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This reader brings together scholars from different eras, cultures and geographic locations. With this diversity of voices, the book opens a dialogue about the social power of art and how change is envisioned by deliberately juxtaposing radically different conceptions of art and activism.  Among the writers included are: James Baldwin, Lucy Lippard, Herbert Marcuse, Audre Lorde, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rabindranath Tagore, John Dewey, John Berger, Augusto Boal, Franz Fanon, Raymond Williams, Jacque Ranciere, Rosalyn Deutche, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Mikhail Baktin, Octavia Butler, and W. E. B. DuBois. The reader focuses on concepts that scholars have grappled with as to how art and politics can combine to achieve social change. It deliberately does not include case studies or manifestos.  Rather, the texts are organized thematically: Art Unsettles: Social Systems and Critique; Art Reveals: Making the Invisible Visible; Art Resists: Everyday Interventions; Art Acts: Activism as Art; Art (Re)Orders: Making Sense of the World; and Art Imagines: Envisioning New Worlds. This thematic structure allows the reader to engage with different perspectives with the theme for engaged dialogue. Each thematic section opens with a brief essay by the editors framing the central conceptual concerns that follow.

Much has been written In English about the experiences and treatment of immigrants from south of the Rio Grande once they have entered the United States. But this account, by the itinerant, effervescent and highly original journalist Beln Fernndez, offers a different and wholly original take.Beln Fernndezshows us what life is like for would-be migrants, not just from the Mexican side of the border but inside Siglo XXI, the notorious migrant detention center in the south of the country.Journalists are prohibited from entering Siglo XXI; Fernndezonly gained access because she herself was detained as a result of faulty paperwork when she attempted to return to the US to renew her passport. Once inside the facility, Fernndezwas able to speak with detained women from Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Bangladesh, and beyond. Their stories, detailing the hardships that prompted them to leave their homes, and the dangers they have experienced on an often-tortuous journey north, form the core of this unique book. The companionship and support they offer to Fernndez, whose antipathy to returning to the United States, the country they are desperate to enter, is a source of bemusement and perplexity, demonstrates a spirited generosity that is deeply moving.In the end, the Siglo XXI center emerges as a strikingly precise metaphor for a 21st century in which poor people, effectively imprisoned by American political and economic policies, nevertheless display astonishing resilience.

Racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year. Malcolm X (a former auto worker)Written in a lively, accessible fashion and drawing extensively on interviews with people who were formerly incarcerated,Cars and Jailsexamines how the costs of car ownership and use are deeply enmeshed with the U.S. prison system.American consumer lore has long held the automobile to be a freedom machine, consecrating the mobility of a free people. Yet, paradoxically, the car also functions at the cross-roads of two great systems of entrapment and immobility the American debt economy and the carceral state.Cars and Jailsinvestigates this paradox, showing how auto debt, traffic fines, over-policing, and automated surveillance systems work in tandem to entrap and criminalize poor people. The authors describe how racialization and poverty take their toll on populations with no alternative, in a country poorly served by public transport, to taking out loans for cars and exposing themselves to predatory and often racist policing.Looking skeptically at the frothy promises of the mobility revolution, Livingston and Ross close with thought-provoking ideas for a radical overhaul of transportation.

Ongoing relevance/likely persistence of QAnon in the US, particularly in the 2022 and 2024 election years: new reporting continues to indicate that QAnon supporters are remaining politically active and adapting the core ideology to new aims (see, for example, The Atlantic's latest piece).While the first major book on the topic, The Storm is Upon Us (Melville House, June 2021) functioned as an authoritative explainer of QAnon's communications, activities, and scope, Operation Mindfuck is an irreverent but urgent call to intellectual action, offering mastery in the analysis of the movement's largely-borrowed source material and cult-mentality triggers. Guffey says: "Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the QAnon psyop is not the identity of its architects, but the mere fact that it worked . . . and worked so damn well."Operation Mindfuck contextualizes QAnon not only within existing conspiracy theory formulas and satanic panics, but also traces its bizarre lineage in the American collective unconscious, from Cold War paranoia to the midcentury counterculture?Guffey's particularly effective in highlighting QAnon's exploiting of political performance tactics pioneered by 1960s radical leftists. Untangling this web of influence and pointing to its far-from-supernatural sources, Guffey argues, is key to breaking QAnon's mesmeric spell.The book's uniquely freewheeling style is marked by Guffey's gonzo-journalistic plunges into the subculture himself, including pursuing an email correspondence with a recent QAnon convert, clicking on YouTube links at his own risk, and joining the mailing list of a QAnon talk show, using the pseudonym Edgar Allan Poe.

