A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land

Second Carnival of Feminist Parenting

2009-07-14T10:07:00.000-04:00

Check out the Second Carnival of Feminist Parenting. This neat blog carnival includes a few posts that were submitted for the event, including my recent piece called "On Gendered Interests in Children," as well as a bunch of unsubmitted links related to feminism and parenting. Lots of interesting stuff!

If that isn't enough blog-based goodness about feminist parenting for you, you can also look back at the first edition of the carnival.

If you write about related things, please check out this page, which is a general description of the carnival and a link to the submission form. They didn't have a huge number of submissions this time around, so please think about putting some of your own work forward for the next one!

Two Examples of the Historical Erasure of Struggle

2009-07-12T13:04:00.003-04:00

A primary focus of my reading and writing has for years been histories of struggle in the Canadian context. It is, therefore, hardly news to me that struggles against oppression and exploitation, and their crucial role in creating space of greater freedom and social justice in the present (and future), are persistently erased from the mainstream collective memory -- "the social organization of forgetting," a friend calls it. I rather like that phrase. I still manage to run across examples of this that make me shake my head, however. This post is to share two such examples that I have encountered over the last few weeks in writing a chapter based on stories from a few different interview participants who have been involved in indigenous struggles in urban areas. The fact that these are struggles waged by people who experience both racism and colonization is, I think, very much related to the this historical erasure.

Example One -- Grassroots Response to the White Paper

The first is a big one. It's possible, in fact, that I just haven't found the right sources, the ones that talk about it, and if so I would really like to be corrected. Though I suspect that if such sources exist, at least one of the things that I have found would reference them. In any case, I will proceed based on what I know.

In the late '60s, there was an upsurge in the cenutries-long process of indigenous anti-colonial resistance. It began, from what I understand, in the part of Turtle Island colonized by the United States and fairly soon spread to the part colonized by Canada. In part to preempt this, in 1969 the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau introduced a public policy document called the White Paper. This document, in the name of an individualistic liberal understanding of "equality," proposed to end any legal recognition of indigeneity -- reserve communities turned into ordinary municipalities, reserved land broken up into individually owned plots, denial or extinguishment of settler state recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights, a complete folding into mainstream service provision, and a few other things. In response, there was vocal and extremely united opposition from across the many and diverse indigenous peoples colonized by Canada, which by 1971 had forced the Liberals to withdraw the proposals. Notwithstanding that it is commonly understood that the same basic assimilationist goals motivate the settler state's orientation to the peoples it is colonizing to this day, forcing it to retreat and regroup and creating space for indigenous survival and further resurgence were great victories.

Given the importance of this moment not only in the histories of indigenous peoples in northern Turtle Island but in the history of the Canadian state, I find it flabbergasting that there is no broad history of grassroots indigenous struggle, including in response to the White Paper, in those years. Most general sources that I have found on indigenous people in Canada that talk about those years have similar elements: they describe the White Paper and why the vast majority of indigenous people considered it cultural genocide; they talk about the important roles played in giving voice to that opposition by indigenous leaders and political organizations at the provincial and national levels; and they say virtually nothing about grassroots organizing in reserve communities and cities. Change is shown as being about interactions between leaders and the state, with strongly worded policy briefs playing a major role, and with no hint that leaders only exist because they are in dynamic relation with peoples that they may in some sense lead but that they do not control and that are themselves active agents in history. Ordinary people, and struggle as something ordinary people do, gets written out. I should add that I have encountered three important but narrow exceptions -- a biography of an important national leader in that era, a history of the period by a white feminist woman that includes a chapter that talks about a very partial slice of grassroots indigenous struggle, and a book by a radical Metis man that has a similar chapter on a different slice. But nothing even approaching an exhaustive, general examination.

I should add that I'm sure many indigenous communities have preserved the memories of those days in stories, as communities in longterm struggle tend to do, and really that's the most important thing. I also know there can be good reasons not to make such stories accessible to the oppressor. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that a lot of the reason for the absence of such histories has more to do with the ways in which mainstream institutions that produce historical narratives are funded, peopled, and organized. And I still cannot dismiss my sense that the cause of transformative social change is better served by trumpeting the stories of past struggles as far and wide as we can.

Example Two -- Mainstream Reporting of Indigenous Victory Over Children's Aid

The other example is much smaller. I spent a few days recently looking at old microfilmed newspapers in a Toronto library. Mostly it was the Winnipeg Free Press. I was trying to find material related to indigenous struggle with the Winnipeg Children's Aid Society in the late '70s and early '80s. Across Canada starting in the '60s and continuing in many places today, child welfare agencies have taken up the colonial role left by the receding residential school system -- that of stealing children from their families and raising them in ways that often weakens or even destroys their ties to their nations, their cultures, and sometimes even their very selves. In the early '80s, sparked by the tragic death of an 18 month-old in CAS care, a group of indigenous people -- mostly women -- waged a brilliant struggle against the CAS. They didn't get everything they wanted, but they were able to force significant changes in how child welfare worked, including the complete dismantling of the organization that had terrorized their families for decades and a new system that, while still deeply flawed, included more space for the urban indigenous community to protect its own children. As is always the case, this depended on cleverly working with other factors at play. CAS upper management was notoriously hostile to and lashed out at the merest hint of criticism, and as the indigenous community turned up the heat, relations between upper management and workers, between upper management and the board of directors, and between upper management and the provincial government seriously deteriorated. Add in a couple of sympathetic journalists (carefully cultivated), a family court justice doing a review of the system whose conscience did not allow him to downplay in his reports the damage done to indigenous people over the years, a related but separate process over the same years whereby Manitoba indigenous nations based on reserved land were taking direct control of child welfare in their territories, and an NDP provincial government that was hardly a close friend of indigenous people but whose electoral needs left some space for prodding in just directions.

Judging as best I can with white eyes and form this end of history, I would describe the coverage in the Free Press as somewhat inconsistent but good at some key moments. What is interesting, though, was its coverage some time after those key moments. As I said, one of the outcomes of all of this was that the Winnipeg CAS, after being ordered into a sort of trusteeship for a period of time by the province, was dismantled and replaced by half a dozen new organizations. For the occasion of the last meeting of the CAS trusteeship board and its final cessation of operations a month or two later, the Free Press had a total of two news articles and an editorial, each of which presented a summary of the events that had lead to this. Native people were mentioned exactly once, in one of the news articles, in a vague and short clause that said something about "criticism" from them, packed into a sentence about other things. The editorial and the other news article didn't mention indigenous people or grassroots struggle at all.

Certainly struggle by indigenous people in Winnipeg wasn't the only thing going on, and without other factors being as they were the outcome would probably have been different. But grassroots struggle by indigenous people was absolutely necessary to create that outcome. Yet it was (despite earlier coverage that wasn't bad) completely erased from that crucial first draft of history that is the daily newspaper as it was authoritatively setting the issue to rest.

Review: Reasoning Otherwise

2009-07-07T20:43:00.000-04:00

[Ian McKay. Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2008.]

I struggle on a daily basis with the fact that any act of writing is inherently arrogant -- except for journal-bound confessions destined for no eyes but the author's, the act of writing, whatever its specific substance, contains within it the presumption that someone, somewhere will benefit from reading what is produced. This is true of the most humble and cautious blog post, and the more sweeping and grand the vision for a given writing project, the more presumption it embodies. Yet it is only through authorial risk and impertinence, through the bearer of a pen and a notepad tweaking the nose of that which is big and imposing, that we can come -- maybe, just maybe -- to understand the world in new ways.

Reasoning Otherwise is part of something that aims to be both sweeping and grand: a massive, multi-volume history of Canada's socialist left that seeks to stitch together new understandings and new visions of the historical landscape and turn the assumptions of previous efforts on their ears. This is the first substantive volume, a sequel to an earlier overview and theoretical preamble and antecedent to, as far as I understand it, at least two or three other big books we can look forward to in the coming years. This one deals with the left in the years before the rise of the Communist Party, territory that is not unexamined but that has received less attention in the Canadian context than in most places.

A to-me endearing feature of McKay's method, which he calls "reconnaissance," is that it explicitly refuses the pretense of being some sort of final, authoritative synthesis, but embraces its own incompleteness and semi-conjectural status, and is explicit about "accepting that, on issues big and small, the latest word is not going to be the last word" [2]. Yes, it does feel a touch disingenuous, because whatever caveats McKay expresses this will likely function as a definitive text on the left of that era for at least a generation, but I still have a lot of respect for the acknowledgment that any one effort to tell stories of the past will inevitably be partial.

Reconnaissance involves examining not a single figure or single institution but all of the messiness of the socialist left in a given era -- what McKay calls a "formation," which can encompass multiple, loosely related organizations, individuals, tendencies, parties, unions, publications, thinkers, and activists. It examines what is common through this potentially chaotic mix, as well as the contradictions it contains. It explicitly disavows "ancestor worship" by latter day leftists, as well as uncontextual and polemical put-downs. It tries to understand the discourse and actions of the left of a given era in the context of that era, and examine projects and choices on the basis of what was useful and what was not, in the name of supporting leftist self-reflection in the present day.

There is lots to like about this approach. I like the commitment to nuance and complexity. I like the interest in recreating not just a sequence of events but the feel of the period and of moments within it. I like the somewhat meandering feel the text has in parts. Like I said, I respect the acknowledgment of incompleteness. At the same time, it is perhaps even more important than with more conventional, less ambitious histories to read it with its incompleteness actively in mind. For instance, a key theme throughout the book is the influence of the master-narrative of evolution on all branches of the left in this era, filtered not only through a particular reading of Marx but through an even more powerful influence from a philosopher named Herbert Spencer, of whom I had not previously heard. This observation is an important insight into the "first formation" -- McKay's name for the pre-CPC socialist left in Canada -- and into early 20th century Canadian society more broadly. However, does it really deserve as much weight as this volume gives it? There is no way for me to judge without either tackling primary sources myself or having the opportunity to read other books that take up the same material in different ways, which of course have not yet been written.

In pre-1920 Canada, explicitly socialist organizations were small and few. They were mostly without deep roots in the trade union movement, in contrast with their European counterparts, though there were individuals (like Toronto's James Simpson) and moments (like some of the massive uprisings in Canada's coal fields) that were exceptions. Some called themselves "parties" and some ran candidates in elections, even winning seats from time to time, but they were not the sort of organization we might expect to be attached to that label based on later experiences with social democratic and communist mass-based parties. Their focus was largely educational; they wanted to "make" socialists. A couple of the key parties, especially the Socialist Party of Canada and the Socialist Party of North America, have been (ahistorically) labelled "impossibilist" by other writers -- they adhered quite stringently to "single plank" platforms which insisted that anything less than the full implementation of socialism was a compromise and a betrayal, and they routinely disparaged any struggles with any other goal. McKay reads this as a response to the power of liberal hegemony and its proven ability to reabsorb workers' struggles and workers' candidates into the liberal fold, and argues that, for all that many of the associated pronouncements come across as nothing less than utterly obnoxious to modern ears, this approach helped create space for the formation of a left that had a centre independent of the inexorable gravity of liberalism. At the same time, other groups mixed practical struggles and transformative end goals in ways that resist easy placement in twenty-first century categories. Though famous U.S. socialist leader Eugene Debs did disparage once such mixture by a group in British Columbia as "mixed pickles."

It was unclear to me, based on the initial overview book for this projected series, how the volumes of actual history were going to tackle race and gender. I had some concern that race in particular would receive less attention than it should. Happily, this is decidedly not the case in Reasoning Otherwise. However, though they are treated seriously and thoroughly, I still have some concerns about the book's approach to each.

I agree with the book's commitment to getting past polemic and point-scoring approaches to left history, and its commitment to presenting nuance and understanding it in the context of the era in which it occurred. A lot of the new-to-me information that was presented in service of building anti-polemical nuance was useful stuff. For example, it counters assertions I've seen made elsewhere that the male-dominated left was largely disinterested in or even actively opposed to women's suffrage. In fact, though the Socialist Party of Canada was not supportive (in much the same way that it was often cuttingly dismissive of, say, bread-and-butter labour struggles), the overwhelming commonsense among leftists, both women and men, was pro-suffrage. As well, though I have heard many times about the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying South Asian would-be immigrants that were the focus of popular hatred and government opposition that prevented them from landing in Vancouver in 1914, I had never heard about the (admittedly atypical and short-lasting) alliance between the folks on the ship and the Socialist Party of Canada. Nonetheless, there were recurring moments when its discussion of race and gender felt actively defensive. That would be a hard accusation to make stick, I'm sure, because there are also plenty of places where the book is very explicit about the ways in which the early 20th century left acted in oppressive ways. But even so, to my eye there were at least some moments where the text came across as more oriented towards defending the distant past from the polemics of the not-so-distant past than towards a nuanced and tough accounting for oppression and resistance around race and gender in the era in question. I don't think that had to be the case.

