Posted on August 3rd, 2011 in About AK, AK Distribution
Hopefully we can all agree that anarchist publishing is more important than ever these days, and it’s essential to get anarchist books and ideas out into a world desperately in need of them. But the fact is, it takes a lot of time and energy to keep a project like AK Press running, and we are a small collective always trying to do too many things, so we need help from our comrades to make sure our books reach as many people as possible!
We know that you all are a helpful bunch, so we thought we’d provide this quick list of ways you can plug in from wherever you happen to be, to help get the word out about AK Press and our books. Local outreach is one of the best ways folks around the country (and the world!) can help us out, because we just can’t be everywhere at once (try as we might).
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5 Easy Ways You (Yes, You) Can Help AK Press:
1. Review AK books online:
Are you an Amazon.com customer? We won’t judge! Write Amazon reviews or make Amazon reading lists of AK Press books you’ve read and enjoyed—this helps increase our online visibility and makes it more likely that someone will stumble onto (and buy) one of our books that they might really enjoy. Are you on Goodreads? Do you have your own blog? Anywhere you can review our books online is a great help. And if you don’t mind sending us a copy of your review (or pointing us to it online), we’d love to see what you have to say!
2. Talk AK up around your town:
Do your local library and your town’s bookstore have our books? Stop by and ask—and maybe even drop off a copy of our catalog (we’ll send you catalogs, just ask!). Do you know of a coffee shop, food co-op, etc. that would be a good home for a stack of AK Press catalogs? Let us know and we’ll send you some to put out there! Is there a local publication where you could publish a review one of our books? Drop us a line and we’ll send you a review copy!
3. Get AK into your school:
If you’re in school, you have a number of unique opportunities to help us out—and a built-in audience! Ask your school library to order AK Press books. Show your favorite AK Press titles to professors who might be interested in using them for future course readings (they can contact us to get a copy to look over!). Write reviews of our books in your school’s newspaper. Talk to academic departments or student organizations about bringing in an AK Press author as a speaker. Use that coveted student organization funding to start up a reading group, lending library, or infoshop! The list is almost endless…
4. Become an AK tabler, or start your own distro:
Do you attend local shows, conferences, or political events that might benefit from a table of AK Press books? Do you go on tour with your band? We’d be thrilled to set you up with a wholesale account, talk you through the ordering process as much as you like, and help you spread the word about the events where you will be tabling. Not quite ready for wholesale ordering? Just let us know what events you’ll be attending, and we can send you some freebies (catalogs & stickers) to distribute.
5. Start a reading/study group:
Even small-scale outreach helps! Could you round up a group of friends, or start up a reading group as part of your political organization, or hell, even start a virtual reading group online? Put in a group order for an AK Press book (or one of our distributed titles) and we’ll give you our reading group discount! We’re also happy to suggest relevant titles if you have a particular topic of study in mind.
And there you have it. We told you it was easy! Of course, we’re always open to other suggestions, so if you have any grand ideas of your own, we’d love to hear them. If you’re interested in helping out, please get in touch for more information and to get things going!
Contact us at:
• sales@akpress.org for wholesale, bookstore, library, reading group, or tabling/distro orders, or to request catalogs
• publicity@akpress.org for review copies, author booking, or to let us know about a review you have written
Thanks for your help—we couldn’t do it without you!
Posted on August 2nd, 2011 in Events
Since 2002, the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair has provided Anarchists,
activists, and the simply curious the opportunity to learn, share ideas and
connect with others. Vendors and speakers from across North America
attend each year, with around a thousand attendees passing through
during the event. This year’s keynote presentation is by No One is Illegal, an organization that fights for the rights of refugees, migrant workers, and others who suffer at the hands of an unfair system of borders and checkpoints.
This year’s bookfair, situated in Edmonton’s Old Strathcona district,
promises to draw a larger and more diverse crowd than ever before, as the busy crowds of Whyte Avenue and the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market visit the eighth Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair, a festival of literature, political discussion, and humanity.
Posted on August 2nd, 2011 in Events
This Bookfair is for anarchists and non-anarchists, with participants from all over North America and beyond. The Bookfair always includes workshops on a wide range of topics. We seek to introduce anarchism to the public, foster dialogue between various political traditions, and create radical, inclusive, anti-oppressive spaces. Participants with different visions, practices, and traditions are welcome. Events include book and information tables, workshops, readings, films, presentations, and much more!
