My life in books

I’ve always intended to read something by John Crowley, but somehow until now I’d never got around to it. But when PM Press decided to include him in their Outspoken Authors series, it finally seemed the right time to make a start. Said volume, titled Totalitopia, is a collection of short fiction and essays by Crowley, augmented with an interview and bibliography.

The first story in the collection, This Is Our Town, was in itself enough to make me happy I’d decided to read it. It is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of childhood, faith and memory, set in a small American mining town that has seen disasters and, possibly, miracles. The narrator is a young girl from a relatively poor Catholic family, who converses with her guardian angel and believes that prayer, free will, and God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience can be reconciled in such a way that, somehow, good will prevail - and who, in looking back as an adult, longs for that childhood certainty of faith.

What if, when the aliens come, they offer to do your chores? Why might they do such a thing? What would be their ulterior motive - for as everyone knows, aliens always have an ulterior motive. The short story Gone suggests one possibility.

And Go Like This is a story inspired by a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.” Crowley writes this as if it happened, all the people in the world painstaking transported to NYC, assigned spaces, and then, when all are accounted fir, the music starts on a hundred thousand records players and the world twists. But the twist is also a psychological one, for what would it mean, that for a brief point in time, the whole of the world were neighbours?

The title piece, Totalitopia, is an essay - serious in intent for all its lightness of tone - on the predictive tendencies of science fiction. Crowley advances various approaches to predictive SF, notes that many futuristic utopias and dystopias are actually commentaries n present conditions rather than serious attempt to forecast the future, and discusses a few of the classic texts, even advancing his own ‘prediction’ - which bears certain resemblances to my own ideas of utopia, something which disposes me to think I may enjoy more of this author’s works - before concluding:

“It will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature. Of course holding the mirror up to nature is what Hamlet insisted all playing, or pretending, must do; but—as Lewis Carroll knew—the image in a mirror, however scary or amusing or enlightening, is always reversed.”

In the essay “Everything that Rises,” Crowley gently critiques the transhumanist movement - which he links to a strain of primarily Russian scientifically-inspired mysticism known as cosmism. Immortality, the transference of mind to mechanical rather than biological substrates, the transmission of the human data stream at the speed of light, the development of the superintelligent AI - all these speculations on the future of mind are part of this movement, and come under Crowley’s eye.

The concluding essay is a review of the works of another author I’ve never read, Paul Parks. Here Crowley does the work of a reviewer well, for in Paul Park’ Hidden Worlds he makes me think quite seriously about looking into some of the books he discusses.

The volume ends, as all of the books in this series do, with an interview conducted by Terry Bisson. Between the sentiments expressed in the interview, and my feeling of profound delight with both fiction and essays collected in this volume, I have the distinct sense that I have missed out on something I would have enjoyed very much in not reading Crowley earlier, and despite the clamourings of thousands of other books demanding to be read, I really must find space for more of his work in the never-ending queue.

Sara Ahmed begins her book, Living a Feminist Life, with these words:

"What do you hear when you hear the word feminism ? It is a word that fills me with hope, with energy. It brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us. It brings to mind women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds. It brings to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, a feeling, a sense of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. Feminism: how we pick each other up. So much history in a word; so much it too has picked up.

I write this book as a way of holding on to the promise of that word, to think what it means to live your life by claiming that word as your own: being a feminist, becoming a feminist, speaking as a feminist. Living a feminist life does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct, although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world (in a not-feminist and antifeminist world); how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls."

This is not unlike my own sense of what feminism has meant to me, throughout almost an entire lifetime of consciously identifying myself as a feminist. It is about living bravely and ethically, believing in the power we have within us to change the world and make it a better place for everyone to live in. It is about social and economic justice for every damned human being on the planet. It is about fighting sexism, racism, classism, homophobia and transphobia. It is about recognising intersectionality of experience and not centering the experiences of the privileged. It's about challenging capitalist greed, the bitter aftereffects of colonialism, the ongoing oppression of globalisation and economic imperialism. It's about respect and compassion and love. And yet, as Ahmed notes:

"When you become a feminist, you find out very quickly: what you aim to bring to an end some do not recognize as existing. This book follows this finding. So much feminist and antiracist work is the work of trying to convince others that sexism and racism have not ended; that sexism and racism are fundamental to the injustices of late capitalism; that they matter. Just to talk about sexism and racism here and now is to refuse displacement; it is to refuse to wrap your speech around postfeminism or postrace, which would require you to use the past tense (back then) or an elsewhere (over there)."