My discomfort with the chapter on racism included some of that concern but I also found the framework used for discussing race and racism unsatisfying in a more general way. I think to really nail down that dissatisfaction I would need to spend more time rereading and pondering than I am willing to, unfortunately. It has something to do with wanting to see more and different ways of relating everyday racism to histories of colonization; more and different ways of relating to critical race scholarship on historical shifts in the form of racism over time; more clarity on how race and racism limited the imagination and the political projects of white socialists; more exploration of racialization as a historical process, with greater clarity around that era's conflation of race and ethnicity in light of the broader historical trajectories of different; even a single mention of the left's relationship to African Nova Scotia; and probably other stuff. Not that there wasn't lots of useful stuff in there, but even more than the other areas tackled by this text, it felt like there was more to say.

There are other bits and pieces that deserve a brief mention. I was a bit surprised that more attention wasn't paid to the Knights of Labor, who largely preceded the period covered by this book and who weren't explicitly socialist, but whom I had thought were a pretty clear ancestor for worker radicalism in the settler society in Canada. The section on religion and the left was excellent. I liked the discussion of the Winnipeg General Strike, particularly the attention to the show trials that followed it, though I thought a bit more focus on the events of the strike would've been useful for readers who weren't already familiar with it.

My reservations notwithstanding, this is a very important book. And an enjoyable one. McKay could probably have accomplished his goals in fewer pages, but it was all interesting and the writing was clear, showed glints of humour, and shifted effectively among the many different scales and foci of attention. Those of us with an interest in the history of oppression and resistance in North America should read it with some healthy skepticism around its grander claims and in balance with other sorts of histories, but we definitely should read it.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Video: "The Colour of the Race Problem is White"

2009-07-04T20:42:00.001-04:00

Here is a useful video of what appears to be an introductory seminar for university students on the basics of racial inequality and struggles against it called "The Colour of the Race Problem is White," given by author and activist Robert Jensen. It is pretty U.S.-centric in its detail and context, but the form of the argument transposes without much difficulty onto Canada.

On Gendered Interests in Children

2009-06-18T20:42:00.001-04:00

Anyone who has kids has at some point found themselves trapped in a conversation in which the other person pronounces, often with great insistence, that "Boys like..." or "Girls play with...".

I want to make a few observations about such statements and the phenomena that underly them. This includes an example from the life of L, my kid who will be six years old in a couple of months, that illustrates one way that such preferences get produced, as well as a few thoughts about how to relate to such phenomena.

The first observation is that in a lot of cases the supposed consistency of gendered patterns of preferences and interests among kids has as much to do with what adults do and don't see, do and don't admit as evidence, as with any tendencies that kids actually exhibit. I have found that L and his cousins are a good source of counter-examples to unsettle some of these narratives. L, who moves through the world as a boy, has two cousins of similar ages, Y and E, who move through the world as girls. E, for instance, is much more aggressive and assertive than L. And Y is just as interested in playing with vehicles as L. Yet despite these and other ways in which they do not conform to what some people might expect, I think it would be very easy for someone to take the three of them as proof of girls being inherently one way and boys inherently another, just by being (probably unconsciously) selective about which characteristics they compared. I think this happens a lot. I think much of the time when parents or grandparents or teachers conclude that gender stereotypes about children are supported by the behaviour of children they know, they are doing a lot of active work in how they see and interpret that behaviour to be able to understand it as supporting their conclusions, and often that work involves not seeing or somehow dismissing or actively reinterpreting certain behaviours.

That said, gendered tendencies to particular interests and preferences do exist in children. And they exist because they are created. The question is, how? There are lots of answers to that having to with all of the many ways in which norms are socially created and enforced on (and resisted by) every one of us. A million everyday situations and workings of power make it so -- details like what kids clothes are even available to buy, and the social punishment implied by a tsk on seeing a picture of a preschool boy holding a pink bag, and Disney princesses only becoming some little girl's passion after a year of immersion in the peer pressure cooker that is school, and countless others. But I just want to highlite one example. This is an example I had thought of before but never written about, and it came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago so I thought I would organize a post around it.

The Example

We lived in Los Angeles from the time L was 9 months until he was almost 2 years, and I was the stay-at-home in this period. At that age, a broken piece of plastic found on the playground can be a whole new world of fun and learning, but let me extract just two of the new interests that appeared fairly consistently in L later in our stay in LA: he liked trains and he liked flowers. Four years later, he remains obsessed with locomotives, while flowers -- well, he isn't beyond admiring them when they are drawn to his attention, or even spontaneously, but they don't occupy much space in his universe. Some of this may be about place, as West LA is flower-rich and train-poor (though play buddies and TV meant it was not wholly train-deficient) and Sudbury is flower-poor and train-rich. Some of it is about the ways in which capitalist social relations can co-create desires and the products to meet them, which are shaped by the fact there is just more for a kid to do with a model train than with a model flower. Though there are lots of ways to productize flowers that are about aesthetics.

Much more important were the ways that these nascent interests were taken up, mirrored back to him, and reinforced or discounted by the adults around him. For a kid that young, it is mostly parents who do the work of putting demonstrated preferences into narratives. We certainly did some deliberate work to avoid imposing gendered interests upon him. We made space for him to like flowers and affirmed that, just as we made space for him to like trains and affirmed that. Yet I would bet that even at the stage of composing narratives of L's life for far-off grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, there were subtle gendered elements in how we talked about those interests -- definitely not consciously denying one and elevating the other, but differences in framing and emphasis that we were not conscious of. Practices by said distant relatives of asking questions and of giving gifts soon made trains a signature L thing, while mention of flowers in descriptions of his antics was taken up as a transient cuteness and attributed little significance by hearers.

I'm not saying it is a perfect paired example, but I would argue that both subtle factors of framing by myself and sometimes less subtle choices around things like gift giving by extended family members would have been significantly different if L was a girl, even if the initial expressions of interest in trains and flowers were the same.

What Can/Should We Do?

I am an adult who exists in a relation of care with a child. Actually, I exist in relations of care with several children at least once in a while -- my nieces, friends' kids, etc. -- but it is only a live-in sort of deal with L. As such, how am I to understand and intervene in the processes of gendered socialization that produce such interests and preferences? (Since L is being socialized into masculinity, that is where my examples will focus.)

A preliminary point that I think always needs to be made in these discussions is that parents have a lot less power to shape their children than most people, including most parents, believe. I haven't worked it all out, and perhaps I'll make another post of it, but I think this has to do with the dominance of liberal frameworks organizing how parents understand their role, with the related emphasis on human beings as abstract, isolated agents. I think being a happy and effective parent means working to understand one's parenting in the context of a much different model of the social world, which recognizes that we do shape a particular part of our child's environment -- though one that progressively and inevitably shrinks with every passing year -- but that we do so in a larger and much more complicated context.

The real place to start, though, is to understand that gendered characteristics produced by socialization in the context of patriarchal social relations can usefully be divided into those that are a problem in and of themselves and those that are not. I should be clear that both matter in as much as they indicate the existence of the patriarchal social relations that produce them, and that cause so much pain and violence in so many lives. But only some of them -- things like those which give many boys the sense that they have a right to talk over girls, or that cut boys off from their emotions in important ways -- cause anguish. If a gendered characteristic causes anguish to the person who has it or causes that person to cause anguish to others, I would say that it matters for itself. However, there are other things which are produced in whole or in part by socialization under patriarchy, but in and of themselves they don't really matter very much. In this case I'm thinking about, say, liking flowers versus liking trains, or having blue as your favourite colour versus pink. The key, though, is that they don't matter in terms of their content, though if there are experiences of anguish that result in a kid arriving at a given position, that matters -- he reluctantly gives up a favourite lunch box because of teasing from classmates, say. As well, while it doesn't matter if any given boy prefers pink or blue, it does matter how he will react if another boy in his class proudly proclaims his like for pink.

If something is causing anguish or causing the causing of anguish, then the need to act has a different character, a greater urgency, but this post is about relating to those products of gendered socialization that don't particularly matter for themselves. I think there are three ways that we should relate to that category of instances: affirm what is, create openness and space, and cultivate critical consciousness.

Affirming what is means supporting (non-anguish causing) interests and preferences, regardless of how they relate to dominant gender norms. If he likes trains, that's fine. If he likes flowers, that's fine too. It is less about how you feel about the content of the preference than it is about affirming your relationship to the child in question, and affirming their right to form and express interests, to form and express self. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that practicing this sort of affirmation with respect to an interest or preference which already receives a great deal of social affirmation is a pretty different endeavour than when it runs counter to dominant expectations.

Creating openness and space is about consciously acting against the social pressures, not because we care particularly about the outcomes in these specific areas but because we recognize that patriarchal (and other oppressive) social relations are of a piece and we want to embody for our kids our desire for a world of justice and liberation in terms of gender and on every other axis. It is about showing them we know there are these pressures, and don't think there should be. It is about deliberately introducing counter-normative possibilities into your child's environment and life. It is about working through the ways in which your gut reactions -- moments of bodily tension, unthinking words, silent biases -- still act as enforcers of oppressive norms, on you and those around you. It is about exploring your own counter-normative interests, going down those alleys that somehow mysteriously got shut off in your own childhood, your own teenage years, your own adulthood. It is about, for children of all genders, affirming the value of the strong, transgressive feminine, which is so broadly despised in the dominant culture, as well as the vulnerable masculine.

Cultivating critical consciousness is a recognition that parenting is not about creating some embodied mimic of an abstract list that exists in our head, but rather about supporting active agents who are figuring out how to exist within-and-against oppressive social relations, just as we are constantly figuring out the same thing. This is not just relevant to the subject of this post, of course, but to all the thorny questions of raising kids in a messed up world. Talk about stuff. Talk about your own struggle, your own wounds. Talk about the media you watch and the situations you face to make all of this stuff visible. Talk about the pressures to like this, to dislike that, to be this, to avoid that. Talk in grounded ways about how patriarchal (and other oppressive) social relations limit and hurt almost everyone, but how they hurt some people a lot more than others and give unearned rewards to some. Through your own journey to develop critical consciousness and to act to create a better world, in everyday ways and in organized collective ways, model what it is to journey.

Relating this to the example at the centre of this post, it means that I should continue to be perfectly okay with L's train obsession. It is not one we need to do much work to affirm, given that it is perfectly consistent with dominant expectations of boys. Probably we could have done more to create space for less easily acceptable interests at the stage where his interest in trains was developing. And of course there is always more that can be done in the current moment to create openness and possibility and to cultivate critical consciousness.

Radical Sci-Fi/Fantasy Convention

2009-06-13T22:05:00.001-04:00

Sorry about the scant posting lately...I've been plugging away at a fairly substantial post about kids and parents and gender in moments that try not to steal energy from book-writin' (which has been a bit of a hard grind these last few weeks) but that post isn't quite ready yet. In the meantime, a friend passed along a really cool looking link: Think Galactic is a radical left sci-fi/fantasy discussion group in Chicago and in a couple of weeks they are putting on what looks like an amazing convention. Panel titles include Gender & Sexuality in FanFiction, Race & Ethnicity in YA, Anarchism & the Superhero, Cultural Appropriation, Species Defined Gender Roles, RaceFail '09, Recognizing Privilege in Theism and Atheism, and lots of other really neat stuff. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to make it, at least this year, but if you think you might, go ahead and register!

Police Target Hamilton Book Fair

2009-05-27T08:52:00.001-04:00

This is ridiculous: The Hamilton police department is warning that the 2nd annual Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair is a potential source of hate crime. Criminalizing dissent is always bad, but there is something particularly cheeky about the police -- the armed fist employed by defenders of the status quo against land claims, struggles for racial and gender justice, actions by working people, and so much else -- accusing these social justice activists of conspiring to promote hatred.

Here is a media release from Common Cause, the group of platformist anarchists who are organizing the event:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Anarchists call Police report comparing activism to hate crime "chilling"

May 24, 2009

HAMILTON- Local members of the provincial anarchist organization Common Cause fear Hamilton police are seeking to criminalize local organizers after a Hamilton police report identified the 2nd annual Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair as a potential source of hate crime.