Posted on August 2nd, 2011 in Events
The Anarchist Bookfair, a tradition-bucking tradition! Part of AS220’s family friendly Foo Festival.
Posted on July 27th, 2011 in AK Allies, AK News, Uncategorized
Sadly, we’re writing to announce the death of an anarchist comrade. Daniel Due was born July 18th, 1946 and passed away May 26th, 2011 at the age of 64. Regrettably, it took us until now to know of his passing. Few people reading this will have known Daniel personally, but he was a longtime participant in the Bay Area anarchist movement, and for many years worked with Bound Together in San Francisco, as well as at AK Press as the bookkeeper/finance person for two stints (a brave soul)—in the late 90s and again in the mid- to late-00s.
A California native, Daniel came to anarchism through his stance against the Vietnam War—as a draft resister—and the associated radical scene at the time. Decades later, he fondly remembered the effect of thinkers like Kropotkin on the young man he was, finding his way in a world he felt out of step with. A tremendously kind soul, Daniel had a strong individualist side that complemented his generous demeanor and child-like enthusiasm for people and politics. From his fellow collective members’ viewpoint, he led a rather private or perhaps solitary life, but one full of dignity and kindness. We do know that an appreciation of the natural world was primary with him. He was an avid hiker and lover of flora and fauna—he spent much of his free time pursuing his interests as a birdwatcher and amateur photographer, venturing to Bodega Bay and elsewhere with various related volunteer and personal pursuits.
As we all can be at times, Daniel was complicated and sometimes quarrelsome. But he died an anarchist, something not certain for so many as they move through life. His faith in a free society never diminished. Despite fracturing relationships with some in the collective on his final departure from AK, he dropped by last Summer to compliment the collective on its work and pick up some new releases he’d had his eye on. We couldn’t have been happier to see him. He will be missed by those who were lucky enough to share some time with him.
To his family, who we never knew, we are so sorry for your loss.
You are free of this unfree world now, Daniel. Rest in Peace.
Posted on July 26th, 2011 in AK Authors!
A few weeks ago we ran Eric Stanley’s interviews with Captive Genders contributors Yasmin Nair and Ralowe T. Ampu, on policing of queer and trans people. This week we bring you the second installment of interviews, this time with contributors Reina Gossett and Tommi Avicolli Mecca on the politics of gender self-determination.
Be sure to read the first set of interviews on the AK Press Blog, or in excerpted form on the Ms. Magazine Blog!
Pre-order Captive Genders at akpress.org to get 25% off the list price of $19.95!
One of the politics Captive Genders offers is that of gender self-determination. Here ‘self-determination’ exists within the context of other markers of identity and power. What a theory of gender self-determination does, we hope, is opens space for a wider verity of gender identities while resisting a totalizing claim to realness at the expense of others’ identities. Two contributors, Reina Gossett, who lives in Brooklyn and works at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a radical queer activist, writer and performer, offer a few thoughts on the politics of gender in relation to past and present social movements.
Eric Stanley: Tommi in your piece “Brushes with Lily Law,” you write about gender identities that live through and beyond what is currently understood as a “transgender” identity. Specifically you refer to “genderfuck” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Can you say a bit more about the possibilities and limitations of this category?
Tommi Avicolli Mecca: I think for me, gender was always a blurry thing, never well-defined, I played dress up and with dolls as a kid and was ostracized as a sissy. I came out and started doing drag, both as a political statement (radical drag, gender fuck, glitter drag, etc.) and as a personal exploration of this social construct called gender. I was never sure if I was a drag queen, a transsexual, a glitter/glam queen, an androgyne or something else. That was before the word “transgender.” Now, I think it’s all up for grabs. People should just simply do what they want. Gender is a continuum like sexual orientation. How many wonderful variations on it can we find?
Eric Stanley: Tommi, in your piece you talk about an earlier historical moment, and Reina, in the conversation you are a part of “Abolitionist Imaginings,” (which is facilitated by Che Gossett and also features Bo Brown and Dylan Rodríguez) yours is more contemporary, while pointing toward the past. I am wondering, Tommi and Reina if you could talk about some about the radical trans/queer organizing of today or of past historical moments you find inspiration in?
