resistance

So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance

brittany — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Traversing critical theory, body studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, and performance studies, Patrick Anderson’s So Much Wasted captures the “politics of morbidity” embedded in the act of self-starvation. Anderson focuses on three settings—the hospital/clinic, a gallery, and a prison—to consider the way people who refuse food remain subject both to institutional means of force and control along with ideological constraints and mechanisms of discipline. What can these emaciated figures, hurling themselves toward death (or, as Heidegger calls it, “being-toward-death”), teach us about subjectivity, political resistance, and the production of power through everyday disciplinary practices?

Anderson’s central claim—that self-starvation both refuses and reproduces the power of the state, and as such produces bodies and subjects capable of radically unsettling the status quo—weaves itself through many seemingly disparate moments: the political resistance of Turkish prison hunger strikes, the state’s imposition that Terri Schiavo must live despite her husband’s wishes, the life-threatening starvation performance art of Chris Burden (who, after staging his own shooting, street death, and near electrocution, asked others to watch as he wasted away for twenty-two days in a Venice Beach, CA art gallery), and Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, and Marina Abromovic’s staging of self-starvation as provocative, artistic disappearance. Perhaps most compelling is Anderson’s reimagining of leading feminist theorizing about anorexia as the internalization of misogyny (e.g., Susan Bordo, Susie Orbach); instead, he argues that anorexics may cultivate a “taste for power” that subverts dominant ideas about women, gender, and queerness as they dramatically rebel against state intervention.

Playful and sharp, astute and extraordinarily sympathetic, Anderson captures the inherent tragedy, power, and radical potential in this seemingly “powerless” act of self-starvation. Not only does he write with breathtaking clarity, at times frolicking between mother-child psychoanalytic theories of feeding and sexuality only to later arrive in the world of masochistic performance art, but he also genuinely extends the leading critical theories of the body, performance, power, and subjectivity (e.g., Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser, and the like). Anderson insists that self-starvation is not simply perversion, but rather, a mechanism that produces troubled reactions from other bodies (individual or the state). Thus, he subtly asks whether psychological treatments, historiographies of starving bodies, force feeding, extensive monitoring, and even photographs might serve an even more perverse purpose: investing the state with the authority to say “who must live and who may die.”

Suitable for numerous audiences—graduate courses in psychology, sociology, gender studies, and performance; scholarly audiences interested in bioethics, fatness studies, prisons, and the philosophy of selfhood; and those practitioners who work with self-starving or self-mutilating clients—this book carefully outlines a politics of resistance through dying, near-death, and “wasting away.” Even if it sometimes floats above its subjects a bit—for example, I kept wanting more content directly from those who have survived their self-starvation attempts—Anderson has written a book worthy of attention and study. By imagining rebellion as a refusal to consume, he forges new and powerful links between gender, sexuality, the body, and the ideological apparatus of the state as it faces the many rebellions of its subjects.

Written by: Breanne Fahs, February 10th 2011

Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War

mandy — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Jodi Kim

University Of Minnesota Press

In Ends of Empire, Jodi Kim approaches the Cold War not as a period in United States history, but as an epistemology, a continued production of knowledge. How does the Cold War generate specific forms of knowledge about the world that reproduce the binary categories of nations as “good” and “evil”? The Cold War is now what Kim characterizes as a “protracted afterlife,” as its gendered and racialized logics and rhetorics are once again deployed in the War on Terror.

Ends of Empire is, therefore, a timely intervention. Kim traces how the rivalry between the US and the USSR was triangulated throughout Asia, and how this triangulation has been sustained through complex cultural formations that naturalize the values of imperialism.

Kim’s project draws heavily from Cultural Studies, as she looks into cultural production as sites of resistance. Since dominant historical accounts obscure the gendered and racialized logics of the Cold War as an epistemology, Kim turns instead towards Asian American cultural products. She skillfully turns her analytic eye on how such literary and cinematic texts make visible the mandated “forgettings,” and violent displacements that Cold War logic continues to unleash in Asia.

In Chapter Three, for example, Kim examines Ruth L. Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats. Jane, one of the novel’s main characters, is the adult daughter of a Japanese mother and an American father who served as an Army botanist during World War II. In her capacity as producer for a television show, Jane promotes the cooking and consumption of US meat to Japanese housewives. Jane is thus part of an enterprise to recruit Japanese housewives as enthusiastic consumers of US products, a contemporary form of imperialist gendered racial rehabilitation for a nation that was once seen as an enemy.

