This week, join the Anarchist Studies Network for the ASN 2022 Conference! This is a virtual conference. For more information regarding registration and a lineup for all speakers and workshops, click here.
Wednesday, August 24, 2022 6:45am – 8:15am (GMT+1) Anarchist Utopianism
Panelists: John Clark, Laurence Davis, Vandana Singh and Margaret Killjoy
What roles do art and literature play in envisioning anarchist futures? In this panel we explore the rich but still relatively neglected phenomenon of anarchist utopianism, especially but not exclusively in its literary forms. Unusually for a panel at an Anarchist Studies Network conference, the aim of this session is to bring together in dialogue both scholars of the anarchist utopian tradition with specialist expertise on its history and theory, and writers of contemporary speculative fiction who have engaged in original ways with anarchist or anarchistic forms of utopianism. More substantively, we aim to elucidate the distinctive ideological features of anarchist utopianism, its historical and contemporary political significance, and the imaginative challenges and affordances of crafting anarchist literary utopias in a 21st-century context. Eschewing simplistic and reductive readings of literary utopias as fixed blueprints for an ideologically defined future, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which anarchist literary utopias engage the reader in a complex dialogue about what is, what might be, and the relationship between the two, inviting us to participate in a time-sensitive journey of the utopian imagination complete with fundamental moral conflict, meaningful choice and continuing change, by the end of which we may return to the non-fictional present with a broader perspective on its latent emancipatory possibilities. Consistent with this emphasis on the importance of critical dialogue, we also hope to leave plenty of time for comments and questions, whether academic or otherwise!
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Thursday, August 25, 2022 6:45am – 8:15am (GMT+1) Nuts and Bolts of the Future Society
Panelists: Thomas Pewton – A Future Food System
Robin Hahnel, Jason Chrysostomou & Anders Sandstrom – A Participatory Economy: a vision for an anarchist economy
Bernardo De Urquidi Gonzalez – Democracy by Average – a new horizontal decision making process
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Thursday, August 25, 2022 8:30am – 10:00am (GMT+1) ‘Go Forth and Multiply’
Panelist: Carla Bergman – Trust Kids: Autonomy Begins at Home
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The Anarchist Studies Network The Anarchist Studies Network is a support network for people working on, or incorporating in their work, the field of anarchism in its many forms. We encourage the study of anarchism within academia by building links between scholars across subject areas, as well as groups located outside the official sphere of academia, including those formed for activism and public intellectual life. We support people in collaborating and create an inclusive space to share ideas, thoughts, and research. We also aim to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between anarchists and other scholars.
ASN hosts a variety of events and activities. The biennial Anarchist Studies Network conference is our flagship event which attracts people from all over the world. The conference is a focal point for many scholars to share new research, present ideas or simply meet like-minded people in convivial settings. The conference actively supports early-career or underfunded participants with grants and is committed to working on inclusion and dismantling structures of power within the space. We also organise smaller workshops and research activities lead by our members, notably through the PSA’s annual conferences. Our members actively contribute to an informal blog for more accessible anarchist writings and share knowledge and best practice through online discussions.
“For this impressive collection, Killjoy (the Danielle Cain series) brings together 21 speculative shorts tinged with just the right amount of horror to keep readers gloriously uncomfortable… Throughout, Killjoy showcases her gift for blending cerebral speculation with visceral thrills. There’s plenty to chew on here.” —Publishers Weekly
Margaret Killjoy’s stories have appeared for years in science fiction and fantasy magazines both major and indie. Here, we have collected the best previously published work along with brand new material. Ranging in theme and tone, these imaginative tales bring the reader on a wild and moving ride. They’ll encounter a hacker who programs drones to troll CEOs into quitting; a group of LARPers who decide to live as orcs in the burned forests of Oregon; queer, teen love in a death cult; the terraforming of a climate-changed Earth; polyamorous love on an anarchist tea farm during the apocalypse; and much more. Killjoy writes fearless, mind-expanding fiction.
Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author born and raised in Maryland who was spent her adult life traveling with no fixed home. A 2015 graduate of Clarion West, Margaret’s short fiction has been published by Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Vice’s Terraform, and Fireside Fiction, amongst others. She is the author of A Country of Ghosts, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, and The Barrow Will Send What it May. She is also the host of the podcast Live Like the World is Dying and Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff on iHeartRadio. She is based in rural West Virginia.