Tommi Avicolli Mecca: For me, it’s exciting to see the acceptance of gender outlaw-ness that I find among younger queers and transgender folks. When I speak on college campuses, there’s just this awareness of the total arbitrariness of the binary gender system. It makes me feel proud of the work we did 40 years ago. Groups such as Street Action Transvestite Revolutionaries in New York and Radicalqueens in Philadelphia really did start a revolution in thinking about gender and gender identity. We demanded a place in gay liberation as non-gender conforming people. Like us, transgender folks today have simply said, “we’re here, we’re trans, we’re not going away!” And Human Rights Campaign and other movement groups have had to deal with it. Like the mainstream movement had to deal with GLF in the early 70s and ACT UP in the late 80s. I love it. As for the historical moments, I remember that moment in the 73 pride march in New York when Sylvia Rivera seized the mic onstage to urge organizers to divert the march from its course and go past the building where some transgender women were being held (they had been arrested on the streets that weekend). Some of us from Radicalqueens Philly stood near the side of the stage in solidarity with her. It was an amazing moment listening to Sylvia, and though she didn’t succeed in changing the route of the march, she inspired me to go back to Philly and become even more militant about gender issues than I had been.
Reina Gossett: As a queer & trans person of color and a person working within gender liberation & self-determination movements I so often hear about death. More specifically I so often interact with the overkilling of queer and trans people, often low income, living with HIV/AIDS, undocumented, disabled and people of color. So much death, so much killing, has made me wonder how to be accountable to dead as well as the living. I remember reading the essay “Dark Resurrections; Origin and Possibility” last year by Alexis Pauline Gumbs where she writes about our lives as continuous, from the bones covering the Atlantic ocean floor from the slave trade, to the Combahee River Collective to today: “the living and the dead and the yet unborn are all fully involved in our struggle, all present, all demanding our accountability.”
So often in our movement we rush to urgently respond to huge violences affecting our lives rather than create spaces that support us to feel, honor and recognize the power of grief. In his essay “Mourning & Militancy” The AIDS activist Douglass Crimp, having worked to center mourning as a powerfully psychic and necessary force for queer people to experience, reflected on grief as misunderstood by many activist communities: “Public mourning rituals may of course have their own political force, but they nevertheless often seem, from an activist perspective, indulgent, sentimental, defeatist.” So its within this context that I am really inspired by historical moments where people came together to hold ancestral & personal grief as a powerfully political act; make plain the connections between grief & state violence, diminishing circles of care, resource and isolation; resist silence & shame by honoring people who passed all the while deepening our own relationships and invested in our own living.
To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Stonewall the New York Public Library put up a series of photographs of Sylvia Rivera and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries organizing in the 1970s as well as more recently. A friend of mine, AJ Lewis, a doctoral student at University of Minnesota went to NYPL to check them out and do archival research there and came across a flier from the Gay Liberation Front of the 1970s for an action in the ‘70s in Los Angeles, which I find to be incredibly powerful. The flier read:
“Sunday March 7 For three police murders:
Larry Turner
Black Street Transvestite
Killed by Los Angeles Police
March 8, 1970
Howard Efland
Gay Brother
Killed by Los Angeles Police
March 7, 1970
Ginny Gallegos
Gay Sister
Killed by Los Angeles Police
Spring, 1970
Tin can demonstration –“bring a small, empty tin-can and a pencil to beat it with. It will make an ominous and interesting sound”
During the demonstration we will attempt to raise (by Magyck) the Rampart Police Station several feet above the ground and hopefully cause it to disappear for two hours. If the GLF is successful in this effort we will alleviate a major source of homosexual oppression for at least those two hours. A large turnout might do the same thing for a longer period of time. Support this action with your presence.
A Peaceful, Non-Violent Demonstration”
Howard Efland’s died in 1969 due to massive internal injuries, which the coroner ruled an excusable LAPD homicide because Howard Efland supposedly resisted arrest to vice officers but according to witnesses Howard (or J McCann) was held on to the ground and beaten. According to an article by Angela Douglas in Come Out! Magazine shortly after their deaths, Laverne (Larry) Turner and Ginny Gallegos were also both killed for resisting arrest and in Laverne’s case for being dressed in “feminine attire.”