Ahmed writes with such specificity about becoming a feminist, being a feminist, behaving in feminist ways, that every page is full of recognitions - “yes, that’s what it feels like,” “yes, that’s what always happens,” “yes, I’ve been there, said that, done that.” She talks about being the ‘feminist killjoy’ - the one who recognises the everyday manifestations of sexism and racism, who identifies them as problems, as wrong, as forms of violence, who has a name for these things, who feels angry about them, who speaks out, who takes action to resist the wrong, repudiate the violence, repair the harm. And about feminism as willfulness: “If to be a killjoy is to be the one who gets in the way of happiness, then living a feminist life requires being willing to get in the way. When we are willing to get in the way, we are willful.”

A further aspect of Ahmed’s writing is her multi-layered examination of the words and images we use, and how their meanings and relationships can reveal unexpected truths. As in this passage:

“If feminists are willful women, then feminism is judged as a product of those who have too much will or too much of a will of their own. This judgment is a judgment of feminism as being wrong, but also an explanation of feminism in terms of motivation: the act of saying something is wrong is understood as being self-motivated, a way of getting what you want or will. Virginia Woolf wrote of a room of one’s own, a room we have to fight for. We can think of feminism as having to fight to acquire a will of one’s own.

Of course now when we hear the expression “a will of one’s own,” we might assume this claim as an assertion of the primacy of an individual. But own can be rebellious in a world that assumes some beings are property for others (being for others): to claim to be one’s own or to have a will of one’s own can be a refusal to be willing to labor or to provide services for others. Perhaps willing women means being willing to be for. When you are assumed to be for others, then not being for others is judged as being for yourself. Perhaps willfulness could be summarized thus: not being willing to be owned. When you are not willing to be owned, you are judged as willing on your own. This is why willfulness as a judgment falls on some and not others. It is only for some that ownness is rebellion; only some owns become wrongs.”

Ahmed devotes a significant portion of the text to discussing her experiences and observations on being a diversity worker in academia - an example of praxis of the feminist theory she expounds elsewhere in the text. But much of the thinking she shares about the work of enabling and supporting diversity, and the multiple barriers faced by such workers, is entirely applicable to the struggles of any activist to enable and support social and economic justice for any marginalised group.

Indeed, the final section of the book is about feminist activism of all kinds and the consequences of living a feminist life. Ahmed demonstrates the ways that the various concepts she identifies and explores - the feminist killjoy, the willful woman, the feminist snap among others - work in the real world of interactions between people with multiple intersections of privilege and oppression. Moreover, she stresses the importance of surviving as a feminist, and of ensuring that feminism survives. And she gives us much to think about while we try to survive and live our feminist lives.

“Feminism needs feminists to survive: my killjoy survival kit is assembled around this sentence. It is a feminist sentence. And the reverse too is very true: feminists need feminism to survive. Feminism needs those of us who live lives as feminists to survive; our life becomes a feminist survival. But feminism needs to survive; our life becomes a feminist survival in this other sense. Feminism needs us; feminism needs us not only to survive but to dedicate our lives to the survival of feminism. This book has been my expression of my willingness to make this dedication. Feminists need feminism to survive.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta ​Taylor, African American scholar, socialist and academic - she is assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University - offers a profoundly incisive and extensively researched study of US politics American racism and Black resistance in recent decades in her book From ​#BlackLivesMatter ​to ​Black ​Liberation.

Taylor's viewpoint is grounded in both socialist and anti-racist theory - and her analysis looks at both economic and cultural forces. Taylor's focus here is on the era from the civil rights movement to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the similarities and differences between the two movements, and ultimately on "the potential for a much broader anticapitalist movement that looks to transform not only the police but the entire United States." However, she begins her analysis with an examination of America's history as a racist state, from the earliest foundation of a slave-based economy to the exclusion of Black Americans from the benefits of the New Deal. In particular, Taylor points to the effects that the cultural myth of "American exceptionalism" has had, particularly in the Cold War period, in suppressing any consideration of institutional and systemic injustice in American society, and the subsequent evolution of the idea of the "culture of poverty" as the reason for the existence of economic and social inequity in the supposedly freest and most economically mobile country in the world.