“You walk into Thoughts and Prayers like it’s a familiar pop cultural fun house—then you get drawn into one of the mirrors and find you’re actually deep in someplace very real: fleshy, frightening, full of anguished intelligence and bitter fun.” —Mary GaitskillThoughts and Prayers is a beautiful and startling volume of poetry about our political existence. With both humor and luminosity, it gets at the personal and collective emotional experience of American public life, from the 1970s to the 1990s Democrats, through the collapse of the news industry, to the burlesque Trump era.

In this iconoclastic and sure to be contentious re-casting by a renowned critic, the great American novel Moby Dick is presented as a work that has been widely misread, an error that continues to this day. According to Barry Sanders, Herman Melville's best- known work is not a novel, does not pretend to be a novel, and was not intended by its author to be read as a novel. Moby Dick is this country's first manifesto, a tocsin sounded to warn us about the encroaching end of nature.  The Manifesto of Herman Melville traces the evolution of Moby Dick-from its awful, initial reception, very rapidly passing out of print, to its remarkable revival to become lauded as one of America's great literary classics.  That turnaround happened in the early decades of the 20th century and was, in great part, the result of the new and radical aesthetic movements such as surrealism, dadaism, and cubism that allowed for a radical reading of the book. The novel's new standing as one of the keystones of the American cannon disguises its deeper meaning as an alarm bell, an obscuring which Barry Sanders, in a critical assessment that is as persuasive as it is provocative, seeks to clear away. Sanders argues that Moby Dick needs to be recognized as Melville's manifesto: a bold statement warning of the destruction of the natural world made most evident in the book's central metaphor the relentless pursuit to kill the whale, the first sentient being in Genesis and one of the most startling mammals-possessed of hair and scales, a tail and breasts-and the largest of the creatures on earth, weighing up to 400,000 pounds. Whalers in Melville's day hunted down and killed these extraordinary behemoths of nature, for their oil, sold to people for cooking and to light their homes. Today the pursuit for energy has shifted dramatically, from sea to land,  but the prize remains the same:  energy producing fuel for which entrepreneurs and adventurers are prepared to kill off all of nature.

A critical biography of Belgium's highest-ranking Nazi collaborator, Léon Degrelle, who fought with the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front during the Second World War and served as inspiration for the protagonist of Jonathan Littell's bestselling, Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Kindly Ones ([Gallimard 2006] HarperCollins 2009). Originally published in French as Le sec et l'humide: Une brève incursion en territoire fasciste (Gallimard 2008) and translated into Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Catalan, and now English, The Damp and the Dry is a critical case study of a fascist true believer who was supported by both Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War and later sheltered by Franco in Spain. Littell pays close attention to Degrelle's autobiographical writings, especially his account of fighting on the Eastern Front, The Russian Campaign, and uncovers an "anatomy of fascist discourse," developing on the theories of German sociologist Klaus Theweleit, whose Afterword follows the text.

An explosive exhibition of art by a celebrated cartoonist chronicling America's march toward right-wing authoritarianism. Museum of Degenerates invites you to a delirious display of art by one of contemporary America's most original and incendiary political cartoonists. Eli Valley's extraordinary work is a scathing indictment of the entire American polity, with a particular focus on the issues of Israel and Judaism at a time when these have moved to the center of public debate and action. In these pages, Valley tips a homburg to German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix who featured in "The Exhibition of Degenerate Art," a 1937 Munich show that sought to ridicule the work of artists critical of Hitler's fascist regime. In an aesthetic that is strikingly original, Valley also draws on early twentieth-century American Yiddish cartoons and the work of artists who created the helter-skelter exuberance of MAD comics in the 1950s. Valley's own art, accompanied here by extensive descriptions of its genesis and context, is a howl of protest against the political, cultural and media elites driving America into an authoritarian abyss. Here is anger, pure and hot, expressed in exquisite detail and, often, disturbingly funny.