I am so inspired by how Laverne, Howard and Ginny are honored as ancestors and are present in the action through a levitated & disappeared police station, ominous and interesting sounds and large turnouts of mourners. I love the levity that accompanied this action, according to witnesses the station rose six feet after demonstrators chanted “Raise! Raise!” I love how haunting this demonstration is, responding to the killings and ongoing threats of homophobic and transphobic violence from the state by organizing an action filled with accountability to the living, dead and unknown forces that are all fully involved in our struggle for liberation. So outside the normalized organizing tactics preferred by the Non Profit Industrial Complex, forty years later this action feels incredibly accountable to the unborn, the dead and the living present at the Rampart Police Station in 1970.
This moment leaves me in awe, accounted for and curious. I wonder what a resurgence of actions connected & accountable to grief, the dead, the unborn, unknown and alive would do to our collective resiliency. I imagine a shift in connection and accountability would create more space in our movements to hold more people, more levity, more magic, less isolation and less shame.
Posted on July 26th, 2011 in AK Authors!
| The Sept/Oct issue of Adbusters includes the text of an inspiring talk by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, author of the upcoming AK Press title After the Future. The text, and a subtitled video of the talk itself, originally appeared on the Through Europe website back in March. Both are below, take a gander…and pre-order Bifo’s book now, here. I helped copyedit it, and can attest to how amazing it is! |
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I would like to talk about something that everybody knows, but that, so it seems, no one has the boldness to say. That is, that the time for indignation is over. Those who get indignant are already starting to bore us. Increasingly, they seem to us like the last guardians of a rotten system, a system without dignity, sustainability or credibility. We don’t have to get indignant anymore, we have to revolt.
Arise. In the dictionary, the word ‘Insurrection’ is described in different ways. But I stick to the etymology. To me, the word insurrection means to rise up, it means to take on ourselves our dignity as human beings, as workers, as citizens in an uncompromising way. But it also means something else. It means to fully unfold the potency of the body and of collective knowledge, of society, of the net, of intelligence. To entirely unfold what we are, in a collective way. This is the point. Those who say that insurrection is a utopia are sometimes cynics, sometimes just idiots. Those who say that it is not possible to revolt, don’t take into account the fact that, to us, almost everything is possible. Only, this ‘almost everything’ is subjugated by the miserable obsession for profit and accumulation. The obsession for profit and accumulation led our country and all European countries to the verge of a terrifying catastrophe, into which we are now sinking, and we should realize we are already quite far into it. It is the catastrophe of barbarism and ignorance.
In Italy, the reform of the Berlusconi government and of his crawlers has already taken 8 billion euros away from the school, university and the education system, and soon it will take away even more. Everyone knows what the consequences will be, and not only in Brera, which is still a privileged place within the Italian education system. I have also taught in 3 or 4 other schools in this country, and I know what are, for example, the consequences of the reform of the crawler-minister Gelmini for an evening school for adults in Bologna. The Gelmini reform meant that the available budget for that school has shrunk to one third of that of three years ago. In the face of this process of devastation and barbarization produced by this reform, we can’t continue complaining. We must say: first of all, you all have to go, then we will take care of it. They have to go, just like the citizens of Tunis and Cairo said. I don’t know how the revolutions and insurrections in the Arab countries will end. A lot is up to us, I believe: whether or not Europe will be able to open a secular and innovative perspective. I don’t know how it will end up, but I know that they revolted and they won. What did they do? They said: we won’t leave this place. We won’t leave this square, we won’t leave this station, we won’t leave this parliament. We won’t leave until the tyrant and his crawlers go. This is what we have to say, what we have to do. By the end of spring 2011, this is what has to happen in Italy. We will occupy the central train stations in Milan, in Bologna and we will hold them until the tyrant and his crawlers will go.