"The government and its proponents in the financial world were making a global claim that the United States was good to its Black population, and at the same time they were promoting capitalism and private enterprise as the highest expressions of freedom. American boosters sustained the fiction of the “culture of poverty” as the pretext for the persisting inequality between Blacks and the rest of the country. In some ways, this was even more important as the United States continued its quest to project itself as an economic and political empire. Cold War liberalism was a political framework that viewed American racial problems as existing outside of or unrelated to its political economy and, more importantly, as problems that could be fixed within the system itself by changing the laws and creating 'equal opportunity.' "

Taylor notes the beginnings of a wider understanding of racial inequity as a systemic issue - and one with material as well as cultural elements -during the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, the extension of the welfare state under Johnson, and most significantly, in the multiple Black Liberation movements, and particularly The Black Panthers - that followed in the latter half of the 1960s.

"Hundreds of thousands of Black Americans drew even more radical conclusions about the nature of Black oppression in the United States as they were drawn directly into the radicalizing movement; hundreds of thousands more sympathized with the rebellions. The struggle broke through the isolation and confinement of life in segregated Black ghettos and upended the prevailing explanation that Blacks were responsible for the conditions in their neighborhoods. Mass struggle led to a political understanding of poverty in Black communities across the country. Black media captured stories of injustice as well as the various struggles to organize against it, feeding this process and knitting together a common Black view of Black oppression while simultaneously providing an alternative understanding for white people. A Harris poll taken in the summer of 1967, after major riots in Detroit and Newark, found 40 percent of whites believed that “the way Negroes have been treated in the slums and ghettos of big cities” and “the failure of white society to keep its promises to Negroes” were the leading causes of the rebellion. Many, including Martin Luther King Jr., began to connect Black oppression to a broader critique of capitalism."

Unfortunately, as Taylor demonstrates, this early materialist critique of the philosophies and methods of institutionalised racism faded in the 1970s as more conservative, 'personal responsibility' narratives take the central place in the debate on both racism and poverty, and the doctrine of 'colourblindness' emerged as a means of appearing non-racist while continuing to engage in administrative and economic practices that were inherently unjust to people of colour.

"Nixon’s turn to focusing on crime fit snugly with his broader use of colorblindness to champion his domestic policies. There was no need to invoke race in this campaign for law and order, but the consequences of the policies could not have been clearer. Crime was committed by bad people who made bad choices—it was not the product of an unequal social order that left Blacks and Puerto Ricans, in particular, isolated in urban enclaves with little access to good jobs, housing, or schools in a worsening economy. Instead, inequality left poor and working-class people of color to their own devices to advance in a society that had made next to no provisions for them to do so through legal or normative means. These kinds of constrained “choices” were made in white enclaves as well, but those were less surveilled and less likely to be criminalized by the police and the criminal justice system as a whole."

As the political climate in America became increasingly conservative in the years following Nixon - even among Democrats, but alarmingly so among Republicans - the twin narratives of colourblindness and the 'culture of poverty' became fixed as the foundations of public policy. Even among the middle class Blacks who increasingly gained access to positions of political and economic power, these narratives went unchallenged, while social and economic conditions worsened for poor blacks (and other people of colour). By the time that conditions were ripe for the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, as Taylor notes in comparing the situation in 2014 immediately prior to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson to that preceding the emergence if the civil rights movement, "The main difference is that today, when poor or working-class Black people experience hardship, that hardship is likely being overseen by an African American in some position of authority. The development of the Black political establishment has not been a benign process. Many of these officials use their perches to articulate the worst stereotypes of Blacks in order to shift blame away from their own incompetence."

Taylor sees the betrayal of black communities by black politicians and elites as the inevitable outgrowth of a switch from grassroots resistance and critique of the political and economic power structure structures to a strategy based on electoral politics - one which, due to the nature of the political process in America left black politicians financially beholden to corporate money and conservative voting bloc brokers.