Jane’s observations about the lingering cancers and contaminations in Japan and in American towns that produced plutonium for the bombs, as well as her meditations on her father’s death from cancer, highlight the transnational links between Japanese and US victims of the war, who are all but ignored in dominant historical accounts. In Chapter Five, Kim’s reading of the PBS documentary Daughter from Danang shows how the continued inequalities in political and racial economies made it impossible for a US transracial adoptee to know the lives of her Vietnamese mother and family.

Kim provides a good example of how cultural critique could be employed to make visible various narratives that are suppressed in dominant accounts of history. Many of the narratives of loss, violence, and haunting that she teases out would be impossible to articulate outside literary or cinematic forms. Ends of Empire thus serves to illustrate how cultural production not only serves to give voice to suppressed histories. By refusing to conform to the logics of the Cold War, these works also serve important sites of resistance.

Kim ends her book with the hope that her efforts to trace links between former and current manifestations of US empire would contribute to “a broader interrogation of the intersecting genealogies that have produced our contemporary moment of neoliberal globalization, imperial mandate, and enduring gendered racial regimes of domination.” It is a welcome invitation, as social critique is particularly relevant when it is oriented towards imagining ways of life and organizing that are not built around the need to reproduce empire.

Written by: Tanglad, September 14th 2010

Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women’s Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalism

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Faegheh Shirazi

University of Florida Press

Central to Islamic scripturalist assertion, or "Islamic fundamentalism" as it is often referred to, is the notion of the ideal Muslim woman, whose status, roles and functions are defined by rules and norms deriving from a narrow, restrictive and patriarchal reading of the Islamic scripturalist tradition. The ‘ideal’ Muslim woman in Islamic ‘fundamentalist’ discourse is defined as being submissive to male authority, while being modest and virtuous in a patriarchally-defined sense. She is to be carefully controlled and monitored, at all times, by patriarchal authority. The spread of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ throughout Muslim communities has had seriously negative consequences for Muslim women’s rights and status. Not surprisingly, groups of Muslim women across the world have begun mobilizing against Islamic ‘fundamentalism’, some on a secular basis, using secular human rights arguments, others, working within a broadly-defined Islamic tradition, employing Islamic arguments for achieving gender equality and challenging patriarchy and misogyny in the name of Islam.

Velvet Jihad provides a fascinating general picture of the status and conditions of women in Muslim communities around the world faced with the challenge of Islamic scripturalist assertion. Shirazi admits that patriarchy is, of course, not a Muslim-specific phenomenon, but argues that the forms that it takes in Muslim communities and Muslim-majority countries makes it particularly problematic and difficult to oppose in that it is generally sought to be legitimised in the name of religion. Hence, challenging such patriarchy is a particularly arduous task as it is easily branded as a challenge to religion itself. The book catalogues a long list of hurdles and restrictions that millions of Muslim women across the world are subjected to in the name of Islam.

With abysmal levels of education, and being economically heavily dependent on their men folk, it is not surprising that vast numbers Muslim women simply have no choice but to accept their lot. Many, as Shirazi tells us, even accept this as mandated by Islam itself. Yet, Shirazi tells us there is what she colourfully calls a "velvet jihad" astir in across numerous Muslim communities spearheaded by bold Muslim women who are now vocally and stridently challenging all forms of oppression in the name of Islam. She likens it to the "velvet revolution," a peaceful movement of resistance that brought down communist dictatorships in eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

What, then, are the means that assertive Muslim women (and there are many, as Shirazi documents) are today adopting to fight patriarchy and misogyny in the name of Islam? They fall into two broad categories. Some Muslim women, who may be defined as "Muslim feminists," are seeking to oppose patriarchal laws, rules, and practices using modern human rights arguments, such as secularism, freedom, justice, and democracy, linking up with reformers, both men and women, both within their communities and countries and at the international level, to highlight the oppression of women in the name of Islam. Shirazi describes numerous such Muslim women’s groups across the world which are using this approach, with varying degrees of success. This strategy might not, however, have much resonance with religious-minded Muslims, who could easily be made to be believe that such arguments for women’s rights are not just "un-Islamic," but, rather, represent, as it is often put, an "anti-Islamic, Western conspiracy." Indeed, that precisely is what Islamic conservatives and radicals never tire of arguing.