But the tyrant and his crawlers are not the real problem. The real problem is an obsession, embodied in financial power, in the power of banks and in the idea that the life of society, the pleasure, well-being and culture of society is worthless. The only worthy things are accounting books, the profits of a minuscule class of exploiters and murderers. From our point of view, at the moment, these two problems, that of the tyrant and of his crawlers and that of the European financial dictatorship are one single problem. But we must understand that it would be useless to get rid of the tyrant and of his crawlers, if their places were taken by the murderers, by people like D’Alema or Fini, who are just as responsible. The destruction of the Italian school did not start with the tyrant and his crawlers. From what I know, it started with the Rivola Law, of which few have memory. It was a law issued in 1995 by the Emilia Romagna region, and it was the first law to give private schools the right to receive public funding. That is, it opened the door to the destruction of the public school and the sanctification of private universities such as Cepu.
So, there is one immediate problem: to hold the country, the squares and stations until the tyrant and his crawlers will go. But at the same time we have to be aware that power, true power, is no longer held in Rome. The Minister of Economy, Tremonti, said this. In an interview that appeared in La Repubblica on 30 September 2011, Tremonti replied to a silly journalist, who was trying to criticize him and instead fell in his trap, saying: ‘Why are you so angry at the Berlusconi government? Listen, we don’t decide anything. Decisions are taken in Brussels.’ Well, we don’t know it very well – who should tell us? La Repubblica, maybe? – but since 1st January 2011 the economic, social and financial decisions over individual countries such as Italy, France, Portugal or Greece are no longer taken by national parliaments. They are taken by a financial committee, formally constituted at European level. This is the rule and the ferocious application of the neoliberal, monetarist principle, according to which the only worthy things are bank profits and nothing else. It is in the name of growth, of accumulation and profit at the European level, that you are forced to live a shit life. And your life will be more and more of a shit life, if you do not rebel today, tomorrow, immediately! Because with every passing day your life increasingly, inevitably becomes a shit life.
They say: insurrection is a dangerous word. I repeat: arms are not implicit in the word insurrection, because arms are not our thing, for a number of reasons. First of all, because we don’t know where they are kept, secondly because we know that somebody has them, thirdly because we know that there are professional armies ready to kill, like they killed in Genova in 2001 and many other times. So, this is not the kind of confrontation we are looking for. We know that our weapons are those of intelligence and critique, but also the weapon of technology. For example, we learnt Wikileaks’ lesson, and we know that it is not only a lesson on sabotage and information; it is also a lesson about the infinite power of networked intelligence. This is where we will re-start. We know how to do it, how to enter your circuits, how to sabotage them, but we also know how those circuits – which are not yours, are ours – can be useful for our wealth, our pleasure, our well-being, our culture. This could be the use of those circuits that the collective intelligence produced and that capitalism stole, privatized, impoverished, that capitalism uses against us. This is the meaning of insurrection: to take possession of what is ours, to perform a necessary action of recognition of the collective body, which for too long has been paralyzed in front of a screen and needs to find itself again in a Tahrir Square.
An American journalist, Roger Cohen, wrote in a clever article: ‘Thank you Mubarak, because with your resistance you allowed the Egyptian people, who hadn’t talked to each others for years, to stay in that square for weeks and weeks.’ Like in wars, also during revolutions there are moments of boredom, and during those moments what is there to do? Talk to each other, touch each other, make love. Discovering the collective body, which has been paralyzed for too long. We will say ‘Tank you Berlusconi’, after weeks spent fighting on the streets of Italy. Afterwards, from the moment when the collective body will have awakened, the process of self-organization of the collective mind will begin. This is the insurrection I am calling you to. This is the insurrection that could even start from the Brera Academy, on a day in March 2011. Because the problem is that everyone knows what I just said. Maybe they don’t say it in such detail, but they know it. All that is necessary is to say: it is possible. There are millions of us, thinking this way. So, the next time 300,000 of us will take on the streets, let’s no go back home at the end of the day. Let’s go on the streets with our sleeping bags, knowing that on that night we won’t sleep in our beds. This is the first step, this is the step we need to take. It’s easy! Then, the rest is complicated…
I have almost finished my lecture. I just want to come back to this place. This initiative of mine was born within the situation you all know. Students, lecturers, technicians, precarious workers at the Brera Academy, like those in any other school or university in Italy or abroad, they all know well what is happening. They know that, beyond a complex dance made of ‘I’ll give it you / no I won’t give it to you / maybe I will / but not tomorrow’, beyond the smoke screen of incomprehensible baroquisms, the problem is that there is no more money. How is this possible? What happened? How come all that money disappeared? Brera used to be loaded. It’s all gone. One could say: but Europe is rich, how come all of a sudden there’s no money? Europe is rich, with millions of technicians, poets, doctors, inventors, specialized factory workers, nuclear engineers… How come we became so poor? What happened? Something very simple happened. The entire wealth that we produced was poured into the strongboxes of a minuscule minority of exploiters. This is what happened! The whole mechanism of the European financial crisis was finalized towards the most extraordinary movement of wealth that history has seen, from society towards the financial class, towards financial capitalism. This is what happened! So, what is now happening in Brera is just a small piece, one aspect of the immense movement of wealth, our wealth, the wealth of collective intelligence, which is now being counted inside the strongboxes of the banks.
