Edited by Joy James
Pluto Press
12/20/2024, paperback
SKU: 9780745350301
This dynamic collection of conversations includes reflections by Black and Indigenous organizers and educators on the historical and ongoing violence and theft that they have endured and continue to resist.
Both raw and disciplined, the wide-ranging discussions explore spirituality, environmentalism, security, freedom, autonomy, anti-Blackness, and family. The volume is an invitation to dismantle colonial oppressions and a step towards building a future free from the harmful legacies of racism and genocide.
ENGAGE includes contributions from under-platformed writers from diverse political perspectives. It emphasizes the role of non-academic collaborators as stewards of progressive, radical projects to realize better and more just futures.
Reviews:
"Joy James has given us a gift. Community-engaged and dialogic, Engage brings us a powerful set of conversations that are rich with all the complexities entailed by diverse and yet intertwined histories of oppression and multiple visions for the future within and between these communities. A must-read for anyone concerned with Indigenous and Black liberation." - Shannon Speed, Director of American Indian Studies Center and Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology, UCLA
"A diverse collection of urgent dialogs on the past, present, and future of rebellious Indigenous and Black life in a world structured by genocide." - Orisanmi Burton, author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt
"This "counter-archive" is essential reading for those of us working in the university and inside institutions that help the state wage war. The students, faculty (bus drivers and librarians), cultural workers, parents, and organizers send us dispatches from their specific locations of struggle. The conversations--sometimes direct, sometimes oblique--are examples of how we talk to each other under institutional surveillance and subject to the reins of philanthropic funding. While the conversations are informed by histories of Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous struggle, they unfold in unexpected ways and in the real time of our perilous and shifting grounds. These are conversations to turn and return to." - Tiffany Lethabo King, author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies
About the Editor:
Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College, is a political philosopher who works with organizers. She is editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader; Imprisoned Intellectuals; and co-editor of The Black Feminist Reader. James's recent books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. Her edited volumes with Pluto include ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous Futures and Beyond Cop Cities