A more culturally-rooted, and, therefore, for many practising Muslims, perhaps a more acceptable way of shaping demands for gender equality and of critiquing misogyny and patriarchy in the name of Islam, Shirazi points out, is represented by the phenomenon often labeled as "Islamic feminism." Not all the women (and men) who are engaged in articulating an Islamic feminist discourse and politics might, however, identify with that label, given the political and ideological baggage associated with the term feminism. Be that as it may, Islamic feminism, Shirazi shows by drawing on empirical evidence from extensive fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Europe, and America as well as a massive corpus of literature available on the Internet, is today a growing challenge to the authoritarian, deeply-patriarchal versions of Islam zealously upheld both Islamic conservatives and ‘fundamentalists’, who, despite their differences, are almost unanimous on the "women’s question."

Citing the works—both literary as well as practical—of a vast number of Muslim women scholars and activists as they seek to counter patriarchy in the name of Islam, Shirazi concludes that their valiant efforts, derided and fiercely opposed by powerful patriarchal forces, truly herald the arrival of a velvet jihad, one that can play a key role in not just championing Muslim women’s rights but also in fashioning more compassionate and just understandings of Islam while critiquing and standing up to violent, authoritarian, patriarchal mullahs and Islamists who claim to represent Islamic authenticity. That, in short, is what this inspiring book is all about.

A longer, more in-depth version of this review can be found at CounterCurrents

Written by: Yoginder Sikand, August 19th 2010

Anarchism and Its Aspirations

admin — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Cindy Milstein

AK Press, Institute for Anarchist Studies

Anarchism and Its Aspirations is a collection of several essays that together offer an introduction to modern anarchist thought and its applications. The title essay, which is the first and longest essay in the book, discusses anarchism’s historical and philosophical roots, as well as its fundamental tenets. The other three essays, “Anarchism’s Promise for Anticapitalist Resistance,” “Democracy is Direct,” and “Reclaim the Cities: From Protest to Popular Power,” attempt to tease out the relevance of anarchism in the contemporary context of state consolidation and the globalization of capital.

The book is geared toward two audiences: first, established anarchists who want to renew their visions for anarchism, and second, readers curious about anarchism who are familiar with the basics of progressive political theory, but unacquainted with anarchist thought in particular. As the author states explicitly, the book attempts to present a rosy view of anarchism–an emphasis on what it strives to be capable of–more than a detailed analysis of its past or present weaknesses or distortions. However, the author does touch on her opinions about the areas in which anarchism has room to grow–in particular, she discusses the importance of getting beyond “protests against” and placing more emphasis on building popular power.

I appreciated the book’s visionary tone, as well as the clear analysis of what anarchism uniquely has to offer to other progressive schools of thought. Among the many aspects of anarchism discussed in the essays, I found the focus on unabashed utopianism particularly compelling. In a world in which even the most progressive of activists often think in terms of strategic compromise, it is refreshing to remember that it is possible to dream bigger dreams–anarchist dreams of pluralism, direct democracy, organizing for mutual aid based on true consensus, and above all, an abundance of resources, love, play, sustainability, and peace for all inhabitants of the planet.

If Anarchism and Its Aspirations has a single flaw, it is its tendency towards slightly dense prose. Overall, it is highly readable, especially given the many layers of history and politics that it explores with depth and nuance. However, a few more anecdotes and applications would have helped this particular reader immensely–the most striking example is the “battle of Seattle,” which is mentioned throughout the book as a watershed moment for modern anarchism, but which is never elucidated, not even via a brief account of the events of November 30, 1999. In this regard, the book occasionally assumes prior knowledge and familiarity (which I, for one, didn’t have) with the internal politics of modern anarchism, which renders some of the book’s detailed political discussion abstract and difficult to follow. In general, I don’t have a problem with finding myself in over my head when I’m reading about something new–in this case, though, the book states that one of its two main aims is to serve as an introduction to anarchism to those who are unfamiliar with it, so I feel that the omission deserves comment.

