New York Times-bestselling author adrienne maree brown knows we need each other more than ever and offers a practice for holding collective power, righting wrongs, and generating true belonging.
Ethical, pondering, and wondrous, adrienne maree brown's Loving Corrections is a collection of love-based adjustments and reframes to grow our movements for liberation while navigating a society deeply fractured by greed, racism, and war. In this landmark book, brown invigorates her influential writing on belonging and accountability into the framework of loving corrections a generative space where rehearsals for the revolution become the everyday norm in relating to one another.
Filled with practical wisdom on how to be a trustworthy communicator while providing bold visions for a shared future, Loving Corrections can speak to everyone caught in the crossroads of our political challenges and potential. No matter how new to the struggle, or how numerous our failures, brown's indispensable writing is an invitation to us all.
How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls pleasure activism, a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism. Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, Cara Page, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Together they cover a wide array of subjects--from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs--building new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.
Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!
adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy and co-editor of Octavia's Brood, is a social justice facilitator focused on black liberation, a doula/healer, and a pleasure activist. She lives in Detroit.
PRAISE for Pleasure Activism:
This is no self-help manual--it's a weighty text that discusses everything from enthusiastic consent to U.S. drug policy--but it's a genuine, well, pleasure to read as well. The book's open, identity-affirming view of sex is wildly empowering, particularly for young people who might not have had the idea ingrained in them that intimate contact with another person should always be initiated out of a desire for pleasure. --Vogue
[brown] demonstrates how we can tap into our emotional and erotic desires to organize against oppression. --Colorlines
adrienne maree brown...continues to stake her claim as one of our most critical thinkers and strategists by intentionally combining the power of story-telling with practical applications to help readers conjure their own definition of pleasure and how it is inextricably linked to every part of our existence. --Monica Simpson, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective
adrienne marie brown is back, again dropping wisdom about alternative ways to live at this deeply fucked-up moment ... Let this book be the best Valentine's Day gift you've ever given yourself. --Vice/Broadly
adrienne maree brown dives deep, head first, into a fast swirling pool of pleasure-related topics. She swims her way from one end of the pool to the other with some help from her body-wise, experienced, friends. This book is all at once so cool, and so hot, with a rainbow of glorious compleXXXities. Pleasure Activism is bound to make a huge splash! --Annie Sprinkle, author of Explorer's Guide to Planet Orgasm--For Every Body
Engaging with politics and social justice issues, whether it's climate change, race, or gender, can feel like work (and it is). Adrienne maree brown makes the case that you can feel good while doing so ... [Pleasure Activism] will challenge you to rethink your approach to changing the world. --Mashable
Pleasure Activism is an invitation to know ourselves and be in conversation with the desire of our lustful imaginations... [I]t makes our personal liberation irresistible. --Jasmine Burnett, activist and anti-oppression consultant
adrienne maree brown elucidates a philosophy of Pleasure Activism to transform individuals and so the world. Her explicit instructions encourage orgasms of the body, mind and spirit. First, in support of our own authentic lives, then so that we can live in loving community with others. It's like a wise and juicy black goddess reopened Eden and said, 'Okay, everybody, let's try this again.' --Veronica Vera, author & founder of Miss Vera's Finishing School For Boys Who Want to Be Girls
Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs's Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of vision and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.
In our complex world, facilitation and mediation skills are as important for individuals as they are for organizations. How do we practice them in ways that align with nature, with pleasure, with our best imagining of our future? How do we attend to generating the ease necessary to help us move through the inevitable struggles of life? How do we practice the art of holding others without losing ourselves? Black feminists have answers to those questions that can serve anyone working to create changes in our world, changes great and small; individually, interpersonally, and within our organizations.
Holding Change is about attending to coordination, to conflict, to being humans in right relationship with each other, not as a constant ongoing state, but rather as a magnificent, mysterious, ever-evolving dynamic in which we must involve ourselves, shape ourselves and each other. The majority of the book is sourced from brown's twenty-plus years of facilitation and mediation work with movement groups.
Includes contributions by Autumn Brown, Sage Crump, Malkia Devich-Cyril, Ejeris Dixon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Prentis Hemphill, Micky ScottBey Jones, N'Tanya Lee, and Makani Themba
A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.