While presenting the Year-End Hate Crime report (available online) to the Hamilton Police Board on May 19, acting sergeant Michael Goch stated police would be “actively monitoring” the book fair scheduled to take place on June 6.

Alex Diceanu, Ontario Treasurer of Common Cause responded, "As the organizers of the annual book fair, and as local anarchists and activists, Common Cause is deeply disturbed by these statements.

"This is a manipulation of hate crime laws to criminalize activism. At this time of economic and environmental crisis, alongside increasing political disengagement, activism and educational events such as the book fair should be encouraged, not chilled with surveillance."

The report also identifies the 2010 G8 summit (Huntsville, ON), the 2010 Olympics, “local native land reclamation issues”, “the anarchist movement” and “anti-government and anti-establishment reaction of economic crisis and job losses” as trends and events that “may have significant impacts and repercussions on the Hamilton community in terms of hate/bias related incidents.”

For the first time the report also includes incidents of graffiti aimed at police even though this contradicts the report's own definition of a hate crime.

Diceanu commented, "We are concerned that public resources meant to investigate hate crimes are being focused upon people trying to improve this community."

The Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair is not a threat to the community.

It is open to the public and family-friendly, featuring free child care and a kid's workshop.

Over 300 people attended last year's book fair. Activists will gather again this year to exchange literature and other forms of information.

Workshops at the book fair attempt to address issues faced by marginalized groups named in hate crimes legislation, including indigenous peoples, racialized groups, people facing disability barriers and others. Other workshops address the the economic crisis, environmental justice and workplace organizing.

"Common Cause's Basic Policy states clearly that, and I quote, 'we actively oppose all manifestations of oppression such as racism, sexism, [religious] sectarianism and homophobia and we struggle against them.'

Indeed, anarchists have always sought to understand and end all forms of oppression in our struggle to create a world marked by true equality, freedom, peace, and harmony with the natural environment" says Diceanu ATTACHED PHOTO: A Hamiltonian with a disability talks with AJ Withers
a disability-rights activist with DAMN 2025 at the 2008 Hamilton anarchist book fair. Photo Credit: George Sweetman

Sci-fi/Fantasy Fans Against Racism

2009-05-18T10:37:00.001-04:00

I am a nerd. Moreover, I am that flavour of nerd that derives great enjoyment from science fiction, fantasy, and horror, in both textual and audiovisual forms -- a taste that has informed my media consumption since my dad first read me various versions of the Arthur myth, some Ursula LeGuin, and J.R.R. Tolkien as bedtime stories starting when I was six or seven.

There is very little I can do to conceal my more general nerdliness from anyone who spends more than a few minutes in conversation with me, but I do tend to be rather sheepish about advertising my specifically fannish tendencies when it comes to speculative fiction. I won't get into the reasons for that sheepishness -- it would distract from the point of the post -- but part of the reason for me posting this today is that I realized that that tendency on my part was on the verge of keeping me silent in a situation in which my political convictions would otherwise be pushing me to say something.

So. Apparently there was a great deal of controversy that began in January '09 when some white sci-fi/fantasy authors and editors and fans said and did some fairly clueless racist things. Some fans of colour and allies pointed those racist things out, and the usual sort of thing happened that tends to happen when white folks get called on racism, in real life or online. This series of events has been called RaceFail 09 (see here and here). I was vaguely aware of RaceFail 09 as it was happening, but only vaguely, because I mostly do not have much to do with organized fan contexts (see above, re. "sheepishness").

More recently, different white sci-fi/fantasy authors have said different clueless racist things -- a good summary is here. It was that post just linked, which I found via a post on Alas, A Blog, that got me reading about all this stuff on Friday afternoon when I really should have been doing other things. This newer situation has variously been called RaceFail 2.0, MammothFail, and other things as well. (Two posts linking to other posts on this issue can be found here and here.)

Now, part of what caught my attention was the content of the original boneheaded move by author Patricia Wrede, who I had never previously heard of. A lot of what I read and write, and a lot of what appears on this blog, has to do with Canadian history from below -- that is, history considered in ways that explicitly foregrounds experiences of and resistance to oppressions. As well, I have developed increasing conviction over the years that you cannot get to the root of anything politically in North America unless you deal with the history and present-day reality of colonization and genocide of the indigenous nations of Turtle Island. So it caught my attention to learn that Wrede is writing an alternative history fantasy of North America in which indigenous people do not exist, and in which the chattel slavery of Africans brought to the Americas does not exist either. As others have noted in various things linked in the links above, you might be able to justify this particular fantastical revision of history if what you were doing was examining the ways in which the shape of the social world in contemporary North America depends in profound ways on histories to which indigenous peoples and enslaved African peoples have been integral. That could actually be fascinating and useful, given the ways in which those of us who are privileged tend to be completely out of touch with the ways in which our privileged realities depend on people who are oppressed to our benefit (white folks on racialized people, men on women, etc., etc.). But the comments from Wrede quoted in the above posts make it clear that it was a decision made primarily because having indigenous people in her story would make things more difficult for her as a writer, and their absence has no particular impact on the history she intends to tell.

This is the main comment from Wrede that gets cited:

The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna).

This choice is happening in the context of a realworld history in which white people have been trying to make the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island disappear for some time now, and one in which one of the dominant stereotypes that indigenous folks must face in much of the U.S. and some parts of Canada is that they don't exist. And the idea that the two stereotypes she references are the only possible ways to write indigenous people is kind of stunning in its refusal to even acknowledge the possibility of writing indigenous people as, y'know, complicated, nuanced, three-dimensional human beings in complicated, nuanced, three-dimensional societies.

The other major contribution to RaceFail 2.0 comes form fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold -- I have never read her work either, but I know that some friends like it a lot. Her point, I think made in the course of discussing the stuff from Wrede, was a claim that people of colour have only recently started to read, write, and enjoy speculative fiction, thanks to the internet. Bujold and others claimed, as neo_prodigy summarizes, that the reason "POC speculative fiction fans don't exist is because we're too poor/uneducated, weren't exposed to it by other family members and other absurd bullshit."

Now, my understanding is that there are ways that dominant practices in the production of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have not always made it easy for racialized people to find a place. The publishing industry has its own particular history of racism, as do organized fan contexts. The dominant modes of storytelling in science fiction and fantasy have also tended to be based in standpoints that map readily onto whiteness, onto the colonizer, onto the imperial being, which could also be offputting to some who must navigate those oppressive realities in real life.

Because of these active exclusions, I have understood it to be the case the people of colour have tended to be modestly underrepresented as writers and fans of sf/f/h in English -- definitely not absent, but moderately less present. But because of this controversy, I'm no longer so sure that even that is true. Whether it is true or not, I'm sure these things are: Racism in both social contexts associated with sf/f/h fiction and in sf/f/h writing exists and makes these environments less hospitable to racialized people. Yet racialized people are and have always been present in those contexts, as both writers and readers. I mean, it is just a basic, basic thing that oppression creates its own resistance. That resistance can take lots of forms, it may or may not be visible to the oppressor, and it may or may not be easily recognized as such by those of us who claim we want to be allies. But it is always there. So of course there are fans of colour, and have always been. Of course. No matter how hostile an environment we white people might make fan contexts and publishing contexts and some of the dominant tropes of the genre -- people that are erased, excluded, pushed to the exit by relations of white supremacy and the ways in which they are expressed in how writing gets published and what writing gets published, will always, always, always be refusing to passively accept that treatment. Always. And white folk who want to be allies should be refusing to passively accept it too. As well, the ways that human beings take up stories and images is active -- people are fully capable of embracing elements of a narrative that fill us with wonder, with hope, with passion, that speak to us in some way, and really embrace them, even as we are critical of other elements.

So some things have been happening in response to all of this. One is this amazing, inspiring callout for racialized fans of speculative fiction to make themselves visible by leaving a comment. Another is the day of blog-based action to which this post is a response, called "Fen of Color United" or FOC_U. The callout was for racialized people to post stories or poetry or fanfic or analyses of the issue and to generally show a refusal to be silent and invisible, and for white allies to speak out in solidarity. So that's what I'm doing.

I'll end with this: Read what you already love but be deliberate as you experiment with new voices. Read authors of colour. Read authors that play with critical politics in their work. And as you do all of that, embrace the juxtaposition of extracting joy and wonder with actively critical reading, of producing joy and wonder with actively critical writing.

Review: "Real" Indians and Others

2009-05-17T15:30:00.001-04:00

[Bonita Lawrence. "Real" Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004.]

This book does pretty much exactly the kind of work that I think powerful political nonfiction needs to do. It begins from individual experience, and draws out from experiences the ways in which the real lives of real people, and by extension the oppressions they experience, are socially organized. It does not flinch from hard questions or from following the implications of politicized understandings of the world. It refuses to oversimplify in the name of a political objective, and finds ways to show how diverse experiences of oppression and resistance are tied together.

More specifically, this book is an important study of racial formation in Canada, and of the evolution of colonial relations. It contributes to discussions among indigenous peoples with respect to how they are organizing against their diverse experiences of colonization. By implication, this also issues a challenge that non-indigenous radicals need to take up and work with.

The book takes a series of interviews done by Lawrence in the context of the urban indigenous community in Toronto, a community in which Lawrence herself has actively participated. It situates these experiences in the long history of the settler state regulating who is and who is not properly considered to be "Indian." This stretches from differential practices towards "pure bloods" versus "mixed bloods" by the Hudson Bay Company in the long years before 1867 and arbitrary decisions about who was or was not allowed to participate in treaty processes, through the many incarnations of the Indian Act, and the ongoing, relentlessly colonial orientation of the Canadian state. I actually found it difficult to read in places -- not that the overall idea was particularly new to me, but the relentless detailing of so many twisty, turny evil ways in which colonial management of indigenous lives has wreaked violence upon people made me heartsick at not a few points in the reading. Through all of this, the book looks at the historical and personal trajectories by which indigenous people in Canada have been pried away from their nations over many generations and ended up in cities, and also how they are struggling, individually and collectively, to navigate what history has dealt them.

The use of colonial identity regulation to attack nations by forcibly expelling potential members is a key insight of this book into the processes of colonization that have created Canada. Indigenous nations were forced into small, isolated pockets of land, and then a whole manner of (usually highly gendered) tools were applied to separate people from their nations, with the end goal of destroying those nations and, therefore, the challenge to the Canadian state represented by indigeneity. Generations of applying these tools have produced deep and painful contradictions within and among indigenous people -- differences and contradictions that cannot simply be wished away by labelling them "false consciousness" or some such, but that are very real and that have to be the starting point for establishing political unity in the struggle against colonial relations. These colonially created divisions, as well as settler ideologies around things like "authenticity," have powerfully influenced commonsenses among indigenous people themselves about who is and is not an "Indian."

Lawrence argues that, though the issues are many and difficult, indigenous people in urban areas, and those whose ancestors include both indigenous and non-indigenous people, have important roles to play in struggling against colonial relations and the liberation of indigenous nations as nations. A key element of the political vision that springs from her analysis is a revival of the ancient confederacies that organized the political life of the nations of Turtle Island in the days before contact. This would provide a location for political identification that was not so bound to colonial ways of organizing the world -- that could, without denying the real bases for contradictions among indigenous people, provide a forum for working through them and building meaningful anti-colonial unity. I don't think I have enough knowledge to comment on this as a political strategy, and it wouldn't be my place anyway as a settler, but it certainly sounds compelling as she presents it.

Though it is not its focus, I think this book also issues a challenge to non-indigenous people. I read this, of course, as a white guy who swims within the vague, largely dispersed and disorganized something that could be called the settler-dominated and white-dominated left. There are at least three tendencies within the white settler-dominated left with respect to relating to indigenous struggles. Though it is less universal than it used to be, the first tendency just ignores it. There is a second grouping that pays it some rhetorical heed but with minimal appreciation that there is a necessity not just to voice token acknowledgment but to open up our own politics to be transformed in encounters with indigenous anti-colonial thought and action. And there is a third tendency, and in this one I'm thinking particularly of some segments of the white settler-dominated radical left, that is still usually not terribly good at sophisticated listening and opening up self for transformation, but that takes anti-colonial politics more seriously at least in a general sense. Yet this last grouping often pays attention to certain land-based struggles, particularly those using confrontational tactics, and ignores other aspects of colonization and resistance.