Well, we decide to pay some attention to the banks. And I communicate to you that from this moment, I, as a professor at Brera, will hold my classes inside a bank. My next lecture will be held on 25th March just there, inside the building of the Credit Agricole. It will be held there. Behind this statue, of which we can now see the ass, on the other side of the square there is a bank where I ask to hold my next lecture, on 25th March, at 11.30am. I’m not doing this because I am a deranged individualist. Well, I might also be a deranged individualist… But the reason why I took this decision and I communicated it to you is that in Europe, it has now been constituted the Knowledge Liberation Front. Maybe these kids could have been a little less rhetorical… The Knowledge Liberation Front called a teach-in in 40 European cities, on March 25th. First of all in London, because, as you know, after many years, on March 26 there will be a general strike in the U.K. This is because the U.K. is now under an exceptionally strong storm of financial violence, and thus on March 26th they will strike and will take on the streets. The day before, the Knowledge Liberation Front will perform 40 teach-ins in 40 European cities. In London, but also in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, Madrid, Bologna, Milan and many other cities. We will do something very simple: we will dress smart, will go to the offices of a bank, will sit on the ground, will take out a banana, a cappuccino and a panini, just like civilized people do, and we will talk about molecular biology, about Goethe, we will read Faust, we will read poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, someone will talk about the poetics of Kandinsky and someone else about nuclear physics. This is what we will do on 25th March, in 40 European cities. Because the time has come for the society of Europe to become, once again, what it could have been in several moments of its history: purely and simply a civil society. Thank you.
Video: Sabina Grasso
Translation and subtitles: Federico Campagna, Anna Galkina, Manlio Poltronieri
Posted on July 25th, 2011 in Uncategorized
Last week, internal documents obtained from the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown provided evidence that the Maryland State Division of Corrections had placed a ban on Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, a new memoir written by Marshall “Eddie” Conway and Dominque Stevenson, and published in March 2011 by AK Press.
A memo dated July 7, and signed by Acting Warden Wayne Webb stated that: “Effective immediately, the book entitled “Marshall Law – The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther” by Marshall Conway and Dominque Stevenson is not permitted into the institution for security reasons.”
The memo was distributed to prison staff, as well as posted on inmate bulletin boards, and sent to the prison’s mail and package rooms, as well as the prison library.
Prisoners say that multiple copies of the book ordered through the mail have been confiscated and destroyed without explanation.
This is not the first time that reading material of a political nature has been banned without explanation from the Maryland Correctional Training Center. Men currently incarcerated at Hagerstown say that such unexplained bannings occur with some regularity, though several pointed out that in the case of Marshall Law, the prison officials failed to follow the correct proceedure which, under MD code 250-1, specifies that the offending pages of a manuscript should be removed, rather than placing a blanket ban on the entire work.
Information on why the book was banned is spotty; one prisoner was told that the book had been banned because it mentioned the Maryland Correctional Training Center. Another speculated that the ban stemmed from the fact that the book contains a chapter that describes a (failed) attempt at a prison break. Prisoners say they were denied the right to a hearing regarding the confiscation of the book, and that the Administrative Remedy Proccedure was denied when one prisoner requested it.