Why do some processes--like aging, birth, and car crashes--occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.
Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?
Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips's own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master's Clock expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.
Whenever we envision a world without war, prisons, or capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. These visionary tales span genres--sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism--but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. Also features essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas.
Those concerned with justice and liberation must always persuade the mass of people that a better world is possible. Our job begins with speculative fictions that fire society's imagination and its desire for change. In adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha's visionary conception, and by its activist-artists' often stunning acts of creative inception, Octavia's Brood makes for great thinking and damn good reading. The rest will be up to us. --Jeff Chang, Who We Be: The Colorization of America
Conventional exclamatory phrases don't come close to capturing the essence of what we have here in Octavia's Brood. One part sacred text, one part social movement manual, one part diary of our future selves telling us, 'It's going to be okay, keep working, keep loving.' Our radical imaginations are under siege and this text is the rescue mission. It is the new cornerstone of every class I teach on inequality, justice, and social change....This is the text we've been waiting for. --Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier
Octavia once told me that two things worried her about the future of humanity: The tendency to think hierarchically, and the tendency to place ourselves higher on the hierarchy than others. I think she would be humbled beyond words that the fine, thoughtful writers in this volume have honored her with their hearts and minds. And that in calling for us to consider that hierarchical structure, they are not walking in her shadow, nor standing on her shoulders, but marching at her side. --Steven Barnes, Lion's Blood
Never has one book so thoroughly realized the dream of its namesake. Octavia's Brood is the progeny of two lovers of Octavia Butler and their belief in her dream that science fiction is for everybody.... Butler could not wish for better evidence of her touch changing our literary and living landscapes. Play with these children, read these works, and find the children in you waiting to take root under the stars! --Moya Bailey and Ayana Jamieson, Octavia E. Butler Legacy
Like [Octavia] Butler's fiction, this collection is cartography, a map to freedom. --dream hampton, filmmaker and Visiting Artist at Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts
Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator, and spoken word artist. She is the author of the poetry collectionScars/Stars and facilitates writing workshops at schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women's prisons.
adrienne maree brown is a 2013 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow writing science fiction in Detroit, Michigan. She received a 2013 Detroit Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler-based writing workshops.
Cancel culture addresses real harm...and sometimes causes more. It's time to think this through.
Cancel or call-out culture is a source of much tension and debate in American society. The infamous Harper's Letter, signed by public intellectuals of both the left and right, sought to settle the matter and only caused greater division. Originating as a way for marginalized and disempowered people to address harm and take down powerful abusers, often with the help of social media, call outs are seen by some as having gone too far. But what is too far when you're talking about imbalances of power and patterns of harm? And what happens when people in social justice movements direct their righteous anger inward at one another?
In We Will Not Cancel Us, movement mediator adrienne maree brown reframes the discussion for us, in a way that points to possible paths beyond this impasse. Most critiques of cancel culture come from outside the milieus that produce it, sometimes even from from its targets. However, brown explores the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that gently asks, how well does this practice serve us? Does it prefigure the sort of world we want to live in? And, if it doesn't, how do we seek accountability and redress for harm in ways that reflect our values?
With an Afterword by Malkia Devich-Cyril.
Absolutely what we need in these days of spreading gloom. A very well argued case for joyful militancy, and against the dead hand of puritanical revolution. Read it, live it!--John Holloway, author of Crack Capitalism
Why do radical movements and spaces sometimes feel laden with fear, anxiety, suspicion, self-righteousness, and competition? Montgomery and bergman call this phenomenon rigid radicalism: congealed and toxic ways of relating that have seeped into social movements, posing as the correct way of being radical. In conversation with organizers and intellectuals from a wide variety of political currents, the authors explore how rigid radicalism smuggles itself into radical spaces, and how it is being undone
Interviewees include Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Walidah Imarisha, Margaret Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, Richard Day, and more.
Ontario Library Association Best Bets 2021 List.
Winner of the International Latino Book Awards' Best Educational Children's Picture Book in English.