On the whole, though, Anarchism and Its Aspirations succeeds in painting a hopeful portrait of the relevance and utility of an anarchist framework in the context of the contemporary struggle for revolutionary social change.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, July 24th 2010

You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive

admin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Seth Tobocman

AK Press

You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive is a collection of graphic work by comic artist and activist Seth Tobocman. The artwork dates back to 1980, when Tobocman and Peter Kuper founded the political comix magazine War World 3 Illustrated, and critical issues of this era are addressed, including Reaganomics, the AIDS pandemic, gentrification struggles in New York City, the occupation of Palestine, and the imprisonment of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive was originally published in 1989 and then again ten years later. Both times it sold out quickly. This most recent acquisition and printing from AK Press is a sign of Tobocman’s work's longevity, and the continued demand for his politically conscious art.

Tobocman is a fixture of New York City’s downtown punk scene and the Lower East Side squatter’s movement. Chances are local readers have seen him in his Lower East Side neighborhood, maybe reading at Bluestockings or ABC No Rio. Tobocman, like his comics, is accessible, present, and engaged in his community. His comics have never been recognized or celebrated by the mainstream art market, which is not surprising considering his critique of bourgeois conformist politics, and Tobocman produces art for the street, not the gallery.

This latest release of You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive gives longtime fans, as well as first-time readers, a chance to enjoy Tobocman’s art and utilize his images (as activists and community organizers often have) to produce political posters, buttons, patches, and graffiti. The direct and utilitarian nature of Tobocman’s work, and of comic art in general, is so appealing because you get an immediate, straightforward, and high impact method of communication and direct action marketing. You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive is a creative, in-your-face resource and a critical tool for resistance.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, April 14th 2010

Resistance Through Writing: An Interview with Victoria Law

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:56:00 +0000

Interview with Victoria Law

Feminist Review recently interviewed writer and activist Victoria Law on her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. Here Law shares her thoughts on making her book an activist tool, the culture’s blind spot about the prison industry, social justice movements’ responsibility to incarcerated women’s issues, and how motherhood radically altered her own work and informed her upcoming anthology, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind.

Who did you write Resistance Behind Bars for?

I originally wrote the book, or the college paper that was the start of it, with no audience in mind. I had spent a semester researching post-Attica prisoner organizing and resistance in college. At the end of the semester, I looked back at what I had and realized that every instance, except for one, was about male prisoners. So the first paper was written to explore what women were doing and why their actions weren’t as well-documented, or remembered, as their male counterparts.

When I first had the idea to turn my paper into a book, I had a few audiences in mind: people who were already interested in prison and prisoner issues; those interested in women’s issues; people who aren’t particularly interested in prisons or prisoners’ issues, but are interested in tales of resistance, and incarcerated women themselves. In corresponding with over a dozen women incarcerated around the country, I also wanted to make sure that the book was accessible to them. None of the women I’d reached out to had any idea of organizing being done in other prisons or of the previous organizing, resistance, and riots that had happened in women’s prisons in the 1970s and 1980s. I kept in mind that I wanted my book—and the information in it—to be accessible to someone with an eighth-grade education. The book doesn’t work as a potential organizing tool if those most affected by these issues aren’t able to read and comprehend it.

What’s the response to Resistance Behind Bars been like—and how has it affected you personally and your work as an activist?

I think that because Resistance Behind Bars is a book specifically about incarcerated women—and even more specifically about their acts of resistance—it’s attracted attention and interest from people who normally think of prison issues as male issues and are excited and intrigued by incarcerated women’s resistance. Such an enthusiastic response means that I’ve been kept busy planning and doing events, not only the typical bookstore readings, but also workshops at various social justice conferences and at schools.

My daughter, who was a newborn when I first started researching incarcerated women’s resistance, is now eight years old and knows a lot about prisons, prison and gender, and abolition, probably more than most other eight-year-olds (except, perhaps, for any children whose parents are Critical Resistance organizers). She’s asked me very pointed questions about both realities inside prisons and ideas about abolition, which means that I had to clearly articulate my arguments, thoughts, and ideas.

What was the writing process like for this book?