Conway and Stevenson’s book takes a critical look at the system of prisons and policing in the state of Maryland, telling the story of Conway’s arrest and conviction for the murder of a Baltimore City police officer in 1970, and his decades of activist and educational work carried out within the Maryland prison system during his incarceration. Conway, who is still imprisoned at the Jessup Correctional Institution in Jessup, Maryland, is a former leader of the Black Panther Party in Baltimore, and maintains that his arrest and conviction are a fraud―the result of a COINTELPRO operation designed to disrupt the activities of the Party in the region. Co-author Stevenson is the director of the Maryland Peace with Justice Program of the Middle Atlantic Region of the American Friends Service Committee in Baltimore, and the coordinator of prisoner-run mentoring programs within the Maryland prison system.
It is unknown whether the Correctional Insitution at Jessup, where Conway is currently incarcerated, has similar plans to ban his memoir within the prison.
David Rocah, attorney for the Maryland ACLU has called the book’s banning unconstitutional, saying, “First, the policy giving victims of crime the power to veto interviews or pictures of inmates is totally unconstitutional. Inmates retain a 1st Amendment right to communicate with the press, subject to reasonable rules applicable to all. Second, even if it was constitutional, the failure to adhere to it is not a constitutional basis to ban the book. Such publications can only be censored for penological reasons, such as because they pose a threat to prison security. Here the book is being censored for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with prison security, but because of an alleged failure to comply with a policy that is itself blatantly unconstitutional.”
Apparently the widespread outrage over this unconstitutional act worked: the Baltimore Sun reported on July 20 that the Maryland DOC had decided to life the ban on the book! The book can now be shipped to inmates at Maryland prisons again. Read the full story in the Sun here: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-prison-books-20110720,0,2715842.story
A copy of the ban notice may be viewed online here: http://www.voxunion.com/pics/BANTHEBOOK.jpg
Posted on July 21st, 2011 in AK Authors!
Eric Stanley, co-editor of the forthcoming AK Press book Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, appeared on KPFA’s “Against the Grain” earlier this week to discuss some of the arguments in his recent article “Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture,” which has just been published in the Summer 2011 issue of Social Text.
In this radio interview, he shares some of his research on antiqueer and anti-trans violence (warning: the examples discussed here are extremely disturbing). He explains the idea of “overkill”—the torture, mutilation, and “pageantry” sometimes associated with murders of queer and trans people. In many such murder cases, the idea of “gay panic” or “trans panic”—”the murderer had some sort of cordial relationship with the victim and then discovered their sexuality [or transgender identity] and became so enraged and so fearful that they had to kill them”—has, shockingly, been a successful legal defense. Stanley argues that the motive for overkill is “not only killing that specific queer person or that specific trans person, but about killing queerness at large.”
Tougher hate crimes legislation and sentencing are NOT a solution, he says, as the State (in the form of the Prison Industrial Complex) is still one of the largest perpetrators of anti-trans and anti-queer violence—which is precisely the issue that he and co-editor Nat Smith, along with an excellent roster of contributors, take on in Captive Genders.
Listen to the radio interview HERE.
Preorder your copy of Captive Genders (at a 25% discount!) HERE.
Posted on July 20th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Reviews of AK Books
Hot on the tails of the long awaited Rabble.ca review and a mention in Pop Matters, comes another new review of AK Thompson’s Black Bloc, White Riot by author and political graphic artist Seth Tobocman.
Get your own copy of the book at akpress.org, and hell, if you’re interested in reviewing it yourself we’d be happy to send you a free copy! Just drop us a line at publicity@akpress.org.
Also, if you’re not familiar with Seth Tobocman, you should be! You can find an assortment of his outstanding work at akpress.org.
PHILOSOPHY ON THE BARRICADES
BLACK BLOC WHITE RIOT is AK Thompson’s literate and passionate defense of the Black Bloc.
The Black Bloc, for those of you not up on contemporary left wing jargon, is the name given to a tactical formation originally used by Anarchist and Communist protesters in Germany in the 1980s. Activists hide their identities through wearing masks, helmets and uniform black clothing and move in a column like a Roman phalanx, often carrying shields and weapons. In this way they may be able to push through lines of riot police or skirt around them to attack banks or other targets that symbolize capitalist order. The Black Bloc first came into American consciousness during protests against the WTO meeting in Seattle in 2000, where a minority of protesters broke off from the nonviolent majority to smash the windows of Starbucks, The Gap, Nike Town and other chain stores. So AK Thompson is not only defending a tactic, he is defending the most militant, countercultural and downright punk rock faction of the Anti-Globalization Movement from criticism by the more moderate tendencies.
