Browse

The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation sets the stage for the radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. This book is the first major study of the concept of anarchist geographies. It realigns radical geography away from Marxism and back to its original trajectory of anarchism. It ultimately encourages a relational understanding of space, wherein anarchism is recognized as a holistic and everyday form of emancipationfrom statistic, capitalistic, homophobic, racist, sexist, and imperialistic ideas.

This book explores how 40% of America’s food supply is thrown out—uneaten—through the lens of one group of activists, “freegans,” in New York City dedicated to recovering, redistributing, and reusing this wasted wealth. Through the eyes of freegans, we see the hidden underbelly of our food system, the limits of “ethical consumption,” and the disturbingly central place of waste in contemporary capitalism. This book is the only full-length treatment of freeganism, a movement that has inspired hundreds of reports in dozens of countries in the last decade. Although other scholars have analyzed food waste, this is the first to do so through the eyes of anti-food waste activists themselves, which presents a uniquely critical perspective into the underlying logic behind it. Finally, it is the first book to use waste to highlight the limits of ethical consumerism—like buying organic, fair-trade, or vegan—by showing that markets do not seamlessly translate preferences expressed at the cash register into changes in production.

This book offers a genealogy and theory of the improper name—defined as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups and individual authors. Improper Names focuses on shared pseudonyms that make their appearance in Europe and North America at three critical historic junctures: the Industrial Revolution, the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, and the emergence of the network society. While proper names designate a referent as part of the operation of a system of signs, improper names fail to circumscribe a clearly defined domain. An improper name differs from other collective subjects of enunciation in that its progenitors are ultimately unable to control third-party usages. The book examines this tension between centralization and decentralization, the We and the I, by focusing on five case studies: Ned Ludd, a pseudonym shared by the English machine breakers of the early nineteenth-century known as the Luddites; Alan/Allen Smithee, an alias adopted by Hollywood film directors from 1969 to 1999 to disown films that were re-cut by film producers; Monty Cantsin, an “open pop star” created by U.S. and Canadian mail artists in the late 1970s to share their reputation and critique bourgeois notions of authorship as originality and novelty; Luther Blissett, a folk hero of the information age introduced by Italian media activists in the 1990s to prank the media and the culture industry; and Anonymous, a signature globally shared by Internet activists to protest against censorship and restricted access to information and information technologies.

Inter/Nationalism examines mutual forms of decolonization in North America and Palestine. Salaita analyzes the many ways that the issue of Palestine has become important to the fields of American Indian and Indigenous Studies while arguing that American Indian and Indigenous Studies should be more central to scholarship and activism focused on Palestine. The book emphasizes the importance of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement against Israel to the creation of intellectual and political communities that put Natives and Palestinians into conversation. Offering an inside account of how BDS operates, the book illustrates its terrific potential as an organizing community. Salaita also critiques a wide range of Native poetry that invokes Palestine as a theme or symbol; the speeches of US president Andrew Jackson, who oversaw the Trail of Tears, and early Zionist thinker Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky; and the discourses of “shared values” between the United States and Israel. The book is written for both academics and activists, with the goal of eroding the traditional boundaries between the two communities.

Despite of similarities in colonial heritages, authoritarian rule, and a breakneck speed of industrialization, despite of similar levels of grievances over abused labor power and natural environment, why did two countries as structurally similar as Taiwan and Korea produce distinct sequences—in reverse order—of the rise of labor and environmental movements? The story that emerges in Leverage of the Weak is of the realization, and the limit, of two types of movement power under the dominance of developmental states and corporate economies. Leverage of the Weak goes beyond the conventional discussion of “the power of the weak” and “disruptive power,” and is the first book to systematically pursue cross-movement and cross-national comparisons on East Asia. By shedding new light on the interconnection of movement emergence, sequences, and trajectories, Leverage of the Weak discloses the material foundation of labor-environment alliances and leads academics and activists alike toward a reassessment of the past and the future of labor and environmental movements, two forces that have significantly shaped social life—and our imaginary pictures of social life—in modern times.

To tens of thousands of volunteers in its first decade, the Peace Corps was “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” In the United States’ popular imagination to this day, it is a symbol of selfless altruism and the most successful program of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. But in her provocative new cultural history of the 1960s Peace Corps, Molly Geidel argues that the agency’s representative development ventures also legitimated the violent exercise of American power around the world and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. In the 1960s, the practice of development work, embodied by iconic Peace Corps volunteers, allowed U.S. policy makers to manage global inequality while assuaging their own gendered anxieties about postwar affluence. Geidel traces how modernization theorists used the Peace Corps to craft the archetype of the heroic development worker: a ruggedly masculine figure who would inspire individuals and communities to abandon traditional lifestyles and seek integration into the global capitalist system. Drawing on original archival and ethnographic research, Geidel analyzes how Peace Corps volunteers struggled to apply these ideals. The book focuses on the case of Bolivia, where indigenous nationalist movements dramatically expelled the Peace Corps in 1971. She also shows how Peace Corps development ideology shaped domestic and transnational social protest, including U.S. civil rights, black nationalist, and antiwar movements.