When I first started researching, I did two things: I set aside all preconceived notions of what prisoner organizing might look like and started reading specifically about women in prison. I found a lot of material covered issues like motherhood and pregnancy. Issues of parenting—and, of course, pregnancy—do not come up in documentation about male prisoner organizing, and so people who are looking at instances of prisoner resistance aren’t going to necessarily look at how they organize around and challenge the realities of parents in prison. Battering and past abuse is another issue that comes up in a lot of the studies around incarcerated women, but again, that’s not an issue that we see impacting men going to prison and thus isn’t looked at as a “prison issue.”

I also scoured the news—and alternative media, mostly prison-related zines—for mentions of actions by incarcerated women. Once I found that someone had done something—filed a lawsuit, complained to the press, launched a hunger strike, etc.—I used the websites of either that state prison system or the Federal Bureau of Prisons to find the woman’s contact information and sent her a letter explaining who I was and what I was researching. I asked if she would be willing to share her stories and experiences with me.

Not wanting to take without giving back, I offered what I could: I offered to look up lawsuits for them and send them copies of court decisions; I offered to look up other resources for them; I offered to send them books via the Books Through Bars program that I helped start here in NYC; I sent stamps so that they could not only respond to me, but also write letters to other groups or people; in some cases, I offered to call their children if they were unable to get through themselves.

What were some of the most surprising realities about women in prison that you discovered in researching your book?

I remember receiving a letter from the Clear Creek County Jail in Colorado about the re-institution of the chain gang for the women held there. That wasn’t the huge surprise; the surprise was that the woman who wrote me was actually happy to be on the chain gang! She had recently given her newborn son up for adoption, and so I can’t help but wonder if keeping occupied, even if it’s on a chain gang, helps her process losing him. She’s not the only one: women at Clear Creek want to be on the chain gang. It’s tiring, backbreaking work in the hot sun, but it’s also the first chance they’ve been given to get out of their cells, be outdoors, and accrue “good time,” or time off their sentences. Keep in mind that the jail’s male inmates have had the chain gang for a while. They also have other chances to earn “good time.”

What are the most common misconceptions and assumptions circulating right now about women in prison that keep people from understanding what’s really going on inside prisons for women?

In May, I was invited to speak at a New York City high school about women and prison. Having done so many of these talks to people who are interested in prison issues and have some framework about the issue, I forget what the majority of people think or don’t know. I came in ready to talk about historical contexts and what is going on now and started with the question: “What do you think about when you think about prison? Who goes to prison and why?”

One girl raised her hand and said, “Criminals. People who do bad things.”

“Drug dealers.”

“Men.”

I realized that most of the students had no framework about incarceration other than what they had been fed by the mass media, so I had to mentally throw out my outline and start from scratch. I talked about poverty and racial profiling, the history of the prison as a means of social control, how Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon equated the civil rights movements and liberation movements with street crime and started their war(s) on crime to lock up poor people of color before they could mobilize to demand their rights. None of the students had ever heard of the Rockefeller Drug Laws or mandatory minimum sentencing. I hadn’t either when I was their age, and I grew up in New York City too!

I also talked about some of the conditions inside—the lack of health care treatment, the fact that staff members often encouraged prisoner-on-prisoner violence, because it’s easier for them if the prisoners aren’t uniting and fighting for basic human rights, lack of educational programs inside the prison. At the end of the hour, when we talked about what they, as high school students, could do about this issue, one boy raised his hand and suggested that we should lobby for medical treatment for people inside prison. “If I broke my leg in prison—or anywhere—I would want people to help me get it treated.”

Later one of the coordinators of that high school’s community day told me, “Students in your session were really struck by the experiences you shared with them, and there has been a lot of conversation in among students about issues concerning prison.” Some of the students were talking about forming a student club to do work around some of these issues, like the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

You write in the book that calls for reform have failed to adequately address the factors leading to women’s incarceration. How so?

Prisons fail to address the societal conditions that lead to incarceration, such as poverty and the increasing feminization of poverty, misogyny, violence, racism, and the issues that accompany women to prison. How does locking someone in a cage address any of these factors?

You have to remember that people have gone to prison face numerous obstacles in successfully reintegrating into the community when they are released from prison. Oftentimes, they are not only released with the same lack of resources and opportunities than they had before being arrested and incarcerated, but now have a criminal record which prevents them from getting certain jobs, qualifying for certain housing, or social safety nets. The 1996 welfare “reform” banned people with drug felonies for life. Similar legislation banned them from receiving governmental financial aid for college, etc.