A bold and colorful exploration of all the ways that people navigate through the spaces around them and a celebration of the relationships we build along the way. We Move Together follows a mixed-ability group of kids as they creatively negotiate everyday barriers and find joy and connection in disability culture and community. A perfect tool for families, schools, and libraries to facilitate conversations about disability, accessibility, social justice and community building. Includes a kid-friendly glossary (for ages 6 - 9).
Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function.
Dune's mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks--in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life--casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit's hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit's history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.
In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.
The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human. With this succinct formulation, Murray Bookchin launches his most ambitious work, The Ecology of Freedom. An engaging and extremely readable book of breathtaking scope, its inspired synthesis of ecology, anthropology and political theory traces our conflicting legacies of hierarchy and freedom from the first emergence of human culture to today's globalized capitalism, constantly pointing the way to a sane, sustainable ecological future.
Murray Bookchin, cofounder of the Institute for Social Ecology, has been an active voice in the ecology and anarchist movements for more than 40 years. The author of numerous books and articles, he lives in Burlington, Vermont.
In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.
Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Community-based approaches to preventing crime and repairing its damage have existed for centuries. However, in the punative atmosphere of contemporary criminal justice systems, they are often marginalized and operate under the radar. Beyond Survival puts these strategies front and center as real alternatives to today's failed models of confinement and correction.
In this collection, a diverse group of authors focuses on concrete and practical forms of redress and accountability, assessing existing practices and marking paths forward. They use a variety of forms--from toolkits to personal essays--to delve deeply into the how to of transformative justice, providing alternatives to calling the police, ways to support people having mental health crises, stories of community-based murder investigations, and much more. At the same time, they document the history of this radical movement, creating space for long-time organizers to reflect on victories, struggles, mistakes, and transformations.
For the first time in English, the autobiography of the revolutionary outlaw who brought Citibank to its knees.
In 1981, Lucio Urtubia received a suitcase full of cash from Citibank executives, handed over the plates he'd used to forge 20 million dollars in traveler's checks, and walked away a free man. This is the true story of the most famous Robin Hood of the twentieth century, a lifelong anarchist who robbed from the rich to give to liberation struggles the world round.
Born to a poor family in the Basque Country, Urtubia was conscripted into Franco's army before fleeing to exile in Paris, where he worked as a mason by day and collaborated with Catalonian anarchists by night. Soon, he was planning bank heists to fund the Spanish struggle, stealing weapons, and masterminding the escape of resistance fighters. Following the uprisings of May 1968, Urtubia opened a printshop, producing political pamphlets while secretly counterfeiting passports and workers' paychecks--until he hit on the scheme that would make him infamous. He who robs a thief is a thousand times forgiven! Urtubia declared. Over decades, he funneled support to such organizations as Italy's Red Brigades, the West German Baader-Meinhof group, the Black Panthers in the US, and the ETA Basque separatists.
Told with Urtubia's free-flowing warmth and humor, To Rob a Bank Is an Honor narrates the life stories and political convictions of a larger-than-life figure at the center of an incendiary era.
This is the second title in the Black Dawn series of speculative fiction from AK Press. An epic political fantasy in the tradition of Tepper and Le Guin that explores the question of what an anarchist community can do to resist the assaults that are sure to come if any such social formation were to exist.
Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he's embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life. A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.A political vision for a future ripe with alternatives to imprisonment and punishment.
Born from sustained organizing, and rooted in Black and women of color feminisms, disability justice, and other movements, abolition calls for an end to our reliance on imprisonment, policing and surveillance, and to imagine a safer future for our communities. Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators offers entry points to build critical and intentional bridges between educational practice and the growing movement for abolition. Designed for educators, parents, and young people, this toolkit shines a light on innovative abolitionist projects, particularly in pre-K-12 learning contexts. Sections are dedicated to entry points into Prison Industrial Complex abolition and education; the application of the lessons and principles of abolition; and stories about growing abolition outside of school settings. Topics addressed throughout include student organizing, immigrant justice in the face of ICE, approaches to sex education, arts-based curriculum, and building abolitionist skills and thinking in lesson plans.
The result of patient and urgent work, and more than five years in the making, Lessons in Liberation invites educators into the work of abolition.
Contributors include Black Organizing Project, Chicago Women's Health Center, Mariame Kaba and Project NIA, Bettina L. Love, the MILPA Collective, and artists from the Justseeds Collective, among others.