To his credit, the author makes no pretense of objectivity. He identifies himself early on as one of “the dirty kids”. The masked radicals are his friends, his lovers, and his peops. And he’s gonna stand up for them. The weapon he brings to this battle is his enormous scholarship of politics and philosophy. The book is chock full of quotations from and references to Baldwin, Sorel, Foucault, Engels, Orwell, Heidegger , Aristotle, Artaud, Dyer, Conrad, Freire, Starhawk and many others. That so many footnotes are marshaled in defense of the act of throwing a brick through a bank window would be funny, if AK weren’t so painstakingly sincere.
But he also has a wry sense of humor reminiscent of Malcolm X or Frederick Douglas, a talent for phrasing the most catastrophic ideas in the most genteel, and therefore disquieting, possible way. For example:
“… violence is the name of the process by which objects are transformed so that they no longer correspond to the concepts to which they had previously been tied … as when “architecture “ is magically rematerialized as “property” the minute you set it on fire.”
It’s no surprise that pacifists find rioting morally objectionable. It’s also easy to see why reformers, bent on generating positive press, would be afraid that the Black Bloc makes protesters look like a bunch of ignorant violent thugs. But the accusations against the militants go a lot further than that.
Haters say that by increasing the risk of arrest at protests, and even by their appearance and body odor, “the dirty kids” have kept people of color, immigrants and other vulnerable groups from participating in the mostly white anti-globalization movement. They accuse them of a machismo that discourages the participation of women. In other words, they are calling the Black Bloc sexist and racist. It is to this second set of accusations that AK Thompson really takes umbrage.
But the Black Bloc is not the first group on the American left to be vulnerable to such charges. For decades movements that profess to represent the interests of the proletariat have had to resolve the contradiction that so much of their support comes from the middle class.
AK Thompson addresses these concerns as forthrightly as one could. He does not try to deny the middle class character of his movement. He does try to understand it, explain it and maybe even find some virtue in it.
According to AK, the modern middle class exists in an alienated space. They are disempowered, suicidal and separated from reality. He sites the growing industry producing anti-depressant drugs as proof. In order to regain their humanity the middle class must pass through redemptive violence. This may sound romantic but it echoes the experience described by many people who have participated in radical rioting, that before that moment they had never really lived. AK wants to celebrate and build on this breakthrough into reality. He feels that before white activists can be good allies to other groups they must acknowledge that they have their own reasons for revolt.
AK Thompson really gets going about the role of women in the Black Bloc. He goes through the history of women’s participation in militant street action, from bread riots to Suffragist riots, to show that political violence is not an exclusively male preserve. He quotes from the writings of female members of the Bloc, to show that it’s not just a boys club. But he takes it further. He points out that once activists mask up it is impossible to know if they are men or women. So, rather than being a bunch of macho troglodytes, he proposes that these darkly dressed dissidents are on the cutting edge of a movement of gender abolition.
But AK knows that to promote a strategy you have to do more than defeat it’s detractors. So he articulates what he thinks is valuable in violence. Like many other anarchist writers, he sees rioting as a way to escape the symbolic realm of representational politics into direct action, to move from expressing an idea to creating a reality. He sees the Battle of Seattle as an unfinished project that points to new and as yet unrealized possibilities. And he also points out that we learn a lot from these experiences, that new areas of knowledge come out of militant street protest.
Over years of activism, I have found that peoples’ feelings about revolutionary violence come from a deep and subjective place, from their own experience, and that such positions are immune against logical argument. So I doubt that, if you are a Black Bloc hater, anything AK says will turn you into a Black Bloc lover. He will give you a lot to think about and he may, in an odd way, make you laugh. One thing’s for sure, if you bother to read this book, you will know that the Black Bloc are more than a bunch of ignorant violent thugs.
Seth Tobocman, July 2011
Hopefully we can all agree that anarchist publishing is more important than ever these days, and it’s essential to get anarchist books and ideas out into a world desperately in need of them. But the fact is, it takes a lot of time and energy to keep a project like AK Press running, and we are a small collective always trying to do too many things, so we need help from our comrades to make sure our books reach as many people as possible!