We also need to keep in mind that prison issues affect all sorts of issues on the outside, shifting money and resources away from other public entities, such as education, housing, health care, drug treatment, and other societal supports that are needed.

Did motherhood change your own activism?

Before motherhood, I was super-involved in all sorts of political projects and organizing. New motherhood definitely made me sit still! Once my daughter was born, I realized that I had to pick a few issues and focus on them. I also couldn’t risk arrest or bringing my daughter to something where the police might attack the crowd.

I started researching resistance and organizing among incarcerated women shortly after my daughter was born. Being stuck inside during the winter with a newborn gave me a lot of time to read, respond to letters, contemplate ideas and issues—this, by the way, is something I did a lot while nursing—and work on draft after draft of this paper. I don’t know if I would have had this same opportunity if I had tried to do this as a childfree person rushing off from one political [event] to another at various hours of the day and night, or if my daughter had been older, more mobile, and needing more direct attention.

I want to stress that what’s made my continued involvement and even writing my book possible is the huge amount of support I get from my friends and the people with whom I organize. I realize that not all mothers get this type of support, although they should, and that I’m extremely fortunate to have such a wonderful support system.

What are you working on now?

My next book, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, will be an anthology co-edited with China Martens, a mother, writer, and publisher of the longest running subculture parenting zine, T_he Future Generation_. Originally, China and I wanted to share our experiences as radical mothers and advocate for community support of all families. We were meeting parents and their allies and hearing their stories and experiences. A few years ago, we realized that we wanted to extend the reach of our message of community support and decided to compile a handbook specifically geared towards allies, or potential allies, of radical parents.

With Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, we’re addressing the need to support—and build support systems for—families in our own social justice movements. In so many of our so-called radical movements, we’re not providing support for people who decide to have children so that they can continue participating in political work. There’s an individualistic attitude that says, “Well, I didn’t choose to have kids. You did, so you deal with them.”

Even when there’s not an overt resistance to having children in our movements, we need to look at how ways that we organize and socialize exclude parents and caretakers. We lose valuable organizers—and organizing experience—when we don’t take these factors into consideration.

Unlike Resistance Behind Bars, this book will be an anthology of both caregivers and their allies of ways that their movements support children and their caretakers in your collectives, organizations, or communities. We are especially seeking experiences that take into account factors such as race, class, gender, single parenthood, and/or mental health issues, since these issues often aren’t talked about when we talk about building communities and support systems here on the outside. We’re still reaching out, meeting people and collecting submissions, so if anyone out there has stories and experiences to share, they should definitely get in touch!

Written by: Ellen Papazian, November 9th 2009

Silence Not, A Love Story

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:07:00 +0000

By Cynthia L. Cooper

Gihon River Press

Everyone loves a love story, especially one with a happy ending, and award-winning playwright and journalist Cynthia L. Cooper’s latest play, a forty-four-scene two-act, is a whopper. Silence Not, A Love Story tells the improbable tale—based on a true story—of Gisa Peiper, a young Jewish student stifled by religious Orthodoxy, and Paul Konopka, a Catholic craftsman, who met in late-1920s Germany while working with the anti-fascist International Socialist Combat League, known as the ISK. It was not love at first sight, but it was close, bolstered by each individual’s ironclad commitment to social justice and human rights.

Their organization, Cooper writes in the play’s Prologue, “was made up of pacifists and humanitarians. Politically, the group was strongly opposed to communism, but deeply committed to the labor movement… Members of the ISK studied political issues through group analyses and Socratic questioning, and they believed that action must follow understanding.” Members ran a school and published a newspaper; they were also encouraged to follow a vegetarian diet, avoid alcohol and spend time outdoors, hiking and enjoying the natural world. By all accounts the ISK was bold and members routinely put themselves in harm’s way. Peiper and Konopka were especially fearless and took incredible risks to publicize the danger posed by newly appointed German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

From his first utterances as a national leader, Peiper and Konopka attempted to activate German citizens to oppose him and his fascist Nazi Party and Peiper’s reporting for the ISK press acknowledged the threat. People, she wrote, knew what Hitler and the Nazis stood for before they came to power. “Their terror tactics showed in street fights, in writings, in threats…The demeaning and torturing of anyone resisting them started immediately after January 1933. Fear pervaded the country. Everybody knew about the terror. It was also known outside of Germany.”