After examining political viewpoints surrounding the oppression of Black Americans, Taylor turns to an examination of racism and violence toward Blacks in criminal justice institutions.

At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans began their long transition from living largely in rural areas to living predominantly in urban ones. In that time, there have been many changes in Black life, politics, and culture, but the threat and reality of police surveillance, scrutiny, violence, and even murder has remained remarkably consistent. The daily harm caused by the mere presence of police in Black communities has been a consistent feature of Black urban history and, increasingly, Black suburban history. Police brutality has been a consistent badge of inferiority and second-class citizenship. When the police enforce the law inconsistently and become the agents of lawlessness and disorder, it serves as a tangible reminder of the incompleteness of formal equality. You cannot truly be free when the police are able to set upon you at will, for no particular reason at all. It is a constant reminder of the space between freedom and “unfreedom,” where the contested citizenship of African Americans is held."

She opens with a discussion of laws restricting black movement, employment and home rental/ownership after the Civil War, laws whose violation was punished by enforced labour on municipal projects - thus beginning the carceral-based slavery system that has replaced the plantation-based slavery system.

"The desperate need for labor seemed insatiable; it turned all Black people into potential suspects and justified surveillance and scrutiny. Convict leasing was lucrative for employers compared to slavery, since it involved lower overhead expenses. As one observer put it, “Before the war we owned the Negroes. If a man had a good nigger, he could afford to take care of him; if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.” The police were the linchpin to this new arrangement."

Having set the scene, as it were, by delineating the history of the conditions - institutional racism and its consequences for the average black person, police brutality, the narrative of a 'culture of poverty' and the co-opting of the black elite - which could, given the necessary spark, bring about a new Black liberation movement, Taylor takes a close look at the Obama regime and its influence on perceptions of racism. She recalls the initial optimism of blacks and progressive whites at the election of a black man to the office of President:

"The excitement about Obama turned into postelection euphoria. That was certainly the feeling in Chicago on election night, when a cross-section of the city converged in Grant Park to hear the country’s first Black president-elect address the nation. It was a rare, almost strange scene to see a multiracial crowd gathered in Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the United States. That was the power of Obama’s calls for hope and change. On the eve of President Obama’s inauguration, 69 percent of Black respondents told CNN pollsters that Martin Luther King’s vision had been 'fulfilled.' In early 2011, asked whether they expected their children’s standard of living to be better or worse than their own, 60 percent of Blacks chose “better,” compared with only 36 percent of whites. This was not just blind hope: it was the expectation that things would, in fact, be better. One researcher described the broader context: 'Certainly, the Obama presidency has fueled euphoria in black circles. But even before Obama came on the scene, optimism was building—most notably among a new generation of black achievers who refused to believe they would be stymied by the bigotry that bedeviled their parents. Obama’s election was, in effect, the final revelation—the long awaited sign that a new American age had arrived.' "Now we have a sense of future,' said Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson. 'All of a sudden you have a stake. That stake is extremely important. If you have a stake, now there’s risk—you realize the consequences of compromising an unknowable future.' Almost 75 percent of African Americans in the South said that Obama would help America rid itself of racial prejudice. Forbes ran an enthusiastic editorial opinion in December 2008 titled 'Racism in America Is Over.' "

Disillusionment with Obama's reticence on racial issues and acceptance of the 'culture of poverty narrative among Blacks helped to build a loose coalition between social justice activists and the economic justice activists of the fledgling Occupy Wall Street movement.

"...Black Occupy activists organized “Occupy the Hood,” whose goal was to raise the profile of the Occupy movement in communities of color across the country and widen the range of people involved. Some “Occupy the Hood” organizers had also been involved in organizing against “stop-and-frisk.” Thus, not only did Occupy popularize economic and class inequality in the United States by demonstrating against corporate greed, fraud, and corruption throughout the finance industry, it also helped to make connections between those issues and racism. The public discussion over economic inequality rendered incoherent both Democratic and Republican politicians’ insistence on locating Black poverty in Black culture. While it obviously did not bury the arguments for culture and “personal responsibility,” Occupy helped to create the space for alternative explanations within mainstream politics, including seeing Black poverty and inequality as products of the system. The vicious attack and crackdown on the unarmed and peaceful Occupy encampments over the winter and into 2012 also provided a lesson about policing in the United States: the police were servants of the political establishment and the ruling elite. Not only were they racist, they were also shock troops for the status quo and bodyguards for the 1 percent."