Tuesday, September 20 @ 7PM Gray Coast Guildhall 11 Old Church Road Quilcene, WA 98376
Thursday, September 22 @ 7PM Left Bank Books 92 Pike Seattle, WA 98101 *MASKS REQUIRED
Friday, September 23 @ 7PM with Robert Evans Powell’s City of Books 1005 W. Burnside Street Portland, OR 97209
Wednesday, September 28 @ 7PM Pageant Theater 351 East 6th Street Chico, CA 95928 *MASKS ENCOURAGED
VIRTUAL EVENT Thursday, September 29 @ 4PM PT /7PM ET with Cadwell Turnbull Firestorm Co-op RSVP
Saturday, October 1 @ 5PM Short Story Writing Workshop @ Sour Cherry Comics (Followed by book signing) 3187 16th St. San Francisco, CA 94103 Workshop RSVP (no RSVP necessary to attend book signing at 7PM)
Sunday, October 2 @ 6PM East Bay Booksellers 5433 College Avenue Oakland, CA 94618 *MASKS ENCOURAGED
Thursday, October 6 @ 7PM Chevalier’s Books 133 N. Larchmont Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90004
Wednesday, October 12 @ 7PM BCC Tucson 101 E. Ventura Street Tucson, AZ 85705
Saturday, October 15 @ 7PM Monkeywrench Books 110 N. Loop Blvd E Austin, TX 78751 *MASKS ENCOURAGED
Tuesday, October 18 @ 6:30PM The Montrose Center 401 Branard Street Room 107 Houston, TX 77006
Sunday, October 23 @ 11AM – 5PM (Reading at 2PM) A.C.A.B. Zine Fest Gasa Gasa 4920 Freret Street New Orleans, LA 70115
Tuesday, October 25 @ 6PM Atlanta Vintage Books 3660 Clairmont Road Atlanta, GA 30341
Wednesday, October 26 @ 6PM Durham County Library 300 N. Roxboro Street Durham, NC 27701 RSVP
Friday, October 28 @ 7PM Small Friend Records & Books 1 N. Lombardy Street Richmond, VA 23220 *MASKS REQUIRED
Saturday, October 29 @ 4PM (note new time!) F12 Infoshop 1740 Broadway Street Charlottesville, VA 22902
Wednesday, November 2 @ 7:30PM Lost City Books 2467 18th Street Northwest Washington, DC 20009 RSVP
Thursday, November 3 @ 7PM Red Emma’s 3128 Greenmount Avenue Baltimore, MD 21218
Wednesday, November 9 @ 7PM The Word Is Change 368 Tompkins Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11216
Friday, November 18 @ 6:30pm The Big Idea Cooperative Bookstore 4812 Liberty Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15224 *MASKS REQUIRED
Saturday, November 19 @ 7PM Rhizome House 2174 Lee Rd. Cleveland Heights, OH 44118 *MASKS ENCOURAGED
Monday, November 21 @ 7PM Burning Books 420 Connecticut St. Buffalo, NY 14213
Tuesday, November 22 @ 6PM Akimbo Books 318b East Ave. Rochester, NY 14607
This weekend on August 6th & 7th, join us for the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. Don’t forget to swing by the AK Press table to say hi and grab some books! This event is free and open for anarchists and people curious about anarchism.
The Anarchist Bookfair takes place in two buildings, which are across from each other (maps below).
CEDA 2515, rue Delisle CEDA is an adult education and community center based in Little Burgundy/St-Henri.
The main floor of CEDA is accessible to people using wheelchairs.
Please note: The CEDA entrance for people needing to use the wheelchair ramp is via the rear parking lot to the left of 2520, avenue Lionel-Groulx, before Vinet, but after Charlevoix.
The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair venues are a few flat blocks from metro Lionel-Groulx. General information about this metro station is available online here: http://www.stm.info/english/metro/a-m36.htm#Lignes
This metro station is wheelchair accessible (there is an elevator to both platform levels). This will only be useful if you are coming from one of the 6 other wheelchair accessible metro stations (Montmorency, de la Concorde, Cartier, Berri-UQAM, Henri-Bourassa or Côte-Vertu). Please note that all of these stations are along the orange Line of the system.
Lionel-Groulx Metro is also a major hub for buses. The following buses stop at Lionel-Groulx Metro during the regular daytime schedule. Beside each is a link to the online schedule. On the schedule, wheelchair accessible buses are marked by a star ( * ).
On Wednesday, August 31st at 7:00pm EDT, join author Kung Li Sun, Mary Hooks, and Charis Books & More for a book launch event celebrating the release of Begin the World Over.