But breaking through angst is no easy feat and Silence Not, A Love Story includes riveting depictions of the general public’s go-along-to-get-along capitulation to Hitler’s demands. Not surprisingly, Konopka ended up on Nazi radar and, in short order, was forced to flee Germany and continue his underground agitation from France. Peiper eventually joined him, but not before being jailed for her pro-democracy efforts.

After the war, the pair moved to the United States. They married in 1941, 12 years after meeting, and remained together until Konopka’s death in 1976. Peiper became a social worker, writer and professor at the University of Minnesota School of Social Work and her long career as a youth advocate was dedicated to fostering human dignity. Her message was constant. We must never forget the millions of people whose lives were cut short by the Nazis. What's more, she served as a living rebuttal to Holocaust deniers and fascist apologists until her death in 2003.

Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, in an introduction to Silence Not, puts Peiper and Konopka’s lives in context: “For Gisa Peiper, and for Rosa Parks and the civil rights activists, their very humanity lay in their acts of resisting evil. They could no more remain passive, removed, and quiescent than they could stop breathing… Without those who stand up for justice, where would the rest of us be?”

After this summer’s murder of Dr. George Tiller and Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Johns, this question seems particularly resonant.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, September 24th 2009

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:37:00 +0000

By Victoria Law

PM Press

Of the many staggering statistics in Victoria Law’s eight-year study, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women, the following fact will make your jaw drop: the number of incarcerated women in United States prisons has almost doubled from 68,468 to 104,848 between 1995 and 2004.

Like their male counterparts, this population of women is overwhelmingly comprised of African Americans and Latinas, which can be largely attributed to racial profiling—not, as popular mythology might suggest—an ad hoc increase in crime amongst these ethnic groups. Law’s fascinating text is born from her personal experience as a teenager who narrowly avoided incarceration herself, and the friendships she cultivated with women who were not so lucky. As Law raised her own consciousness about the prison-industrial—complex, she began investigating incarcerated women’s involvement in prisoners-rights movements and was told flat-out by other activists that “Women don’t organize.”

Resistance Behind Bars is a compelling testament to the untruth of this statement, and offers innumerable examples of women’s prison uprisings. One such instance is a 1975 sit-down demonstration for improved medical care at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women, in which women fought back against prison guards attempting to beat and herd them into a gymnasium. Creatively, these prisoners used volleyball net poles, chunks of concrete and anything else immediately available, causing the state to invoke the aid of over 100 guards from other prisons to pacify the rebellion.

Law’s exhaustively researched text includes anecdotal information she harvested from interviews, letters, and conversations with prisoners as well as government reports and major media sources. Most importantly, Law highlights the deeply gendered nature of women’s prison experiences, which cuts across virtually all aspects of incarcerated life. Sexual abuse, motherhood, physical labor, education, medical care, and the extent to which women prisoners’ activism receives media attention are all areas that Law treats with a distinct sense of urgency. What’s more, Resistance Behind Bars has bonus features that underpin Law’s activist project: a list of resources organized according to region for how readers can get involved in the prisoners-rights movement, and an annotated list of recommended readings.

Written by: Heather Brown, July 5th 2009

Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland

admin — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:09:00 +0000

Edited by Joshua Frank, Jeffrey St. Clair

AK Press

As we enter the final countdown to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, we will hear political pundits talk in red- and blue-state terms. The shorthand goes like this: blue states are progressive and urban, while red states are conservative and rural. And those purple states? Well, forget about those states; they're the bisexuals of electoral politics. We just don't know what to do with them. (wink)

As someone who has spent most of her life participating in radical social movements in the red states I call home, I was hoping Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair's edited volume, Red State Rebels, would dispel the myth that activism is something that only exists on the coasts. To this end, the authors were successful. Within these 300+ pages, short, easy-to-read essays reveal that resistance to American hegemony comes in many forms.