All of these tendencies could benefit from reading this book, but I am particularly interested in seeing it read by folks in the last grouping -- that segment of us that know that taking indigenous struggle seriously is important but that is fumbling around to figure out how to do that. This book doesn't answer that question for us, of course, but by making urban indigenous realities visible in an anti-colonial framework it provides both a push and a resource for correcting one of the traps into which we frequently fall.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Review: The New City

2009-05-05T11:54:00.002-04:00

[John Lorinc. The New City: How the Crisis of Canada's Cities is Reshaping our Nation. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008. (Original edition published 2006.)]

I'm not sure it really makes any sense for "cities" or "the city" to be the focus of affection, but it still manages to be one for me: I like cities.

I grew up in a small town, so for most of the year I had almost no experience of the urban that wasn't completely diluted by its mediation through the automobile. However, we would spend at least a month every summer at my grandparents' house in Glasgow and those early associations with urban living -- vacation, grandparental presence, being spoiled, and all the other good things those imply for a child -- may be the actual root of my current city-liking. Still, it took me years of living in Hamilton, Ontario, as a young adult to go from complete disconnection to serious affection, but that may have been more about how my life was organized as an undergraduate university student than anything else. And if my sentiment was indeed forged in visits to Scotland's grimy, poor, industrial and post-industrial urban heartland, it is an interesting coincidence that most of my adult life has been spent in the grimy, poor, industrial and post-industrial Ontario cities of Hamilton and Sudbury.

Regardless of where it came from, my newly flowering affection for Hamilton was partly responsible for the three years I spent producing and hosting a radio show that could variously have defined itself as being about municipal politics, local social movements, or local urban issues. Whichever angle my co-host and I were emphasizing at a particular moment, we were always assertively pro-city in our orientation. If this book hit the shelves during those three years, I'm sure I would've had an entire show devoted to interviewing John Lorinc, a mainstream journalist with a long history of covering urban issues in big Canadian newspapers. There is something about the enthusiasm Lorinc exhibits for cities, and for the best that the urban can offer, that really speaks to me. This is particularly true in my own current context of feeling regretfully under-citied -- I have a certain affection for Sudbury, but still wish I lived some place bigger.

I also appreciate the form and content of the book. It is extensively researched. The writing is not beautiful or brilliant, but it is clear and smooth. Lorinc packs in a lot of material and weaves together many sources in a seamless way, as good journalistic writing has to do. There is also evidence of concern for injustice and suffering. Certainly the book has moments of glorifying conspicuous urban consumption, but much of its focus is on key social issues such as homelessness, immigration, education, transit, the environment, and so on. In doing so, it generally advocates progressive positions, presents important aspects of problems, and often talks to sources that have clever things to say.

I hope I've managed to foreshadow that there might be a "but" coming along in this review, because it is a pretty big one. For all that this book manages to tweak that part of me that is sweet on cities, and for all that it brings under one cover lots and lots of the raw materials that a radical analysis of cities in northern Turtle Island would also require, The New City also smacks with a saddening thump into the limits of mainstream progressive Canadian politics in its first pages, and keeps on thumping into that wall throughout the book.

It would be pointless, I think, to try and provide a complete accounting of the political problems of this book -- they are all extremely predictable and it would soon become repetitive and shrill. But I suppose I have to at least give an overview, or some examples:

Gendered experiences of urban space never receive any attention. This is despite the fact that I know there are Canadian feminist academics and activists who have worked on this question.
He vastly underestimates the role of racism in shaping Canadian cities historically and Canadian urban experience today. He cheers on state multiculturalism without any awareness of the criticisms it has received from anti-racist academics and activists.
Despite being very supportive of the struggles of immigrants in some parts of the book, it is very hard to read the way he talks about immigration in other sections as anything other than instances of the tired but powerful immigrant-as-problem discourse.
He does the usual white progressive two-step around indigenous issues by urging a certain kind of support for Native people while completely completely blanking on what it would actually mean politically to take seriously indigenous claims about the past, the present, and the future.
He is very selective in what he targets with pro-ordinary-people skepticism. For example, he seems to completely accept that the "debt crisis" that was used to create the public panic that preceded the sharp ramping up in neoliberalism at the federal level in Paul Martin's 1995 budget as being a genuine crisis caused by foolhardy spending. But you don't have too look too hard, or even too far to the left, to find that myth taken apart and to see how it was mostly just made up as part of class warfare from above.
It uses the tired device of performing the virtues of Canada through selective comparison with the United States.
It explains its questionable narrative of Canadian cities once being the envy of everyone and now running into some problems basically by looking to decisions made by political parties. While it is nice that it is both nonpartisan and highly critical of the right, analyzing neoliberalism solely at this level means missing a lot -- including missing why the book's call for a more robust social democracy with an urban emphasis is simply not going to be on the menu without significant grassroots mobilization.
He largely ignores the ways in which so much "revitalization" of urban space in rich countries, even putatively progressive variants, ends up being an attack on poor people and poor communities.

So by all means read this book. It contains loads of useful information. Some of its discussion of specific policy problems, in the context of organizing for immediate reforms, are also quite useful. And definitely savour the moments when Lorinc shows his passion for vibrant cities. But not only take his writing as a detailed lesson in the real strengths and serious limitations of mainstream progressive politics in Canada, but also take some of the problems of this book as indications that maybe we should start to trouble some of the ways in which privileged lefties (such as yours truly) experience our own enjoyment of the urban.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Review: In Their Own Voices

2009-05-01T13:53:00.001-04:00

[Jim Silver (with Joan Hay, Darlene Klyne, Parvin Ghorayshi, Peter Gorzen, Cyril Keeper, Michael MacKenzie and Freeman Simard). In Their Own Voices: Building Urban Aboriginal Communities. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2006.]

In Their Own Voices skillfully accomplishes its purpose. It uses community-based participatory research to examine both problems and strategies in the urban Aboriginal community in Winnipeg. But it still leaves me with many questions.

The book brings together four distinct research projects. The primary author appears to have been involved with all of them, while the other people listed above participated in only one. The book begins with a sociological and political overview of urban Aboriginal peoples in Canada by Jim Silver. The other four chapters each discuss a specific participatory research project, all located in Winnipeg, which has one of the highest urban concentrations of indigenous people in Canada.

The first project looks at a mainstream neighbourhood association and the relationship of the fairly dense concentration of Aboriginal people in that neighbourhood to the association's activities. The chapter documents extensive barriers to participation. However, it goes on to illustrate how a neighbourhood association that is specifically for Aboriginal residents can provide a much more effective way to build an organized voice for Native people in a given area. The next chapter looks at four adult learning centres in Manitoba, and the ways in which they respond more effectively than the regular school system to the needs of Aboriginal people. Again, it finished by looking at the importance of an organization run by and for Aboriginal people for effective individual and community empowerment. The third project is an examination of Aboriginal participation in mainstream elections, through both the published literature and interviews done in Winnipeg. And the final project brings together the wisdom of almost 30 long-time Aboriginal community activists from Winnipeg to present a vision for what Aboriginal community development can and should mean in urban contexts. It includes mention of struggles for Aboriginal control of child welfare and of a particular high school, and it recommends strategies that involve mobilization and steps towards urban self-determination for Aboriginal people.

In all cases, the research emphasizes the importance of activities that are culturally based and that emphasize cultural revitalization; of organizations that are run by and for Aboriginal people in urban contexts; and of the importance of focusing on the very urgent needs and harms that colonization has imposed on the everyday lives of most urban Aboriginal people.

It's always possible to cover up methodological problems in studies like this, but as far as I can tell it is an excellent example of this kind of research. It seems genuinely participatory. It takes the politics, experience, and needs of the group of interest into account, and focuses on the voices of the oppressed in how it presents its data. Aboriginal people in Winnipeg were integral to this research in multiple ways, both shaping it and executing it.

In addition, a lot of the stuff that it talks about is pretty interesting. It provides some quite cool examples of indigenous people building power in urban areas, even if the language is a bit different than that. The indigenous-controlled high school, child welfare agency, and adult learning centre were particularly inspiring, as were the initial moves towards a larger scale of self-determination within the city. It provides a strong and consistent emphasis on the role of colonization in shaping the experiences of urban Aboriginal people. It is also very useful for its insight into the everyday lives of urban Aboriginal people -- something to which radicals like Patricia Monture, Taiaiake Alfred, Andrea Smith, and Howard Adams are responsive, but the details of which aren't necessarily always legible in their work to those of us who do not share such experiences. This book's use of people voicing the details of their own experiences paints a stark picture of just how vicious colonization is to its victims. In Their Own Voices also puts an emphasis on addressing the all-important political questions in the context of ordinary people living their lives, and of what is actually happening in a particular city. It is about people building organizations, and finding ways to help people shift their everyday experiences in important ways.

However, there's an awful lot this book doesn't talk about, too. It does not talk about the possible limits and dangers of state funding. It alludes to some of the dangers of market relations to urban Aboriginal communities as the process of addressing individual colonization and community poverty begin to have some effect, but only in very limited ways. It does not talk about current experiments in urban settings in North America to address related social questions in ways that are fundamentally anti-state, such as many of the groups affiliated with INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. In the chapter on elections, it is thorough in presenting the various reasons why indigenous people might choose not to participate in mainstream electoral politics, including if they have indigenous nationalist politics (though it is interesting that very few of the urban Aboriginal people in Winnipeg that they interviewed claimed this reason for not voting). And I think it's also important that this chapter presented the pragmatic, immediate gains that can result from voting. But it did not explore the limits of what can be achieved through electoral politics. Nor did it explore what it means to participate electorally when the state is a significant source of violence to you and yours. This connects to the almost complete absence of discussion of police violence and harassment, which plays a huge role in shaping the experiences of indigenous people in urban areas, particularly in Western Canada.

All of these areas of silence add up to a fairly significant whole, and risk skewing the political vision that is presented in the book in particular directions. And in saying that, I'm not recommending that attention to these things be taken in puritanical directions -- noting the limitations of electoral politics, for instance, does not mean leaping to self-righteous abstentionism. At the same time, not explicitly dealing with such limitations can lead to serious misunderstandings about what voting for your Member of Parliament can actually achieve.

A final area of concern is where this kind of research implicitly locates the problems that it tries to address. The focus on voices and experiences of oppressed peoples and on the organizations that they are building to meet daily needs is absolutely essential, practically and politically. Yet unless that is paired with efforts to explore, starting from those voices and experiences, the way in which those experiences of oppression are socially produced, then it risks leaving oppression oddly disembodied and without any apparent agent to enforce it. This book certainly names colonial oppression, but in most instances it does not explore how contemporary colonial relations are put together. Yes, emphasizing the agency of the oppressed is vital, but pointing to the agents of oppression -- individuals, institutions, and particular forms of social relations -- is also vital. It is only through at least some attention to how oppression is created that a complete and balanced picture of politically necessary work can emerge.

I don't want to overemphasize the negative. This book has a lot of important stuff in it, and its commitment to what people are actually saying and doing is great. It is cool research that describes some cool organizing. But I think it is best understood with a clear awareness of what it leaves out.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Quote: Early Example of Oppression the Canadian Way

2009-04-29T22:17:00.001-04:00

Looking north of the border, the fact that Canada was able to pacify the Indigenous peoples of half a continent on a virtually nonexistent military budget cannot be understood without taking into account how British officials have always used the threat of warfare and its attendant starvation south of the border to control Native populations in Canada. In a sense Canada piggybacked off of American Manifest Destiny, using the starvation and territorial limitation brought about by the destruction of the buffalo and the Indian wars to the south to force treaties on captured populations in the north, all the while maintaining a posture of innocence and denial about the fundamentally violent nature of the colonial process in Canada.

-- Bonita Lawrence, "Real" Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood, p. 30, emphasis in original

Video: Prefigurative Politics in Social Movements

2009-04-27T10:20:00.002-04:00

I've embedded a 10 part series showing a panel from the recent Left Forum in New York City. The panel is called "Building New Social Relations: Prefigurative Politics in Movements."

The speakers are:

Chair: Andrew Cornell, American Studies, New York Univeristy
Chris Dixon, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
Cindy Milstein, Institute for Anarchist Studies
Deborah Gould, Sociology, University of Pittsburth
Harjit Sing Gill, Institute for Anarchist Studies

Chris Dixon, who speaks in Parts 2 and 3, currently lives here in Sudbury and is active with Sudbury Against War and Occupation. He speaks about his PhD research, which involved interviewing 50 anti-authoritarian activists from cities across the U.S. and Canada. All of the speakers are really good, and well worth taking the time to watch!

Enjoy!