Taylor pinpoints the killing of Trayvon Martin as the turning point that led to the coalescence of the BlackLivesMatter movement. Despite protests, demonstrations and attempts by Black and anti-racist activists to challenge the narrative, Martin was characterised as a dangerous criminal and his killer, George Zimmerman, as a victim.

"Out of despair over the verdict, community organizer Alicia Garza posted a simple hashtag on Facebook: “#blacklivesmatter.” It was a powerful rejoinder that spoke directly to the dehumanization and criminalization that made Martin seem suspicious in the first place and allowed the police to make no effort to find out to whom this boy belonged. It was a response to the oppression, inequality, and discrimination that devalue Black life every day. It was everything, in three simple words. Garza would go on, with fellow activists Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, to transform the slogan into an organization with the same name: #BlackLivesMatter. In a widely read essay on the meaning of the slogan and the hopes for their new organization, Garza described #BlackLivesMatter as 'an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.' "

While the death of Martin ad the acquittal of his killer marked the beginning of the BlackLivesMatter movement, Taylor identifies the crucial moment when that ignited mass resistance in the killing of Michael Brown:

"For reasons that may never be clear, Brown’s death was a breaking point for the African Americans of Ferguson—but also for hundreds of thousands of Black people across the United States. Perhaps it was the inhumanity of the police leaving Brown’s body to fester in the hot summer sun for four and a half hours after killing him, keeping his parents away at gunpoint and with dogs. “We was treated like we wasn’t parents, you know?” Mike Brown Sr., said. “That’s what I didn’t understand. They sicced dogs on us. They wouldn’t let us identify his body. They pulled guns on us.” Maybe it was the military hardware the police brandished when protests against Brown’s death arose. With tanks and machine guns and a never-ending supply of tear gas, rubber bullets, and swinging batons, the Ferguson police department declared war on Black residents and anyone who stood in solidarity with them."

As she recounts the growing response to the deaths of Brown and other black boys and men at the hands of police across the country, Taylor draws clear distinctions between the positions of the black 'older statesmen' such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who sought to defuse tensions and re-establish the legitimacy of the government in dealing with police violence and racism, and the younger generations of activists who sought immediate and direct action.

"The young people of Ferguson had great reverence and respect for the memory of the civil rights movement, but the reality is that its legacy meant little in their everyday lives. “I feel in my heart that they failed us,” Dontey Carter said of contemporary civil rights leaders. “They’re the reason things are like this now. They don’t represent us. That’s why we’re here for a new movement. And we have some warriors out here.” When Jesse Jackson Sr. arrived in Ferguson, he was confronted by a local activist, who said, “When you going to stop selling us out, Jesse? We don’t want you here in St. Louis!” Other activists did not go that far, but they did note that young Black people had been thrust into leadership on the ground in Ferguson because they were the ones under attack."

Taylor notes other differences between the BLM movement and the more established Black civil rights organisations - the prominence of women and LGBT people, its decentralised structure and use of social media, the flexibility of its tactics, its work in coalition building with labour and other movements, and the development of a "systemic analysis of policing.... that situated policing within a matrix of racism and inequality in the United States and beyond."

In the book's final chapter, Taylor discusses the ways in which radicalisation on political and economic issues - an analysis that links capitalism to the material conditions that Black and other marginalised people are faced - with is a necessary part of the struggle for Black liberation. She reminds us of the socialist perspectives adopted by 60s activists such as the Combahee River Collective and the Black Panthers, and traces the roots of black radicalism in the United States from the early days of the Communist Party in that country. Beginning with the words of Karl Marx on the relation between colonial exploitation, slavery, and capitalism, she outlines a radical understanding of the relation between the capitalist system and the oppression of black people, leading to the conclusion that only a restructuring of society which embraces economic as well as social justice can bring about the goal of black liberation.