Charis welcomes Kung Li Sun in conversation with Mary Hooks for a celebration of Begin the World Over, a revolutionary tale of Black and Indigenous insurrection. History as it should have been. Begin the World Over is a counterfactual novel about the Founders’ greatest fear—that Black and Indigenous people might join forces to undo the newly formed United States of America—coming true.
In 1793, as revolutionaries in the West Indies take up arms, James Hemings has little interest in joining the fight for liberty –talented and favored, he is careful to protect his relative comforts as Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef. But when he meets Denmark Vesey, James is immediately smitten. The formidable first mate persuades James to board his ship, on its way to the revolt in Saint-Domingue. There and on the mainland they join forces with a diverse cast of characters, including a gender nonconforming prophetess, a formerly enslaved jockey, and a Muskogee horse trader. The resulting adventure masterfully mixes real historical figures and events with a riotous retelling of a possible history in which James must decide whether to return to his constrained but composed former life, or join the coalition of Black revolutionaries and Muskogee resistance to fight the American slavers and settlers.
Kung Li Sun is a lifelong southerner currently based on the Gulf Coast. As a public interest attorney in Atlanta, she brought class-action lawsuits on behalf of people in prisons and jails. He left lawyering to support undocumented and abolitionist organizers as a strategist and trainer, and to write. This is their first novel.
Mary Hooks is a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother and Field Secretary on the field team for the Movement for Black Lives. Mary is the former co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Mary joined SONG as a member in 2009 and began organizing with the organization in 2010. Growing up in a family that migrated from Mississippi to the Midwest, Mary’s commitment to liberation is rooted in her experiences and the impacts of the War on Drugs on her community.
This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle. Charis Circle’s mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage
Please contact info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don’t hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org.
The Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair is an annual event that brings together people interested and engaged in radical work to connect, learn, and discuss through books and information tables, workshops, panel discussions, skillshares, films, and more! We seek to create an inclusive space to introduce new folks to anarchism, foster a productive dialogue between various political traditions as well as anarchists from different milieus, and create an opportunity to dissect our movements’ strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and tactics.
Revolutionary Organizing Against Racism (ROAR) started as a conference in 2017 during the anti-fascist movement to translate the street protests that were happening all over the U.S. into a more radical analysis about racism’s key role in our entire social structure. We know it’s not enough to oppose street-level white supremacy and that ICE and the prisons are much more efficient institutions at upholding white supremacy and that if you are anti-racist, you must turn your attention to revolutionary politics. We’re happy you are here, and we hope you enjoy our revolutionary content.
This summer, investigative journalist and author Robert Evans will be on tour to promote the release of After the Revolution! Registration details below.
What will the fracturing of the United States look like? After the Revolution is an edge-of-your-seat answer to that question. In the year 2070, twenty years after a civil war and societal collapse of the “old” United States, extremist militias battle in the crumbling Republic of Texas. As the violence spreads like wildfire and threatens the Free City of Austin, three unlikely allies will have to work together in an act of resistance to stop the advance of the forces of the Christian ethnostate known as the “Heavenly Kingdom.”
Robert Evans, the author of A Brief History of Vice, has had an eclectic career as an investigative journalist reporting from war zones in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine, and reporting on domestic radicalism in the US. He hosts the podcasts Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here for iHeartRadio, is a writer for the humor website Cracked, and an investigative journalist for Bellingcat. He resides in Portland, OR.
PORTLAND 05/03 Powell’s City of Books 1005 W Burnside St. Portland Portland, OR 97209 *RSVP Not Required
SEATTLE 05/09 Third Place Books 17171 Bothell Way NE, #A101 Lake Forest Park WA 98155
LOS ANGELES 05/12 Chevalier’s Books 133 N Larchmont Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90004
05/17 Firestorm Co-op Virtual Event with Margaret Killjoy
NEW YORK 05/19 Strand Bookstore 828 Broadway 3rd Floor, Rare Book Room New York, NY 10036
Music is a huge part of everything that I do. I spend most of my time listening to music and looking for new music. It informs all of my politics and has been a radicalizing force in my life from my earliest days growing up in the church. Music isn’t a hobby or convenient distraction, it’s at the core of my being. I have been making playlists for years to try to help people through hard times with songs that inspire, comfort, and push me to action. I started doing this when I was working with the Praxis Center at Kalamazoo College as an editor for the race, class, and immigration section of their blog. I also made two during the pandemic when I was organizing, teaching, and writing. So, naturally, I made one to go with my book. You’ll see a few references to music throughout the text if you pick it up, but not nearly as many as I could have put. I think I’m going to have to write a book that’s strictly dedicated to music. It means too much to me not to. So, I’ve attached an accompanying playlist of songs related to this text. These are songs that inspired The Nation on No Map. Some complement the text and others conflict with it. Others are simply different songs I enjoyed while things were coming together on my journey to the last page. And some are symbolic. Hear me out!