Review: Tortured People

2009-04-26T13:12:00.000-04:00

[Howard Adams. Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization, The Revised Edition. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books Ltd., 1999.]

I believe that the point of reading is the transformation of the reader. There are other kinds of experience that are more powerfully transformative, certainly, but few that give as useful a window into what is not here, what is not now. This means that there are ways you can be changed by a good book that nothing else could offer; however, it also means that reading in ways to resist or undermine that potential for liberatory movement in self in that "self + text" moment is really, really easy.

Some of the most politically important books for such change are also the hardest -- I'm speaking of my own past experience but also in general. Whether through their directly presented content or in a more situated way based in where you're reading from, they rub your nose in contradictions. They force you to acknowledge that something in who you are, what you think, what you do, what you desire, who you aspire to become, cannot hold. It is not just that it brings to the surface internal inconsistency -- I'm not convinced such inconsistency per se is always a bad thing -- but it forces you to confront inconsistency that matters, that is a source of anguish, but that is deeply enough embedded in some social contradiction or sedimented self that no easy path to resolution is apparent.

Those of us who by and large benefit from the way things are, at least at the most obvious level, tend to enter adulthood with a whole range of delusionary configurations-in-self -- thoughts, narratives, beliefs, feelings, or however you want to chop self up to be able to talk about it -- that, in a bunch of different ways, reconcile us to the way things are. Undoing that is the work of a lifetime, and can only go so far unless change is social and not just at the level of consciousness. Nonetheless, reading can be a vital tool on this journey.

Tortured People is the final book by radical Métis scholar Howard Adams. Its bluntness and frankly revolutionary politics mean that many, particularly among those of us who have never experienced traumas of racism and colonization, would be unlikely to let it in far enough to do much changing. But if it can get by that gatekeeping mechanism, its seventeen short, plainly written essays are rich in the raw materials for evoking painful but potentially edifying contradictions in consciousness.

Many of the book's themes are quite similar to those in Prison of Grass. It includes painful moments from Adams' own experiences as a colonized man, an analysis of the control of the colonized via forced internalization of ideology, and in a briefer and smoother form than his earlier book a crucial retelling of elements of pre-20th century indigenous, particularly Métis, histories of oppression and resistance. He offers short, incisive critiques of pillars of relations of white supremacy such as ideologies of eurocentrism and covnentional history. Of particular interest, he provides one of the only written accounts I've ever come across of radical indigenous struggle in Canada in the '60s and '70s, with a particular focus on Saskatchewan, where he himself was involved. Different readers will encounter in different essays moments of challenge to cherished illusions, particularly if the idea of the Canadian state and its attached nation as anything other than benevolent is a novel one for them.

One of the most important ideas that Adams makes central to both books is the quite explicit argument that decolonization on Turtle Island simply cannot happen without radical social change that goes far beyond indigenous people. Or, put another way, that indigenous anti-colonial struggle must be understood as autonomous but that those engaged in it will, at a certain point, need to build links to those struggling for social transformation in other ways. I like the fact that this point is made overtly, because I think in many different contexts and for some very different reasons it is often underemphasized. However, I think there is still plenty of room to debate about what that broader social change might look like. Particularly when discussing "the National Question," Adams draws quite explicitly on Lenin. While my sense is that the particular essay where he does this was aimed at the white socialist left, to make the twin points that revolutionary transformation is necessary and that indigenous peoples engaging in radical nationalist struggle is not some betrayal of class struggle, I have some serious reservations about relating to Lenin in this relatively uncritical way. This ties into other places in the book where it implies, though often does not state quite so directly, a particular kind of marxist vision for social transformation. I certainly don't want to just dismiss the traditions that draws on, but I also think it is important to emphasize that the details of how change will happen must emerge in the course of dialogue, questioning, and struggle.

For me, though, the toughest part of Adams' analysis is his unrelenting attack on the neocolonial forms of settler domination that have become so much more central since the uprisings of the '60s and '70s. He repeatedly calls out indigenous elites as collaborators and state-funded indigenous organizations as participating in the oppression of their peoples. He welcomes indigenous cultural revival as essential to creating both a framework and unity for the necessary political struggle, but warns that much of what happens today under the banner of Aboriginal culture ends up being a kind of distracting indulgence in symbols detached from their former material basis and from the needs of struggle -- a kind of impotent cultural nationalism supported by the state because it neutralizes the real political threat represented by indigeneity even as it seems to give expression to difference.

I think that analysis is crucial, but it is hard for me to know exactly what to do with it. For instance, witnessing puritanical denunciation in the context of the white-dominated left, often of people who are actually getting much more done than the denouncers ever have, made me wary of categorically writing off the contradictory but subversive potential for critical, strategic engagement with state funding or other supposedly "impure" choices. There are often important opportunities for resistance and subversion mixed in with the very real problems. And looking at the choices of indigenous activists I respect very much who are doing what they can to meet devastating need in their urban communities with the only resources that are out there, who on earth am I to do anything other than support them? Yet Adams is quite firm that seeing the struggles of his people as anything less than a struggle for national liberation (in the context of broader revolutionary class struggle) is a betrayal (and you didn't, for instance, see the ANC applying for grants from the South African apartheid government). And beyond the even larger dose of "who on earth am I" that applies to that position, I agree -- in my own way, and from where I sit -- that it is imperative never to lose focus on the fact that indigenous struggles with the Canadian settler state are national liberation struggles requiring broad and fundamental social transformation.

Adam's analysis forces me to confront how the social contradictions imposed on indigenous peoples by neocolonialism create all sorts of dangerous opportunities for a white leftist version of colonial arrogance at one extreme or a functional support for neocolonialism that claims to be supporting liberation at the other. This is not some intellectual problem that can be easily transcended with new and creative thinking; it is a product of the material conditions under which indigenous peoples struggle, and the awful choices forced upon them by colonization. Adams has made his choices, as an indigenous revolutionary caught up in these contradictions, about how to navigate them. Knowing his choices makes the problems clearer to me, but doesn't necessarily make my own choices, given my own experiences of privilege and my politics, any clearer. However, I have the sense that an important ingredient for moving forward for white radicals wishing to support indigenous struggle involves challenging some of our most basic assumptions and ways of work when it comes to social change.

That is, when confronted with contradictions evoked for me by this book (though certainly not only by this book) it became clear that certain things cannot hold. And that is the most acute challenge that my particular reading of Tortured People evoked -- a forceful reminder of the way in which meaningful political work is, by definition, messy, painful, and impure, and how it is a conceit of privilege to imagine that it can be anything else. That's what challenged me. But part of what is useful about this book, I think, is that it provides the raw material and the clear vision to evoke different sorts of challenges for people approaching it from other places.

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Quote: "Canada's a Liar"

2009-04-21T10:51:00.001-04:00

We Aboriginals are dying every day in greater numbers than the colonist population because we are the colonized. Starvation is the life of the oppressed; it is as natural to us as sleeping. It is the disease that makes up our life and wipes out our existence. This is the capitalist system and our legacy of suppression and death. Life is a constant ordeal; we struggle just to stay alive on the edge of survival. Is this really living? Are we not merely lingering until we expire? Like a road map to the grave, the signs are clear: sunken dark eyes, sallow complexion, swollen lips, bleeding gums, emaciated limbs and a swollen belly. It is the curse of dying slowly, day by day, hour by hour. This is not the life of some unknown person in some unknown third-world country. This is the life of the Aboriginal in Canada. The land of the strong, the free and the horrid capitalist, semi-democracy and quasi-humanity. The nation that cheers and applauds its international nature made of humanitarianism, human rights, anti-apartheid, aid to the suffering third-world Native masses. Bullshit -- Canada's a liar. It's hypocritical and two-faced. Look in Canada's back yard, its crimes, inequities and injustices are there to see. Of course, all this is hidden. That is one of the main occupations of Canada's capitalist governments to keep the grisly offenses, and ugly injustices hidden from view especially from the international scene.

-- Howard Adams (from Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization, final page of "Introduction")

Review: Prison of Grass

2009-04-20T12:52:00.000-04:00

[Howard Adams. Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, Revised Edition. Calgary: Fifth House Publishers, 1989. (Original edition published in 1975.)]

This book is an anti-colonial classic. Written by radical Métis scholar and Red Power movement veteran Howard Adams, its politics and writing place it in the tradition of the great national liberation texts of the mid-20th century authored by the likes of Fanon and Memmi.

Like other authors in that tradition, Adams roots his analysis in accounts of brutally painful personal experiences of living as a colonized individual in the context of colonial social relations. He grew up in a French Métis community in Saskatchewan. His internalization of the messages and values of the colonizers led him to flee, resist, hate his indigenous heritage as a young adult. Ultimately, though, he embraced his heritage and confronted the personal pain of colonization rather than futilely trying to escape it. He became an important leader in indigenous liberation struggle in Canada, particularly in the '60s and '70s, and a radical anti-colonial voice through his positions at the University of California and the University of Saskatchewan.

Much of the book focuses on retelling certain key aspects of Canadian history in a decolonized way. He talks about the origins of the fur trade and the ways in which it distorted and shifted indigenous ways of being in the central part of the continent long before the beginning of sustained settler colonialism. He talks about the role of Christianity and education, both past and present, in perpetuating colonization. He talks about the ossification of indigenous cultures -- how colonization can detach cultural symbols from actual power over collective ways of being and doing, and turns them into spectacle for the colonizer's consumption and for the colonized's entrapment. He particularly focuses on reanalyzing the uprisings of 1870 and 1885 in what was to become central Canada, rescuing them from the empty colonial stories that we learn in mainstream history classes and demonstrating the ways in which they were class and national liberation struggles. Particularly interesting to me was his insistence that in both instances there were moments of significant common cause between Cree, Métis, and white inhabitants of the prairies during these struggles -- ended by the Ottawa regime making concessions to split off important layers of the white settler population, and by the lack of functional unity among resistance forces.

He also talks about contemporary colonization during the period in which he was writing. This includes the significant role played by indigenous buy-in to the supposed superiority of white middle-class ideals with respect to everything from beauty to comportment to political culture, and the need for any anti-colonial struggle to work at rooting out that internalized self-hatred. He talks about the failures of indigenous leadership and the role of government funding in coopting radical struggle. He argues very strongly for nationalism as a potentially positive force. He recognizes that there are harmful versions of nationalism, which can co-opt and remove colonized people from political struggle, but he argues that a radical nationalism infused with class politics is key to anti-colonial struggle in Canada. It is particularly at this point, though throughout the book as well, that it would have been interesting to see more attention to issues of gender oppression and sexuality. He argues for indigenous militants mobilizing their communities in local struggles, which he envisions as eventually becoming connected to each other and to class struggles in the broader society, leading ultimately to an anti-colonial and socialist revolution.

Along with a welcome, energizing clarity about new-to-me aspects of Canada-the-colonial, this book also left me with considerable uncertainty about how exactly to relate to it in a lot of ways. It speaks historical truths that are no less relevant today. It speaks of then-contemporary realities that have shifted a bit in form in the intervening decades, but are largely the same in their fundamentals. Yet it is still a product of a particular moment.

Part of the power of this particular kind of national liberation politics in the 1970s, I think, was that it connected struggles on Turtle Island to struggles against colonization, capitalism, and imperialism around the world -- struggles and movements that were ongoing, that were alive, and that had the feeling of relentless momentum in the direction of victory. Though that is an important tradition for radicals anywhere to remain connected with, the context is vastly different today.

I also find it difficult to fairly evaluate some of the ways in which certain leftist political language and ideas are used in the book. Perhaps some of that is his deliberate revolutionary bluntness tweaking my still-middle-class sensibilities. However, part of it is that the book's use of certain notions around things like "class" and "revolution" feel kind of schematic. Which is to say, I have the sense that his use of those ideas convey vitally important things for anti-colonial struggle in North America, but I also get the feeling that there is more to say, more to understand, more to name in order to advance contemporary organizing, both in indigenous and in settler-dominated contexts. Certainly there is something very powerful in his vision of the necessary connection between indigenous liberation struggles and other struggles, but I think we need to deliberately hold onto uncertainty and questioning as we move forward rather than embracing some sort of doctrinaire blueprint, revolutionary socialist or otherwise. If we hold his particular usages somewhat loosely, we can learn from them; if we hold them too tightly, we will be trapped by them.

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Review: Claiming Space

2009-04-16T13:02:00.002-04:00

[Cheryl Teelucksingh, editor. Claiming Space: Racialization in Canadian Cities. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006.]