"Racism in the United States has never been just about abusing Black and Brown people just for the sake of doing so. It has always been a means by which the most powerful white men in the country have justified their rule, made their money, and kept the rest of us at bay. To that end, racism, capitalism, and class rule have always been tangled together in such a way that it is impossible to imagine one without the other. Can there be Black liberation in the United States as the country is currently constituted? No. Capitalism is contingent on the absence of freedom and liberation for Black people and anyone else who does not directly benefit from its economic disorder. That, of course, does not mean there is nothing to do and no struggle worth waging. Building the struggles against racism, police violence, poverty, hunger, and all of the ways in which oppression and exploitation express themselves is critical to people’s basic survival in this society. But it is also within those struggles for the basic rights of existence that people learn how to struggle, how to strategize, and build movements and organizations. It is also how our confidence develops to counter the insistence that this society, as it is currently constructed, is the best that we can hope to achieve. People engaged in struggle learn to fight for more by fighting for and winning something. But the day-to-day struggles in which many people are engaged today must be connected to a much larger vision of what a different world could look like."

The Authoritarians, Robert Altemeyer

Robert Altemeyer is a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba, where he has been studying the phenomenon of the authoritarian personality for several decades. He has published several books in the conventional fashion, but has posted his latest book in its entirety on the Internet. The PDF can be downloaded here.

As Altemeyer notes in his introduction,

We know an awful lot about authoritarian followers. In one way or another, hundreds of social scientists have studied them since World War II. We have a pretty good idea of who they are, where they come from, and what makes them tick. By comparison, we know little about authoritarian leaders because we only recently started studying them. That may seem strange, but how hard is it to figure out why someone would like to have massive amounts of power?

Altemayer looks beyond that rather superficial assumption about authoritarian leaders to examine, as has been done for their followers, “who they are, where they come from, and what makes them tick.”

Being rather a fervent anti-authoritarian myself, I read this in the spirit of “know thy enemy” and found it to be an interesting look at the psychology of the person who not only thinks that they know better than everyone else, but wants to make everyone else do what they think is best for them. The general observations of the authoritarian mindset weren’t particularly surprising to me, having done a fair bit on ruminating on what makes dictators (overt or covert) tick for myself, but the research was in many cases interesting and enlightening.

As so many Western democracies inch – or lurch – toward practices redolent of fascism, I think that a book like this is rather urgently required reading for those who are in any way concerned about that slip toward the political, economic and religious right.



Cops, Crime and Capitalism: The Law and Order Agenda in Canada, Todd Gordon

And now I'll tell you what's against us
An art that's lived for centuries
Go through the years and you will find
What's blackened all of history
Against us is the law
With its immensity of strength and power
Against us is the law!
Police know how to make a man
A guilty or an innocent
Against us is the power of police!
The shameless lies that men have told
Will ever more be paid in gold
Against us is the power of the gold!
Against us is racial hatred
And the simple fact that we are poor.

From “The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti”
Lyrics by Joan Baez, based on the letters of Bartolomea Vanzetti.

Every social revolutionary knows in her gut that in the modern capitalist state (and in the modern totalitarian state, I’m an equal opportunity anti-authoritarian), the police, no matter how reassuring and comforting their presence and actions may be to the to the relatively privileged and, in North America, primarily white, middleclass, are tools of control and oppression organised and operated by governments in support of the interests of the powerful and wealthy elite and the societal structures that support that elite.

Todd Gordon has presented an interesting and valuable examination of how the relation between the police and the capitalist establishment has functioned, and continues to function, in Canada, with particular notice paid to how this works in the post-September 11 political and social environment.

The sad truth I must face as someone who has tried to maintain a book journal for a year now is that I read too many books (at least for someone who wants to do something other than read, work, sleep and snuggle with my partner), which leaves me less time than most of them deserve to talk about them. Here are some very good books I read in this past year. I enjoyed and learned greatly from them all.


The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Overture and the San Domingo Revolution, C.L.R. James

This book has been called a masterpiece of Marxist historical analysis, the best account of the Haitian (San Domingo) Revolution of 1791-1803 ever written, a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora, and a good many other fine things. It is not an easy read, and it certainly helps to be familiar with the course of events of the French Revolution (as a French colony and a major link in the African slave trade for the French empire, the course of the revolution in San Domingo was inevitably affected by events within Revolutionary France and by its relationships with the United States, Britain, and Spain). But it’s a good read.


Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Andrea Smith

This is an immensely important book. Lest my simple words fail to express how important it is, I will instead point to some reviews.

I am most intrigued by the simplicity with which Smith links sexual violence to land to bodies to spirituality, in such a way that you can see the cause and effect of colonization on each link which then influence the other links. It is a circle that is hard-pressed to be broken or to know where to begin the healing and repair. What makes Smith's text so powerful is her illustration of a cycle of violence and genocide that has a long history and what looks like a long future, especially when colonial attitudes of violence, rape, and power are being internalized in our Native communities. "All women of color," Smith notes, "live in the dangerous intersections of gender and race." Megan L. MacDonald, American Studies Program, Purdue University

Conquest examines the relationship between the violence of state institutions and experiences of interpersonal violence. Smith argues that a culture reliant upon dominance and intimidation for social cohesion will inevitably result in violence within interpersonal relationships. Through a series of thematic chapters, Smith demonstrates how people of colour, and Aboriginal peoples specifically, have been further victimized by the state through racist and sexist policies and surveillance structures that maintain control over every aspect of their lives. Zoe Aarden and Deborah Simmons

The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, ed. Benjamin Drew

During the 1850s, the American abolitionist Benjamin Drew travelled to various communities in Upper Canada (now, roughly, southern Ontario) collecting accounts from people who had escaped slavery in the U.S. and settled in Canada to avoid being captured and returned (including Harriet Tubman). Some of these narratives discuss the conditions under which they lived prior to their escape; others simply recount the flight to Canada and their experiences on settling in a new country. The accounts are fascinating, sometimes harrowing. One element that struck me in many accounts is that the narrators did not try to pretend that they did not experience racism in Canada, but they did almost universally agree that this was not a matter of great concern to them; they appeared to believe that in Canada there were laws that would protect them – or in the worst case, allow them redress – should they suffer harm from any racist acts. Another element was the frequent insistences that virtually all the refugees they knew, including themselves, had been able to make good livings and support themselves and their families, and to live temperate and law-abiding lives. The book’s introduction suggests that the assertions of self-sufficiency may have been in part a response to various undertakings in the northern US at the time, some of them fraudulent, to collect money that would supposedly be sent to Canada to help support refugees, while both arguments could have been intended to counter racist propaganda arguments from Southern slave owners that Blacks needed the institution of slavery to protect them from themselves.


Memoirs of a Race Traitor, Mab Segrest

Recounting the experiences of a white Southern-born lesbian doing anti-racist work during the 70s and 80s in the American South, the book puts a primary focus on race issues, but doesn’t forget how gender and sexual preference issues intersect with them. An interesting and honest book, and one that I found personally interesting – as a white queer who was involved in the late 70s and early 80s in a coalition of people from both the black and queer communities fighting against one of the KKK’s perennial attempts to establish a greater presence in Nova Scotia. Very different situations, circumstances, histories and personalities involved, but just enough of a similarity that it struck me close to home at some points.


My Dangerous Desires, Amber Hollibaugh

An excellent collection of Hollibaugh's writing (with a foreword by Dorothy Allison!), with essays and interviews that address various aspects of the relationships between class, gender, sexuality, political activism, and desire from the perspective of a working-class femme lesbian activist and sex worker, among other things. Many of these essays are deeply personal, grounding the theoretical concepts she is exploring in an analysis of her own roots, influences and life journey. Some of the pieces are conversations with other writers, such as Deirdre English, Gayle Rubin, Jewelle Gomez, and Cherrie Moraga, including the groundbreaking "What We're Rollin' Around in Bed With."


Talking about a Revolution, South End Press Collective (ed.)

A collection of interviews with some of America’s truly great radical left activists and intellectuals – Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Barabara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, Peter Kwong, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, Urvashi Vaid and Howard Zinn – about their experiences and hopes for progressive social movements in America and about the spirit of revolution. Much food for thought if you aspire to be a revolutionary, in any sense of the word.