If you’re willing to listen to my musical
selections, please also consider a short reading list of texts that could be
read alongside this book too. Many of them influenced this book and my thinking
about the topics at hand.
Featuring: An essay by William C. Anderson on ideology, Black anarchism, and his forthcoming book The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism & Abolition.
The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism & Abolition, now available for preorder at AK Press.
If there’s
one thing I learned from Black anarchism, it’s
to transcend. I am not just a Black anarchist because I want to systematize or
institutionalize Black anarchism. I’m
not wed to it and I’m
not dedicated to any cause like that because the entire point is not to be.
However, I have internalized its lessons and that’s why I wrote The Nation on No Map. The lessons
Black anarchism offers can help show us how to transcend the pre-arranged narratives
that hold us back. I believe that Black anarchism has done so in many ways and
provided a framework that we can observe. Social movements have long been
plagued with orthodoxy, cultism, and limitations that I feel have poisoned the
roots. People have put ideology before liberation at the expense of progress
and it’s blatant how much this is deterring us in a world that’s facing rapidly compounding unimaginable crises. I
learned a long time ago that a lot of people don’t actually want liberation, they just want control,
authority, and power. Furthermore, they don’t
make any distinctions between these things. Oftentimes with oppression, people
start thinking that having what the oppressor has (the ability to oppress) is
the goal; it’s
not. Ultimately, I think it’s
time to gather what we need from the history we’ve been offered and move beyond the stories we like to
tell ourselves about the past and the present for the realization of something
far greater. Black anarchism can provide helpful insights.
Founding Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin familiarized me with the task at hand to “raise the contradictions.” He was talking about exposing the inconsistencies between what the state, society, and what the world promises but does not deliver. I’d already been thinking about something similar in terms that expanded beyond ideological positions to something much deeper. I was beginning to ask questions about things that Marxism, classical anarchism, and doctrinaire politics could not answer. They have always had to be reshaped and extended in ways by those that are most marginalized within their ranks. This led me to interrogate questions of contradictions within ourselves and how we internalize them. Autonomous Black radicalisms of all sorts gave me a model and method which I found most useful in guiding my own political growth to do so.
The Nation on No Map is a humble attempt to use my own understanding and the lessons I’ve learned to trace a liberatory path. I believe that challenging the supposed necessity of the nation-state and removing the ways of thinking that feed into it are top priorities. I examine different relationships that Black America has with certain aspects of the past and use Black Anarchism to interrupt and trouble them as I look around. I can see clearly that the importance of an actual radical struggle is more important than just having the appearance of one. That is to say, some of the radicalism and revolutionary politics around us are held back by a lack of imagination. And we’re certainly going to need new ideas amid the flourishing discussions of abolition which I believe need an anti-state emphasis. A free future remains out of reach when antiquated, conservative ideas get repeatedly recycled. For Black America, the problems we experience as it relates to things like citizenship, migration, and nationhood illustrate the point I hope to make. The truth is in the mirror.
There’s
so much to talk about but there are barriers getting in the way of our growth
because people assume we’ve
already figured things out. We haven’t,
and we should call everything into question if we’re willing to admit as much. There are a wide array of
self-proclaimed liberatory politics we have before us that impede liberation
when they become cloaks for rigidity, religiosity and unthinking reformism. If
the answer to questions about the future is to endlessly parrot the dead
politics of yesteryear, we’re
failing. Not knowing things (yet) isn’t
always bad, but assuming we know everything already because we don’t want to question
prescribed beliefs is dangerous. What history gets overlooked? What questions
go unanswered? Whose stories get erased? Which ones get revised, edited, and
written over? The questions that go unanswered because some are unwilling to
ask are many.