Thanks to the work of critical geographers and others, recent decades have seen increasing attention to the ways in which social relations happen in and through space, and to the ways that the physical landscape in which they happen shapes social relations. This includes, of course, social relations of racialization and white supremacy, which are the subject of this book. Space in this understanding is not just blank physicality, but has a complex character shaped by mechanisms of formal control, perception, imagination, experience, and social organization.

When people of a particular kind of radical bent hear the words "space" and "struggle," some jump straight to images of barricades. Certainly that sort of struggle over space is not unimportant, as are other forms of directly confrontational, grassroots mobilization. But most of the time and for most spaces, their character is determined (at least in an immediate sense) in much more everyday ways that are less obviously overt and collective but are very much socially organized. Those of us who are most likely to be privileged by this sort of everyday oppression often have many ingenious strategies to avoid seeing it as struggle -- or, sometimes, seeing it at all. A final way in which space is contested, which is not quite either of the above but can incorporate elements of both, is institutional struggle. This is more obviously collective but it lacks grassroots mobilization, or contains mobilization within strict bounds, and is channeled through institutions that are bound up in relations of ruling.

In thinking and writing about struggles over space, there are at least two tendencies that are worth making visible and taking into account. One I've already mentioned: the tendency of some privileged activists (some white men and others) to valourize only certain kinds of struggle based on a political or emotional investment in the tactics involved and to disregard the importance of other moments and modes of struggle, particularly the everyday. Even when we don't openly dismiss the importance of oppression and resistance at the everyday level in our rhetoric, often our practices fail rather spectacularly to recognize the necessary integration of the everyday with the overtly collective and confrontational.

The other relevant tendency has to do with the social relations of academic knowledge production. One feature of that process is that even when those individuals doing the producing are committed to and involved in struggles for social justice, often the knowledge that results from their academic work is not most directly oriented to the needs of ongoing grassroots struggles. Certainly the best stuff can be appropriated by movements, and I am of the opinion that there is far more politically great stuff in the work of lefty academics than many community-based people have the time or inclination to unearth. But doing that work is often not a simple enterprise, often not because of any failure of vision or politics on the part of activists in the academy but because of the institutional realities that shape what gets produced.

All of that is to set the context for my puzzlement about certain features of this book -- which is to say, what is there is (mostly) good, but what is absent is still a bit surprising.

For instance, take the first chapter, in which the editor sets the context for the book. It lays out some basic concepts around racialization and around spatial analysis, presumably to ground readers for the rest of the book. It introduces the specific pieces. It has some good, sharply critical analysis of state multiculturalism. I quite like its use of the example of Dundas Square in Toronto to illustrate the ways in which urban space gets shaped in racialized ways, and gets contested. Yet it would not be too hard to write something that accomplished all of the necessary tasks that any introductory essay must accomplish while also painting a more politically pointed and rousing picture of the historical trajectory of the racialization of space in Canada, and of the multiple levels at which racialized people and their allies intervene in and struggle with that process.

Part of the explanation for why a somewhat more muted approach was taken may be what Teelucksing identifies as the "variety of perspectives on claims to space by racialized people in Canada" expressed in the different contributions. Her intro has to set the stage for all of those perspectives, after all. This variety can be understood in a number of ways, but what really struck me was the spectrum from inclusionary politics to transformative politics. And, yes, I recognize that such labels inevitably simplify and can end up being quite unfair, but I think they get at some important aspects of the pieces in this collection.

By "inclusionary," I mean struggles over space that have to do with carving out a niche, often an institutional niche, that certainly claims space for the group in question but that leaves underlying social relations -- that is, in part, white supremacy organized through state multiculturalism -- more or less unchallenged. Kelly Amanda Train's essay on the building of a Sephardic Jewish community centre in Toronto and Anastasia N. Panagakos' essay on the main Greek community organization in Calgary were the most obvious members of this category for me. They talked about efforts that were very important to those involved but, at least in these tellings, felt like they involved claiming space in the context of accepting the broader order.

Other contributions felt like they contained (at least in ways more legible to me) a greater attention to naming and troubling the oppressive character of social relations in Canada somewhat more broadly. For instance, Glenn Deer drew connections between local settler histories in Richmond, British Columbia, and a "moral panic" by white settler populations when an influx of newcomers from China in the 1990s seemed to be making white anglophone dominance of certain spaces less absolute. This panic played out mostly in the context of the media. Cathy van Ingen wrote the only piece concerned with indigenous people in the volume -- it talks about the efforts of an urban reserve community in Edmonton to take various economic and urban developments measures, including building a casino and resort on reserve land. More particularly, it talks about the resistance by surrounding white-dominated affluent neighbourhoods and white-dominated municipal authorities to the plan.

However, my favourite essays of the volume did not tend to deal with institutional struggles at all. They were much more about the relationship between social relations and the constitution of everyday experience in ways that felt, at least at the level of sensibility, focused on transformation. Though they did not necessarily focus on the collective and confrontational moments of struggle, it felt to me like they were oriented entirely towards the sorts of problems we need to understand in creating transformation through the entire range of moments that constitute struggles for justice and liberation:

Awad Ibrahim looks at the ways in which youth from continental Africa engage in the construction of new selves in their new, Canadian spaces, in ways that do not involve a rejection of their African heritage but rather a synthetic dialogue between who they already know themselves to be and the Blackness into which they are racialized (and which they actively take up) in the Canadian context.
Jenny Burnam challenges the conventional ways in which academics have conceptualized immigrant communities in Canadian cities, with the endless and unhelpful musings about "assimilation" and "retention" and so on, by looking at the city through the lens of diaspora. Though white supremacy remains, the critical mass of living and fluid diasporic communities in a city like Toronto create new kinds of spaces and new opportunities for living, creating, and resisting, that older frameworks fail to express.
Rinaldo Walcott starts from a footnote in Franz Fanon and talks about the documentary Divas: Love Me Forever about Black drag queens in Toronto, and talks about the scope for Black gay men to intervene in both the crisis of Black masculinity and the white domination of queer space. (Btw, if any of my Sudbury comrades read this and happen to have that film, I'd be interested in borrowing it...)
Leeno Luke Karumanchery wrote the last essay in the book, a powerful examination of the pervasive everyday trauma that is part of existing as a racialized person in almost every space within Canada. I have some uncertainties and further questions about his project of infusing social and anti-oppression analysis into discourse/practices organized around ideas of "mental health." However, as I found with the book he co-wrote that I read many years ago, his detailed and relentless analysis of the everyday traumas of racism present a grim reality that we white activists and radicals need to understand and wrestle with in much more fundamental practical ways than is currently the case in most spaces, or we will continue to reproduce harm and to fail in our struggles for social transformation.

Despite this breadth of material, including some that I found to be important and powerful, I was surprised that certain issues were not mentioned, or came up only in brief passages in essays focusing on other things. I was surprised there was nothing about the direct action struggles of the Iroquois people of the Six Nations to prevent the further colonization of their traditional territory by white-owned businesses wishing to build housing developments. I was surprised there was only a page or two about the ways in which the Canadian national security state has, both before and since 9/11, shaped how Muslims of various racial backgrounds experience urban and other spaces. I was surprised there was nothing about the ongoing struggles by racialized -- particularly Black and indigenous -- communities with respect to racist policing and how that shapes the character of urban space. I was also surprised there was little about gentrification, an issue in which social relations of racism tend to play a more complex role in Canada than stock examples of the process sometimes assume but which is nonetheless deeply racialized.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Sudbury Teens Should Do Direct Action "Read-In" At Public Library

2009-04-15T11:29:00.000-04:00

The main branch of the Sudbury Public Library has decided to deal with a small number of disruptive individuals by banning all teenagers from their facility during weekdays, according to a Sudbury Star article.

The background is that a small number of young people have been, in the words of manager of libraries and heritage resources Claire Zuliani, "quite disruptive. They have little respect for our property and our staff. To the point where some of our staff are afraid to come to work."

Okay, fair enough, that needs to be dealt with somehow, though I think reports about fear of youth, who often get unfairly stigmatized as dangerous, should be examined with a bit of a critical eye. And as Sudbury Secondary student Kyle Chapados is quoted as saying, "But it's not fair to the rest. How many were really causing these problems? There seems like there could be a better way of dealing with it than just banning all students."

Exactly. An individual is a problem? Ban them from the library for a year, then. But, no, Zuliani insists on using rhetoric based in youth as a class being a problem. For instance, she says, "We've had kids break into cars." Do you know that it is these same kids who have been disruptive inside? Has someone been charged and convicted? If so, how is a ban going to convey something that conviction for breaking into the car has not done? If not, how do you know it was a kid? Or are you just assuming that it is a young person? She even uses the inflammatory language of "take back our library," again keeping in mind this is used in the context of all youth being banned from the place during certain hours. Lovely.

Apparently, youth who are using the library in ways of which management approves will be allowed back in at some point, but it is unclear when or under what conditions. The people who will be most affected by this will, of course, be the vast majority of young people who use the library space in non-disruptive ways. The article says that Zuliani expects that the ban will teach young people some respect, which is ridiculous. It will probably teach the handful of people who have been disruptive very little, and it will teach the rest that libraries hate teenagers, or maybe that public space is not meant for youth. Which are just great lessons for our public libraries to be teaching.

I think it would be great if a group of youth were to address this by taking some direct action. Get a group together, both teenagers and older folks. Go in to the public library en masse, sit down silently and start reading. Be polite, follow whatever code of conduct they have, but refuse to leave. Have someone fax the media just as your group is entering the library. Have supporters outside with signs saying things like, "Youth are not the problem" and "It's my library too," and have spokespeople outside to deal with the media when they show up.

And if you need some help figuring out the logistics, I know some people who have some experience with that sort of thing.

Video: Angela Davis on How Change Happens

2009-04-05T12:28:00.000-04:00

Check out this video of legendary African-American radical and academic Angela Davis delivering a speech at UC Davis in 2006. She talks about imagination, about memory, about struggle, about feminism, and about how social change happens.

(Found via this post.)

Review: Evil Paradises

2009-04-03T14:46:00.002-04:00

[Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, editors. Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism New York: The New Press, 2007.]

As is so often the case, my ambivalence about this book is not really about it per se but about a lack of fit between it and the particular needs I brought with me to the reading.

Evil Paradises is a collection of essays in which "visionary thinkers reflect on the capitalist 'utopias' being constructed in cities, deserts, and even in the middle of the sea" in the era of neoliberalism. The contributions span the distance from architectural reflection to snappy journalism to relentless marxist sociology and politics to a kind of pro-urban anti-nostalgia. They also range from Cairo to Beijing to Orange County, from Ted Turner's many ranches to the middle of the sea.

I was brought to this book my own ongoing work related to social movement history in Canada. The next-to-last chapter that I need to write is going to be about one or several indigenous struggles in urban contexts in Canada. I haven't quite decided how I'm going to approach it, yet, so for now and the next little while I'll be focused on reading -- about cities, about the history of indigenous struggle in Canada, and about the combining of the two. In the books that are focused on cities, what I'm looking for is ideas and tools for talking about the urban and the ways that cities shape our lives. I felt I got plenty of that from the last book I read, Mike Davis' Planet of Slums, even though it didn't mention Canada. Unfortunately, I didn't feel that the current volume was nearly as rich in appropriable ideas, at least for my purposes. This may have been because of its focus on the ways in which the rich are transforming space, particularly urban space, for their own benefit, rather than the impacts of and resistances to such transformations by oppressed people.

I did find some stuff that I think will be useful to me, in my own current chapter or in other contexts. Timothy Mitchell's chapter on neoliberalism in Egypt was mostly not useful (though it was definitely interesting), but his discussion of the ways in which nonmarket relations are inherently a part of the relations of the capitalist market felt quite important. I also think I will be able to use stuff from the essays by Marco D'Eramo and Don Mitchell that talk in different ways about the privatization of public spaces in core capitalist countries.

Most of the essays, though, were interesting but not useful. For instance, it was quite fascinating to read Mitchell's account of how neoliberalism actually happened in Egypt in the late '90s -- a level of detail often missing in left discourse on the topic. Mike Davis' piece on the vast capitalist excess that is Dubai was just kind of astounding to me. I also was interested in the piece on the impact of the Olympics on Beijing, the global marketing of imagined pieces of California in various cities as illustrated in a gated suburb in Hong Kong, the post-Sandanista elite reclamation of Managua, and Patrick Bond's essay on post-apartheid neoliberalism and resistance to it in Johannesburg.