"Bev Stohl ran the MIT office of the renowned linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky for nearly two and a half decades. This is her account of those years"--Page [4] of cover

"This penetrating study asks whether the actual evidence concerning alleged Russian interference in the US elections of 2016 justifies the enormous hue and cry it has elicited ... A highly instructive inquiry into our current malaise." - Noam ChomskyCold War, Hot War upends conventional thinking about the defining story of the Trump era-the supposed threat of Russia to American democracy -and offers revelatory insight about the U.S. political and media culture in which it arose. Drawing on his writing for The Nation, Real Clear Investigations, The Grayzone, and original reporting for this book, journalist Aaron Mate offers a rigorous, and mordantly entertaining account of how and why supposed Russian interference in US elections became what Mother Jones described as "the biggest scandal in American history."Russiagate reporting is a densely populated field. But, unlike other accounts, this book sidesteps the inflammatory speculation shared by Democrat and Republican talking points. Instead, Mate raises two questions that no major work has previously addressed: Do the facts about Russiagate match what we have been led to believe? And, if not, why has it become one of the biggest news stories of recent years? Russiagate, Mate argues, is not a genuine "scandal" based on the merits, but a kind of Privilege Protection Racket: a product of the interests-and entrenched dysfunctions- of those in power. This is not some reverse conspiracy theory of "Deep State" subterfuge.  Cold War, Hot War brilliantly exposes the way the Russiagate phenomenon reflects the common elite interests of both liberals and conservative. In short, Russiagate is a pathology of the privileged.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maximillian Alvarez conducted a series of intimate interviews with workers of various stripes, from all around the United States, about their jobs, their lives, dreams, and struggles, and about their experiences living through a year when the world itself seemed to break apart.--Adapted from back cover summary.

An audacious collaboration between an award-winning novelist and a leading environmental philosopher,Love in the Anthropocenetaps into one of the hottest topics of the day, literally and figurativelyour corrupted environmentto deliver five related stories (Flyfishing, Carbon, Holiday, Shanghai, and Zoo) that investigate a future bereft of natural environments, introduced with a discussion on the Anthropocenethe Age of Humanityand concluding with an essay on love.The love these writer/philosophers investigate and celebrate is as much a constant as is human despoliation of the planet; it is what defines us, and it is what may save us. Science fiction, literary fiction, philosophical meditation, manifesto? All the above. This unique work is destined to become an essential companiona primer, reallyto life in the 21st century.

A mesmerizing mix of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick, Chameleo is a true account of what happened in a seedy Southern California town when an enthusiastic and unrepentant heroin addict named Dion Fuller sheltered a U.S. Marine who'd stolen night vision goggles and perhaps a few top secret files from a nearby military base.Dion found himself arrested (under the ostensible auspices of The Patriot Act) for conspiring with international terrorists to smuggle Top Secret military equipment out of Camp Pendleton. The fact that Dion had absolutely nothing to do with international terrorists, smuggling, Top Secret military equipment, or Camp Pendleton didn't seem to bother the military. He was released from jail after a six-day-long Abu-Ghraib-style interrogation. Subsequently, he believed himself under intense government scrutiny - and, he suspected, the subject of bizarre experimentation involving "e;cloaking"e;- electro-optical camouflage so extreme it renders observers practically invisible from a distance of some meters - by the Department of Homeland Security. Hallucination? Perhaps - except Robert Guffey, an English teacher and Dion's friend, tracked down and interviewed one of the scientists behind the project codenamed "e;Chameleo,"e; experimental technology which appears to have been stolen by the U.S. Department of Defense and deployed on American soil. More shocking still, Guffey discovered that the DoD has been experimenting with its newest technologies on a number of American citizens.A condensed version of this story was the cover feature ofFortean Times Magazine(September 2013).

Tiyo Attallah Salah-El died in 2018 on "e;Slow Death Row"e; while serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison. He was a man with a dizzying array of talents and vocations: author, scholar, teacher, musician, and activist: he was the founder of the Coalition for the Abolition of Prisons. He was also, as is apparent from the letters written over a decade and half to his friend Paul Alan Smith that make up this book, an extraordinarily eloquent correspondent.Tiyo's missives present a vivid picture of the tribulations faced by those incarcerated, especially the nearly 60% who are non-white: habitual racism, arbitrary lockdowns, brutal beatings and hospitalizations, stifling heat and bitter cold. Here too are descriptions of Tiyo's individual struggles with cancer, aging, and the sirens of personal demons.Tiyo's refusal to succumb to such hardships is evident in dispatches that are generous, philosophical and often laugh-out-loud funny. Through them we learn of his many friendships, including those with the historian Howard Zinn, a range of activist/advocate supporters on the outside, and two fellow people in prison who were leaders of the Black liberation group MOVE.At a time when the appalling racial bias of America's police and criminal justice system is under the spotlight as never before,Pen Palis both a vital intervention and moving portrait of someone whose physical confinement could never extinguish an extraordinary free spirit.