I try my best to highlight this in my work. For example, this is a problem that plagues the Western left and radical movements who are drowning in their own dogma because of a staunch unwillingness to rise above doctrine. The left is stuck because it cannot get over the idea of itself and its self-centered infatuation with its past, and this prevents it from overcoming oppressions that are constantly reconfiguring. Our worst nightmares reorganize themselves while leftists desperately await the return of a dream they once had. They long to stay asleep, anticipating that the same heroes, villains, and storyline will reappear so they can reclaim the past fantasies they cling to. Sometimes when they can’t find victory around them, they’ll even excuse the very forms of violence they claim to be against as a means of defending ideological delusion, not oppressed people. Oppressors are warmly embraced by those who haven’t yet figured out, or are unwilling to admit, that tyranny can change clothes.
It’s this sort of orthodoxy and hagiography holding back our hopes of achieving liberation because they force creativity to fall by the wayside. Furthermore, they gloss over limitations and contradictions in favor of faithful dedication to ideas that may very well be expired, exhausted, or even lifeless. The new must be born so that we can overcome, but the movements and traditions I lament are overly obsessed with venerating what’s bygone to such an extent that they preserve too much of the old. That history is usually only recalled to be praised despite the horrors, killings, and betrayals that would tarnish the reputations of radicals’ favorite heroes if they even believe those things happened at all. Growth is lost because there are no recognizable problems to grow from. You can’t fix a historical issue you refuse to acknowledge. Patriots are patriots no matter where you go.
Maybe some critics will dislike my text and will attempt to make
it an ideological conflict, but the real confrontation is inside of us. It lies
in the hurdles we fail to surpass because we’re
more dedicated to supposedly being right than admitting what’s wrong. To make any of this simply about ideological
disagreements, is to attack a house The Nation on No Map is not even in.
This is one reason I find great parallels in the study of Zen Buddhism, which
carries strains of thought dedicated to a needed self-destruction. Those
insights underscore this entire book. The Nation on No Map is a
self-immolating text that I truly struggled to finish. I felt aflame while I
was writing it and the fear that arose imagining plumes of smoke around me made
it hard to focus. I fought amongst past and present versions of myself in a
furnace of my own making. When I completed this attempt and the ashes settled I
came across the death poem of the Zen monk, Kogaku Soko, who died at 84 years
of age in 1548 saying:
My final words are these:
As I fall I throw all on a high mountain peak –
Lo! All creation shatters; thus it is
That I destroy Zen doctrine.
The arrogance of orthodox ideology is the assumption that someone can know everything about the outside world while refusing to step outdoors to gain an internal critique. Self-reflection is crucial, but far too many among us are scared of the uncomfortable realization they might find. We will have to tear down idols and be willing to tell the truth about the monuments we’ve built. We will have to get over ourselves because a lot of us may very well be blocking our own path. Black anarchism can help us trace how that happens and give us organizing principles to fight back, meet material needs, and transcend radicalisms that are not taking us far enough, and that may not even be so radical at all. Much has to be overturned and some of that will occur from within. In order for revolution to happen, we will actually have to think and do things revolutionarily.
William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Nation on No Map and the co-author of As Black as Resistance. He is the co-founder of Offshoot Journal and also provides creative direction as one of the producers of the Black Autonomy Podcast. His writings have been included in the anthologies, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket 2016) and No Selves to Defend (Mariame Kaba 2014).
Register here to attend the first webinar Lessons In Liberation: Grounding Education in Abolition on September 1, 2021 at 4:00pm PST.
All webinars will be streamed via YouTube and Facebook. ASL Interpretation will be provided by Certified Deaf Interpreters and Deaf Interpreters. We will also provide CART Captions. Please contact Sheeva (she or they) at abolitionisteducation@gmail.com for any additional accessibility needs or accessibility questions.
Demystifying forces of the state, gangs, and revolutionary violence.
In Gang Politics, Kristian Williams examines our society’s understanding of social and political violence, what gets romanticized, misunderstood, or muddled. He explores the complex intersections between “gangs” of all sorts—cops and criminals, Proud Boys and Antifa, Panthers and skinheads—arguing that government and criminality are intimately related, often sharing critical features. As society becomes more polarized and conflict more common, Williams’s analysis is a crucial corrective to our usual ideas about the role violence might or should play in our social struggles.
Kristian Williams is the author of six books, including Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Williams has been actively writing and leading discourse on anarchism in historical and present-day contexts, social inequalities, and critiques on police and political force since the 1990s. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
PHILADELPHIA 07/03 Wooden Shoe Books @ 7PM 704 South Street Philadelphia, PA 19147 *RSVP Not Required