Perhaps the most enjoyable pieces were also the least academic. Rebecca Schoenkopf edited a left-liberal weekly, a la The Village Voice, in ultra-rich, ultra-conservative Orange County, until it got bought by a right-wing chain. Her witty, weary reflections on the O.C. and in particular on the reality show known as The Real Housewives of Orange County were delightful. Even better was sci-fi novelist China Mieville's cutting mockery of libertarian fantasies -- a handful of which are connected to actual projects that claim to be intending to realize the dream but which never seem to move forward -- of floating cities on the sea.

So there is lots of neat stuff in this volume, along with some that is less gripping. And, as I said, much of the muting of my enthusiasm for it has to do with not finding what I had hoped to gain from it rather than broader flaws in it. However, I wonder if part of why its ability to inspire me was limited had to do with the tendency of some marxists, some academics, and some marxist academics to be so enthralled with describing the nefarious, dazzling workings of capital that talk of resistance kind of falls by the wayside. Capital as self-aggrandizing spectacle is kind of turned on its head and shown to be horrific, but it is left as spectacle. That can be interesting. But it often feels like it isn't terribly useful.

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Review: Planet of Slums

2009-03-31T14:41:00.001-04:00

[Mike Davis. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso, 2007].

If read from a place of willingness to hear its message, Planet of Slums will inflame a fierce hatred of capitalism in your heart. It is an analysis of neoliberalism through the prism of urban space around the globe, and it is a relentless, pounding indictment of the organizing of billions of lives into poverty and suffering by capital.

Humanity is somewhere near the point of becoming more urban than rural -- maybe just past, maybe just before. The population of the planet is expected to continue to increase for at least another 30 or 40 years, and the vast majority of that increase will occur in urban areas of the global South. The next couple of decades will see several individual urban areas with greater populations than the entire urban population of the planet at the time of the French Revolution. By 2015, there will be more than 550 cities with at least a million inhabitants, and there are already 5(ish) that have more than 20 million.

A slum is "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure" [22-23]. There is not complete identity between residents of areas so labelled and the population experiencing urban poverty -- not all slum dwellers are poor and not all people in poverty live in slums -- but there is significant overlap. Fully one third of the global urban population lives in areas that could be called slums -- only 6% of the urban population in the rich countries, but almost 80% of the urban population in the very poorest.

The housing arrangements of people who live in areas that could be designated "slums" take a variety of forms. Some inhabit neighbourhoods that were once prosperous but that money and the people who controlled it have fled, and existing buildings have been taken over and used in new ways. The most talked about arrangement -- and, by some on the left, most romanticized -- are squatters, or those who have simply appropriated land or space to meet their needs, sometimes surreptitiously and individually, sometimes brazenly and collectively. Davis points out that real squatting is actually fairly rare, these days, and much more common is "pirate urbanization," or privatized squatting, in which private developers (or gangster) seize control of the land, often without formally owning it and inevitably without official permission to develop it, and make people pay for the right to stay on it. As well, many in slums actually rent their dwellings, sometimes from other deeply impoverished people who also live there. And in many cities there is a blurred peri-urban edge in which agricultural land is gradually consumed in completely chaotic and unregulated ways by informal housing of those unable to find space nearer the centre of the city.

In these processes, the classic understanding of the city is changing. Many cities no longer have a centre. It does not make sense to talk of downtown, suburbs, exurbs. Many are now chaotic, distributed networks of informal relationships and informal or nonexistent municipal services. Several do or will in the coming decades cover vast corridors of land in a single, largely unplanned, urban or semi-urban agglomeration. In some parts of the global South, urbanization has been completely disconnected from industrialization, which makes it a much different process than "classic" urbanization in 19th century Europe (which, however oppressive and exploitative it was to the newly proletarianized former peasants pushed into slums, was still able to benefit from European colonial predation on the rest of the world).

In the early 20th century, urbanization in much of Africa and Asia was very slow, in large part because European colonizers mostly kept poor rural people from migrating to the cities. In China after 1949, Maoism also severely limited urban population growth. And in Latin America the barriers were less formal but still significant. In the 1950s and 1960s (and a little later in China) the barriers to urban population growth fell away and the number of people in many cities in the global South began to skyrocket. People were pushed off the land and also drawn to cities by new policies of industrialization. In many places, new anti-colonial and nationalist regimes promised affordable urban housing as part of an overall strategy of national economic development. Few were able to deliver in any sustained, useful way. In the '70s, a combination of anarchist and neoliberal thought focused on promoting self-help as liberation within slums, but despite scattered successes this model has not made a dent in the problem as a whole either. It is becoming even less tenable, Davis argues, as classic squatting becomes less possible because of the ways in which urban space in many cities is already used.

Davis also examines various ways in which poor people living in slums get attacked in order for states and the rich to make changes to urban space for their own benefit. He looks at the environmental impact of this model of urban growth, from exhaust fumes to sanitation, and particularly their impact on human health. He examines the immense harm done to poor urban dwellers by Structural Adjustment Programs, imposed on most poor nations by the international financial institutions that serve the interests of the rich nations. He systematically demolishes the myth that informal economic activity and "micro-credit" are the magic bullets to deal with urban poverty in the global South. And he looks at the ways in which the effective abandonment of segments of the urban population in some of the great cities of the global South, and the entire city in some instances, have utterly transformed how people live, and how people can live. The book closes with a brief look at how the Pentagon is thinking about slums as the next frontier in warfare and as a space that the U.S. military must learn to dominate.

There are some interesting aspects about the ways in which Davis puts together the knowledge in this book. His sources are resolutely mainstream -- U.N. and government reports as well as academic studies that deal with everything from the physical aspects of specific slums to ethnographies of how such communities function socially. There is something powerful about condemning the system using the documents the system itself has produced, a la Chomsky, and Davis does it very well. However, given the ways in which that kind of document -- the census, the government report, the study by the outside academic -- inevitably does some violence, or at least some erasure, to the lives it examines, it makes me wonder what is missing from this book. What really goes on in the world's slums that is not reflected in this book? I have no idea, but I know there must be something.

A related question is about the ways in which he makes use of sources that examine a wide range of places. Again, in some ways his seamless combination of analyses from cities around the globe in a single paragraph or passage is very powerful and makes an important point about the homogenizing impact of neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, I have to wonder what is lost in terms of specificity. I should add that Davis is as attentive to specificity as his level of analysis allows -- there are differences in the historical trajectories of the cities of Latin America and China and South Asia, for instance, and he doesn't neglect that. But I still wonder about what is lost in translating the realities of a billion people from many dozens of countries into a 210 page book.

Others have read this book as being pro-state in its orientation. I certainly have a sense that that is the direction of Davis' bias in terms of the ongoing intra-left debates about the state form, but that wasn't how I read this book. Rather than being some wistful plea for a return to the days of strong socialist states, it felt more to me like a cry of despair, a howl of grief and rage that neither state-based nor non-state approaches as they have actually been attempted have done much that was broad and lasting to mitigate the suffering into which capital forces the vast majority of the world's urban poor. And it is hard to know what to do with this pessimism. To what extent is it warranted? How would we know? He points out that he does not talk much about resistance movements among the urban poor, which will be the subject of a future book that he and a collaborator are currently working on. Perhaps that work will be more hopeful. But I also wonder the extent to which this seamless pessimism is made possible by a framework that depends on mainstream sources and that emphasizes the homogenizing impact of neoliberal capitalism at the expense of exploring the inevitable cracks and holes and seedbeds of resistance.

Despite a pessimism about whose unrelenting character I have some doubts, I think this is a valuable book for activists and lefties in North America to read. It is, for one thing, direct and accessible and politically clear. More usefully, particularly for those of us with relative privilege, it can act as an effective kick to unsettle assumptions produced by our social and geographical locations -- it isn't news to most of us that capitalism is at its most brutal with racialized women and men in the countries of the global South, but it is easy to lose focus on the enormity of what a recent event in Toronto named the "actually existing barbarism" of global capitalism. Reading Planet of Slums is a way to counteract that loss of focus in ourselves, and a way to keep alive the ongoing challenge to see how struggles in North America do and can and should relate to struggles around the world.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Myths for Profit

2009-03-29T14:00:00.000-04:00

A Sudbury-born filmmaker is on a cross-country tour with a new documentary exploring the myths of Canada's role in war and peace. The film will screen in Sudbury on April 1, 2009. Here is the media release:

SUDBURY-BORN FILMMAKER SCREENS NEW DOCUMENTARY ON
THE MYTHS OF CANADA'S ROLE IN WAR AND PEACE

SUDBURY, ONTARIO, March 27, 2009 - On Wednesday, April 1, 2009, Sudbury-born filmmaker Amy M. Miller will be back in town as part of a cross Canada tour with her new documentary, Myths for Profit: Canada's Role in Industries of War and Peace. The event is sponsored locally by Sudbury Against War and Occupation and will be at Fromagerie Elgin, 5 Cedar Street (across Market Square on Elgin) from 7:30 to 9:30 pm.

Myths for Profit, which Miller made in collaboration with Boban Chaldovich, tackles several enduring myths that lie at the heart of Canadian national identity. By examining Canada's prominent role in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as well as current Canadian participation in the occupation of Afghanistan, the film debunks the notion of Canada as a peacekeeping nation. The film goes on to explore the extensive involvement of Canadian corporations, with active support from various government agencies, in producing weapons and other war-related material. It finishes with a look at the ways in which foreign aid is used by the Canadian government to push underdeveloped countries into actions and policies that do not necessarily benefit their people but do benefit Canadian corporations. Miller and Chaldovich's current tour will screen Myths for Profit in more than 40 Canadian cities.

Amy M. Miller grew up in Sudbury and currently lives in Montreal. She is a long-time activist and popular educator, and is currently involved in numerous independent media projects. Boban Chaldovich has a long history of involvement in grassroots art and political projects in
Belgrade. Both are members of Wide Open Exposure, a new Montreal-based multimedia production team with a focus on issues of social and economic justice.

Sudbury Against War and Occupation is a group of Sudbury residents concerned with all forms and consequences of war and occupation. The organization started in early 2007 to object to Canadian support for and involvement in the ongoing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. They have also been active in supporting the struggles of indigenous peoples in North America and in opposing the occupation of Palestine.

If you are in town, please come to this event. If not, check out the tour dates to see when it will be playing in a city near you.

Review: The Threat of Race

2009-03-27T12:37:00.001-04:00

[David Theo Goldberg. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.]

Much of the time, the ways that we talk about the world chop our experience and the social world into artificial bits. Which is not always bad -- our representations simply cannot include the full complexity of that which is being represented. But how we go about doing this chopping, and our failure to recognize that we are doing it, can still get us into trouble.

Take, for example, the notion of "neoliberalism." In most lefty talk where that's an important part of the language, it refers to various changes that have happened between the early 1970s and today. Usually the use of this vocabulary signals that the focus of attention is on trade liberalization, privatization, welfare state downsizing, a particular international trade and investment regimen, increasing capital mobility, and growing labour flexibility and precarity. It is about non-market ways of addressing human need being strangled, starved, and ended, and forced into subservience to the highly constrained and coercive set of relations that is the capitalist market. Usually, when you hear the word "neoliberalism," it is a sign that you are going to be hearing about the part of the social world that gets cut off from the rest and reified into "the economy" and the part of the social world that gets cut off from the rest and reified into "the state."

What is often missing in much left discourse on the topic is the idea that any change in social relations as pervasive as the neoliberal shift of the last few decades is not going to be isolated to just one or two realms of experience. Everything will be different. Relations of production and state relations are not somehow separate from relations of white supremacy, patriarchal relations, relations of heterosexism, and so on. In order to get beyond a partial and limited understanding of neoliberalism, you have to look beyond the narrow focus on more conventional and reified understandings of "the economy" and "the state."

That is where The Threat of Race comes in. It is a new work by a prominent critical race theorist that examines race and racism in the neoliberal era. How have relations of white supremacy (though it doesn't quite use that language) been transformed in the neoliberal shift, and how are they integral to it? It goes about examining this in a to-me novel way. It includes some introductory material on racial neoliberalism that is not particularly geographically focused, but the bulk of the book examines the topic through looking at local articulations of racism in five different regions of the world: the United States, Palestine, Latin America, Europe, and South Africa.