The science is conclusive: to avoid irreversible climate collapse, the burning of all fossil fuels will have to end in the next decade. In this concise and highly readable intervention, Ashley Dawson sets out what is required to make this momentous shift: simply replacing coal-fired power plants with for-profit solar energy farms will only maintain the toxic illusion that it is possible to sustain relentlessly expanding energy consumption. We can no longer think of energy as a commodity. Instead we must see it as part of the global commons, a vital element in the great stock of air, water, plants, and cultural forms like language and art that are the inheritance of humanity as a whole.People's Powerprovides a persuasive critique of a market-led transition to renewable energy. It surveys the early development of the electric grid in the United States, telling the story of battles for public control over power during the Great Depression. This history frames accounts of contemporary campaigns, in both the United States and Europe, that eschew market fundamentalism and sclerotic state power in favor of energy that is green, democratically managed and equitably shared.

As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos.Acknowledging the possibilities for new beginnings at such moments, Mao Zedong famously proclaimed "e;There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent."e; The contemporary relevance of Mao's observation depends on whether today's catastrophes can be a catalyst for progress or have passed over into something terrible and irretrievable. Perhaps the disorder is no longer under, but in heaven itself.Characteristically rich in paradoxes and reversals that entertain as well as illuminate, Slavoj A iA ek's new book treats with equal analytical depth the lessons of Rammstein and Corbyn, Morales and Orwell, Lenin and Christ. It excavates universal truths from local political sites across Palestine and Chile, France and Kurdistan, and beyond.Heaven In Disorder looks with fervid dispassion at the fracturing of the Left, the empty promises of liberal democracy, and the tepid compromises offered by the powerful. From the ashes of these failures, A iA ek asserts the need for international solidarity, economic transformation, and-above all-an urgent, "e;wartime"e; communism.

I have created for each of you a fate, one tailored specifically for your needs and desires. Each of you has a defining momentnot before, not afterwhen a wrong turn or decision led to the disastrous outcome that you and I mourn. To isolate that malignant moment is an exacting, exhaustive process, which only the most well-trained and competent professionals, armed with the most sophisticated of predictive models and processing power, can accomplish. You can put your trust in me, as you would in an expert surgeon, a surgeon of the soul.On a distant planet overlooking Earth, the nameless protagonist ofThe Compensation Bureauis one of a team of Actuaries at work on the innovative Lazarus Project. Conceived in response to the shocking violence observed in humankind, the project identifies people who have wrongfully died at the hands of otherswhether victims of war, hate crimes, or random brutalityand attempts to compensate for the cruelty and pain they faced in life and death.But balancing the accounts for the sufferings and wrongdoings of humanity proves hardly a clinical exercise. The Actuary soon finds himself personally invested in the projects mission, and the goals of the project itself are complicated as the fate of Earths inhabitants becomes more uncertain.The Compensation Bureauexplores the power of individual and collective action, from a writer hailed byThe Washington Postas a world-novelist of the first category.

"e;When I first committed to three full months in El Salvador, the feeling that I was signing up for the equivalent of marriage and reproduction was assuaged only by the awareness that, come March 2020, I'd be dashing around Mexico before flying to Istanbul and resuming freneticism in that hemisphere. Little did I know that the scribbled itinerary would never come to fruition, and that I'd only get as far as the coastal village of Zipolite in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where March 13-25 would turn into March 13 until further notice."e;Since leaving her American homeland in 2003 Beln Fernndez had been an inveterate traveler. Ceaselessly wandering the world, the only constant in her itinerary was a conviction never to return to the country of her childhood. Then the COVID-19 lockdown happened and Fernandez found herself stranded in a small village on the Pacific coast of Mexico.This charming, wryly humorous account of nine months stuck in one place nevertheless roams freely: over reflections on previous excursions to the wilder regions of North Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe; over her new-found friendship with Javier, the mezcal-drinking, chain-smoking near-septuagenarian she encounters in his plastic chair on Mexico's only clothing-optional beach; over her protracted struggle to obtain a life-saving supply of yerba mate; and over, literally, the rope of a COVID-19 checkpoint, set up directly outside her front door and manned by armed guards who require her to don a mask every time she returns home.