For almost a hundred years, the farmers of North Dakota have been engaging in non-corporate models of doing business. From buying gasoline from cooperative gas stations to selling their agricultural products to producer cooperatives, the farmers of North Dakota have been sticking it to "the corporate man" for some time. And now, in the twenty-first century, these farmers are winning the fight against Monsanto's genetically-engineered (GE) seed and corporate greed - not for environmental reasons, but for economic ones! When Monsanto started punishing farmers for brown-bagging (replanting seed from their own harvest, rather than buying new seed), farmers organized and offered Monsanto the first anti-GE wheat campaign organized by American farmers. Because farmers were the organizers of the movement, Monsanto was forced out of the state's wheat production, teaching us all an important lesson in corporate resistance: kill the demand for a product, and the corporations will leave.

This issue of farmers resisting corporate greed is just one of the issues presented to us in this forty-three essay volume. Written in an accessible, investigative journalism style, these essays educate readers about all sorts of issues affecting rural America: the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, the cost of using your First Amendment rights in front of conservative police, polluted land left from industry long gone, and resistance to upscale resorts attempting to destroy nature in order to bring city-folk out into the former wilderness. Many essays focus on individuals who experience repression for being the "opinionated weirdo" in town—a common target for rural law enforcement.

Except occasionally, most of the essays focus on environmental and land issues. And while this is not overly surprising considering the environmentalist backgrounds of both of the co-editors, it unfortunately upholds the idea that red states are entirely rural, which they are not. Not a single essay looks at activist organizing efforts in college towns, a place where many red state rebels find solace and build communities of support to resist becoming the lone weirdo target. Instead red state rebels are painted as solitary fighters, taking on "the man" or law enforcement with a rugged individualist fervor.

Also, with the exception of one article on rebuilding New Orleans, this volume skips over activist struggles in urban cities. Unfortunately, even when these articles deal with rural issues faced by people of color, the authors fail to embed their stories within a critical race or anti-racist framework. Few articles speak about gender issues and none even begin to touch on queer issues. Yes, there are articles that include people of color, women, and GLBTQ people, but there is no critical analysis of race, gender, and sexuality.

Despite these flaws, this edited volume is a must-read for those interested in buffing up their knowledge of grassroots resistance across the Heartland. Though the book too narrowly focuses on rural land and environmental issues, this content is especially thought-provoking and offers many new ideas for activist tactics. Since it's not written from an over-the-top radical or single ideological perspective, and since nowhere does the volume pretend that Democrats are all good and Republicans are all not good, this book would make an excellent gift for a friend or family member you feel needs to hear about resistance to the status quo.

Written by: Ailecia Ruscin, October 15th 2008

The Hanging of Angelique

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:54:00 +0000

By Afua Cooper

University of Georgia Press

The history of Canadian black slavery is a story quite often untold. The Hanging of Angelique opens the doors to the unknown. After fifteen years of research, Afua Cooper brings to light the “untold story of Canadian slavery and the burning of Old Montreal”.

Cooper weaves together crucial historical facts that are often unspoken, and similar to the many stories that Americans have heard over time. The sad and intricate life of a black woman who, at only 29 years young, was full of despair and discovered a longing within herself to be set free. But at what cost? After a catastrophic fire was set to old Montreal, Marie Joseph Angelique, a Portuguese black slave, was accused of setting the fire.

Cooper leaves the ending unspoken: “Did Angelique set the fire? Your guess is as good as mine.” But her intricately detailed research tells the story for her. It’s the writing of Cooper that is pleasantly appeasing as you dive deep into a historical conundrum of right versus wrong.

The detailed filled story offers a new look into the life of Angelique and gives readers a well defined idea of exactly what slavery was like in Canada in 1734. It allows the reader to see a glimpse of the life that Angelique struggled with on daily basis and leaves the unspoken whisper in the back of your mind: Did she do it? What would I do?

Cooper tells the story of a woman who refused to fit into the role that has been chiseled for her and her sad demise while creating the big picture that shows what exactly it meant to be a black slave woman in Canada.

Considered to be the “oldest slave narrative in the New World,” The Hanging of Angelique will leave you with a saddened and somber idea of what a black Canadian woman’s place was at that time, and the lack of identity that you were free to call your own. Cooper gently nudges the readers through the novel and as you turn the final page, you’ll feel the oppressive hands of slavery around your ankles, slowly pulling you underwater until the light has completely dimmed.

Written by: Megan Blair, April 30th 2007