

Joy James

Joy James is Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College. An activist/advocate working for the release of political prisoners who challenged state violence and repression, James works with the Abolition Collective (AC) Black Internationalist Unions (BIUs), and was an editor of the AC 2016 Elections Blog. James writes on the "Captive Maternal" in political philosophy and popular culture. Her writings on politics, feminism and critical race theory, democracy and social justice have appeared in The Black Scholar, Boston Review, The New York Times, AAIHS Blog, APA Blog, and Feminist Wire. 

James is the author of Seeking the 'Beloved Community'; Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics; Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals; Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture. Her edited books on captivity and abolitionism include: Warfare in the American Homeland; The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings; Imprisoned Intellectuals; States of Confinement; The Black Feminist Reader (coedited with TD Sharpley-Whiting); and The Angela Y. Davis Reader. James curated the Harriet Tubman Literary Circle at UT-Austin to address abolitionist politics. She is currently working with activists and educators on a 2021 tribunal on political imprisonment and human rights violations in the US. 

Joy James is a contributor to Abolition Collective’s Making Abolitionist Worlds

Tauhid Chappell

Tauhid Chappell is a project manager for Free Press’ News Voices project, focusing on the program’s Philadelphia initiative to reimagine how the city’s local newsrooms approach their coverage of crime, violence and the criminal justice and carceral systems. An eight-year veteran of the media industry, he most recently worked as a social-media editor at The Washington Post before joining The Philadelphia Inquirer as an engagement editor, where he analyzed reader behavior on search, social and digital platforms. Tauhid is also an executive board member and parliamentarian of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, the first and oldest association of Black journalists in the country and the founding chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Clarise McCants

Clarise McCants heads the Story Team at Movement Alliance Project (MAP) and helps lead MAP’s work building narrative power that strengthens communities’ ability to make lasting change. This includes supporting campaigns and coalition work with narrative strategy, powerful content creation, and amplification. Clarise also leads the Police and Violence Narrative Project and works to transform dominant narratives on violence, police, and mass incarceration and center communities’ needs in the conversation on what it means to completely reimagine public safety. As a native Philadelphian, her leadership stems from the starting place of her own lived experience. 

Diamante Ortiz

Diamante Ortiz (she/her) is the cofounder and Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Black and Brown Coalition of Philadelphia and a leader in Reclaim Philadelphia’s Mass Liberation Task Force. Diamante’s passion for community engagement, advocacy, and political transparency began throughout her childhood in Los Sures Brooklyn, with gentrification and uprooting to BIPOC and this carried over to her undergraduate career at Temple University, where she continued to support groups such Stadium Stompers.

Diamond Hardiman

Diamond Hardiman is a coauthor and collaborator of Media 2070 report. She works as Free Press’ News Voices: Colorado manager in collaboration with community to reimagine local news. She aims to participate in the creation of a world where freedom is noncontingent—but rather, an inevitable necessity. She has worked in St.Louis and Mississippi as an advocate for tenants’ rights, bail abolition and for people sentenced to state execution. Diamond earned a B.A. in African-American Studies and Political Science from Saint Louis University

Moderated by Malav Kanuga of Common Notions

Register Here