* A police officer kills a twelve-year-old boy. It's caught on video. The officer gets off.* A police officer strangles a man selling cigarettes. It's caught on video. The officer gets off.* A police officer shoots a man in his car. It's live-streamed. The officer gets off.It happens over and over again. The culprit here, alongside the cops, is Qualified Immunity (QI), a legal principle which Reuters describes as "e;a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights."e;Originally intended to protect cops from being sued over good faith mistakes, courts have interpreted QI so broadly that police are shielded from accountability in all but the rarest of circumstances. Only when the exact same abusive behavior was already deemed unconstitutional by a court in the exact same jurisdiction can victims succeed in a prosecution.Above the Lawrecounts 12 cases in which justice was denied because of QI. The stories are accompanied by infographics, timelines, and contextualizing background to create a concise and compelling indictment of an outrageously unjust legal principle that must be changed.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, scion of Mario Cuomo, is today as famous as his father, also a governor of New York state for three terms. Like Robert Moses, he is one of New York's great and infamous power brokers. Though initially lavishly celebrated for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, not least by himself, it is now apparent that Cuomo's management of the crisis was a juddering and fatal failure. Thousands died because, ignoring the advice of experts, he shut down too late and returned still sick patients to nursing homes. The crisis was intensified by his previous commitment to austerity, which saw the slashing of funding to hospitals.A vital riposte to Cuomo's recently published book about the pandemic, now increasingly derided as self-serving and deceitful,The Princeis a searing indictment of Cuomo's handling of coronavirus and his time overall in the highest office of the state.

With Joe Biden stepping back into the national scene, the time is ripe for a close assessment of the administration in which he served as vice-president.The Center Did Not Holdweighs the progressive-and not so progressive-contributions of the Obama-Biden White House across more than a hundred issues involving international relations, domestic cultural and economic matters, and social justice.While Obama and Biden campaigned in the early 2000s on a host of progressive promises, Eisenberg's meticulous accounting shows that, over eight years, they failed to achieve any substantial, lasting change to that end, instead perpetuating a tradition of cautious centrism.Among the disappointments, the former president and vice-president reneged on environmental promises, pandered to lobbyists, prosecuted a record number of whistle-blowers, and failed to implement the simplest of financial reforms in response to the 2008 crisis. Under Biden's trademark "e;counterterrorism plus"e; strategy, they oversaw tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, and escalated violence in the Middle East.

Michael Ratner (1943-2016) was one of America's leading human rights lawyers. He worked for more than four decades at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) becoming first the Director of Litigation and then the President of what Alexander Cockburn called "e;a small band of tigerish people."e; He was also the President of the National Lawyers Guild.Ratner handled some of the most significant cases In American history. This book tells why and how he did it.His last case, which he worked on until he died, was representing truth-telling whistleblower and now political prisoner Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks.Ratner "e;moved the bar"e; by organizing some 600 lawyers to successfully defend habeas corpus, that is, the ancient right of someone accused of a crime to have a lawyer and to be brought before a judge.Michael had a piece of paper taped on the wall next to his desk at the CCR. It read:4 key principles of being a radical lawyer:1. Do not refuse to take a case just because it is long odds of winning in court.2. Use cases to publicize a radical critique of US policy and to promote revolutionary transformation.3. Combine legal work with political advocacy.4. Love people.Compelling and instructive,Moving the Baris an indispensable manual for the next generation of activists and their lawyers.

Bernie Sanders' tilt at the US presidency has come under fire from an establishment that derides his social democratic policies as alien to the American way. But, as Ted Hamm reveals in this engaging and concise history, the sort of socialism Bernie advocates was commonplace in the Brooklyn where he grew up in the 1940s and 50s.Policies like free college tuition, rent control, and infrastructure projects including extensive public housing, parks and swimming pools were part of the New Deal city run by a progressive Mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, and supported by FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. While Arthur Miller, resident in Brooklyn Heights, was stagingDeath of a Salesman, a play with which Bernie's dad closely identified, Woody Guthrie was penning his paeans to the American worker in Coney Island and Jackie Robinson was breaking the color bar on Ebbets Field in a Dodgers team yet to be relocated in California.Drawing deeply on interviews with his brother and friends, and delving skillfully into the history of the borough,Bernie's Brooklynshows how, far from being an anomaly in US politics, Sanders' 2020 platform is rooted firmly in the progressivism of the New Deal.