The general form of racial neoliberalism, to summarize Goldberg's analysis, involves privatizing the expression of racism. It involves creating situations that are no less organized in racialized ways, that are no less racist, that are no less about privileging white people and targeting non-white people, but that steal the language to name that it is happening. It creates not only racism in contexts where race is never named explicitly, racism which requires no explicit racists to function, but also, he argues, it involves "racism without racism":

This is not to say that what can be identified as traditional racisms have disappeared; quite the contrary. There is here the condition without the category and mode without the (same) meaning. The modes, forms, sociologics, even their rationales more often than not mimic classic racisms. But they lack the sharpness of their identifying account or defining contours, torn as they are from the classic conditions of their articulation. These anthraxic racisms without the ostensive reference of racism exacerbate humiliation and degradation, debilitation and desecration, desacralization and distortion. They underpin torture in denial ("We don't torture" even as "we" waterboard) and collateral damage under apology ("Sorry, we didn't mean it, they got caught in the firing zone"). So as racisms have become more difficult to track and trace, more blurred, new targets and their rationalization have appeared. [361]

In the United States, where racism was explicitly and openly organized by the state for so long, the civil rights movement partially turned the state to practices that were anti-racist in limited ways. The response to this under neoliberalism has been to privatize issues of racism, so that even if the state is no longer openly practicing slavery and segregation, neither can it be used to undo their legacies. In Palestine, the Israeli occupation is racial oppression through and through, in ways both everyday and spectacular, but one that exists in denial of its own racial basis. In Latin America, racial mixture is officially celebrated in many ways, but proclamations of no racial exclusion are used as a screen for a sort of inclusion-with-subordination to whiteness. In Europe, racism is equated almost exclusively with the Holocaust in ways that both erase Europe's history of global colonization and that make racism as a contemporary problem (such as that which targets people of colour who are migrants) almost unspeakable. In South Africa, race and racism have functioned historically almost in quasi-religious terms, and with the end of apartheid and the ANC-lead neoliberalization there is an equivalent to secularizaiton, in which the religious does not disappear as a deep organizing principle but is talked about and functions in new, less visible ways. Those poor and hasty summaries do not do his complex discussions of each region even the remotest bit of justice, though frankly his summary is kind of opaque too:

Racial americanization revealed the historical play between segregation and its privatizing born again expression at home and in its neo-imperializing reach. Racial palestinianization has concerned the forcing of occupational partition and the dialectics of terror and targeted assassinations, of suicide bombing and collateral killing in the name of securing cycles of partial population safety and frustrated revenge. Racial europeanization revealed the shift to categorical erasure and coded reference in the wake of unspeakable destructiveness, attended by the elevation of fixing boundaries cultural as much as territorial as immigration was made the dominant expression of racial threat. And racial latinamericanization has conjured the social rules for promoting and containing racial mixture. Finally, where racial southafricanization historically revealed the repressive debilitations and restrictions implicated in the convictions of a political theology of race, it has now come to exemplify the post-racial ambivalence between a commitment to nonracialism and a more robust racial irrelevance. [370-371, emphasis in original]

I learned a lot from this book. I appreciated Goldberg's critical position on the Isreali occupation of Palestine -- for an article by him written during the assault on Gaza earlier this year, click here -- though there were a handful of moments in that chapter that seemed a little peculiar compared to the rest of the book, I think because of greater attention to preempting attacks on his position. As well, I learned an immense amount from the chapter on South Africa, about whose pre-1948 history I knew little.

I'm not sure I have the knowledge to offer a constructive criticism of the argument as a whole, or of the regional pieces as whole entities either. All I can do is note a few narrower concerns.

The first is not necessarily a flaw, because it is simply pointing out one thing that this book is deliberately not: It does not talk about Canada. This is hardly remarkable for a book with global scope. While racial formation in Canada has its own specificities in comparison with the United States and elsewhere, it is not surprising that Goldberg chose the regions he did rather than this country. However, attention to the specificities of the Canadian situation might have drawn attention to areas of analysis that I think really are a bit weak in the book as a whole, or at least incomplete.

One of these was Goldberg's outline of the three global waves of anti-racist struggle that have occurred so far. In his understanding, the first wave was abolitionist struggle, including slave uprisings and anti-slavery organizing by allies in the metropoles. The second was the era of anti-colonial and civil rights struggle. And the third was global struggle focused on ending apartheid and, a bit later, achieving multiculturalism. I think this scheme is interesting and useful, but I think multiculturalism as a focus of struggle in the anti-apartheid wave deserves a more nuanced and critical evaluation than it gets. I say that because of Canada's unusual history of early adoption of official state multiculturalism, and the ways in which it has functioned not just as a terrain of struggle for racialized people in Canada but also as an important way in which white supremacy in Canada is propagated and organized, as writers like Himani Bannerji and Sunera Thobani have discussed. I don't think Goldberg's analysis precludes this sort of critical lens on multiculturalism, but it doesn't foreground it either.

The other has to do with the relationship between indigenous struggle and anti-racist struggle, and it is a more serious problem with the book, I think. Three of the regions it discusses -- the United States, Latin America, and South Africa -- have histories of settler colonialism. In the little I've managed to learn about indigenous struggle in the context of the Canadian state, it is thoroughly anti-racist in nature but has specificities connected to the indigenous relationship to and struggle for the land, and connected to (at least for some peoples, some nations) a desire to maintain (or recreate) autonomous collectives that are capable of refusing to be pushed from tradition-inspired ways of being and doing by state violence and the exigencies of the capitalist market. If these goals are seen as central to anti-racist struggle, and the refusal of them central to the social organization of racism in settler colonial societies, then you end up with a quite different picture of things than if you ignore them or put them in the background. In line with much anti-racist thought originating in the U.S., settler colonialism is not ignored but is placed in the distant past and not understood as central to current social relations when he discusses that country. I know less about Latin America and South Africa, so perhaps my understanding of the specificities of indigenous struggle is less relevant to how indigenous peoples in those regions understand their political projects. However, it seemed to me that the books discussion of these two regions was also lacking in the ways it incorporated indigeneity and indigenous struggle into anti-racism.

I have other fragmentary comments as well.

For instance, I had mixed feelings about Goldberg's writing. He is a talented writer and I appreciate it when academics make the effort to push beyond disciplined language in ways that reflect the passion warranted by the issues they discuss. Goldberg certainly does that. I also understand that a certain kind of playfulness and deliberate nonlinearity with language can be pedagogically useful and can in some situations convey meaning beyond what is possible with more plodding, linear writing. But there were places in this book where that approach to writing felt more like gratuitous smartypantsing than anything that was necessary for conveying meaning.

I am interested to know more about Goldberg's opposition to the language of "racialization." He only mentions it briefly in this book, and points towards previous work that talks about it in more detail. As far as I understand it, he has two main objections to it. One is that there is this pretense with "racialization" that the person using it is foregrounding a process of social construction of categories and of oppressions, but, as useful as that might be, most of the time the actual use of "racialization" and "racialized" is just a formulaic gesture in that direction without any deeper effort to unearth or articulate the processes involved. Which is a reasonable criticism, I think. His other point is that he sees analytic value in keeping the notions of "race" and "racism" distinct. He argues that they are deeply intertwined in essential ways, but that there is political value keeping them separate and keeping the focus on racism. In particular, he says that in all three of the global waves of anti-racist struggle, a sign that a given wave was receding was a shift in attention from racism (or racial oppression) being the basic element of the problem to "race" or racial categorization or racial language as being the bad thing to avoid, which then made it harder to name and oppose racism. I'm not sure I buy this and would like to see the longer version of the argument.

One of the chapters that was not specific to a particular region talked a lot about "civility" and its mobilization in defense of oppression. That wasn't particularly new to me, but it was a more extensive discussion of it than I've seen before. But what really interested me was that he wove that together with discussion of "civility" as understood under liberal democracy as coming about historically in a way tightly tied to the notion of "civil society." He argues that civil society, in line with a few other things I've read, is not a space that opposes the state and keeps it in check, as liberal-democratic theory would have it, but rather state relations and civil society are mutual constitutive and interdependent, and the civility that is a prerequisite of a functional civil society is an essential element in preserving the dominance of the state form. I have no writing planned at the moment that would draw on these ideas, but I'm sure I'll come back to them at some point.

I quite liked the way he talked about racism regionally. I liked the fact that the regions discussed were different kinds of entities. It lead to discussions that did not ignore the importance of the state relations within the broader context of global social relations, but neither did it necessarily restrict its analysis to the unit defined by state boundaries. The geographic scope of the regions was chosen more for reasons of what cohered naturally in terms of the history and present expression of racism. I also thought this approach was effective in conveying the idea that social relations in general can have a global character in various ways, but only take on meaning -- and in fact only come into existence -- through specific, local expressions.

And, at the risk of making the lead to my review less successful, I was actually not as impressed with this book's attention to intersection as I thought I would be -- not so much intersection with relations of production, which it talked about although perhaps not in as pointed a way as it could have, but intersection with relations of privilege and oppression beyond that. These interconnections were acknowledged in places, but rarely explored very far. For instance, I think there could have been a lot more said about gender in almost every chapter. It does raise an interesting practical question though: given what I said in the lead about the impossibility of rendering the full complexity of our social world in any representation of it, how do you write about interconnection, intersection, interlockingness that approaches the infinite, or at least feels like it does? I'm not sure any writing that I've ever done answers that question in a convincing way. Certainly there is nothing wrong with having a focus or a centre for your analysis -- with, for example, this being a book that puts racism at its centre. But I have a sense from other reading -- mainly work by radical women of colour, but others too -- that it involves not shifting the focus of a particular piece to something else, but changing how you talk about that focus and, ideally, leaving what might be called "hooks" in the writing that allow the reader to connect the ideas in one piece of writing with other ideas from other writing, other writers, or from the reader herself. Not that I'm claiming I could do better, but I'm not sure that The Threat of Race does as much of this as it could.

Anyway. This is kind of a disconnected review, but hopefully it gives a sense of the book. My choice to read it was kind of random. Most of the books I review on this site are in the service, directly or indirectly, of my current book project. I picked this one up, though, when I was down in Toronto in early December doing my usual pre-Xmas book buying trip. I like to get at least one book of political nonfiction for myself that is not about work while I'm buying stuff for other people, and this was my selection this time around. But I'm wondering, in retrospect, whether it was a good choice. I picked it because a handful of other authors that I have read in the past couple of years have referenced some of Goldberg's earlier work, so I understood him as someone worth listening to, and I was intrigued by the focus on racism under neoliberalism. And certainly I learned lots. But in retrospect, is my own personal political education really best advanced by reading a book about racism that is high theory written by a white guy? Asking that is not at all meant to disrespect the book or the author, but rather as a challenge to be critical about the ways in which the social relations of academic knowledge production shape how radicals learn about the world and who they learn about the world from. A bit of skeptical reflection on the patterns in one's reactions of "Oh! That looks interesting!" is perhaps warranted.

(For the website associated with the book, which includes supplementary materials and occasional new articles by the author, go here. To hear an interesting interview with the author, go here.)

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Support War Resisters; Video of Ex-Soldier on Why Not To Enlist

2009-03-19T22:13:00.001-04:00

I was at an event of the War Resisters Support Campaign tonight. The two resisters who came from Toronto to speak were great speakers and very informative, and I was sorry to have to leave before the second one was quite done. I don't have much to say about it, except

to encourage people to support the effort to prevent the deportation of G.I. resister Kimberly Rivera and her family by the canadian state, which is due to happen next week;
to draw your attention to "A War Resister Speaks from Prison: Let GI Resisters Stay in Canada" by deported G.I. resister Robin Long, who is currently serving a 15 month sentence in prison for refusing to participate in war crimes;
and to link to this video, which is retired Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff, who served in conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, giving a very simple, direct argument for why you shouldn't join the military...Goff also blogs here.

New Book on Mothering and Blogging

2009-03-18T14:40:00.002-04:00

As I have happily noted on a number of past occasions, it excites me when people I know have success in publishing work of various sorts, and it gives me pleasure to draw people's attention to it. This one is particularly relevant to this space, given that it is a book about blogging.

It is a collection called Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog and it is edited by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte. Shana, a PhD candidate and lecturer in Women's Studies, lives in Sudbury, and I've been lucky enough to get to know her, her partner, and their son a little bit. The book will be published in May by Demeter Press. You can find out more about it and order it here.

The blurb about the book says,

This important, timely collection considers how critical mothering and writing about motherhood have, in the last few years, begun to engage with a new form of communication. All over the Internet, mommy bloggers are commenting on the radical act of being mothers and women within a world hostile to both of these identities. What are some of the questions posed by this new context for motherhood? What are the implications for sites of marginalization and diversity within the blogosphere?

Place your advanced order now, or encourage your local library to do so!