From Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin’s Introduction:
“How We Fight White Supremacy is a curated, multidisciplinary collection that serves as a showcase for some of our most powerful thinkers and doers. It starts in the middle of a Black-ass conversation; you won't find any explanatory commas about our cultural mores here... Each chapter starts with our take on why a particular category of resistance is integral to the fight and ends with our (very) personal reflections on the matter. Seriously, this collection has everything: thoughtful interviews, 'am I really crying right now?' essays, ridiculously relatable fine art, unexpected profiles, crying laughing emoji face funny fiction, reflections from everyday people on their everyday resistance, get hype playlists, and more... But most of all, this is a book about freedom dreams."
One of my favorites of 2019, set in rural East Tennessee, Quiver is a young adult, coming-of-age tale of friendship from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Vegas Tenold's journalism in Everything You Love Will Burn explores the rebirth of white nationalism in America through the lens of a young, up-and-coming alt-right leader, Matthew Heimbach.
King Leopold’s Ghost is a research-driven exploration of Belgium's colonization of the Congo, the assault against the African natives and their land, how King Leopold II of Belgium was able to commit such heinous crimes to such proportions, and how despite contemporary activists' outspoken anger and lobbying efforts to raise awareness and halt the crimes, very few people to this day know anything about it.
I started this book hoping for an opportunity to learn about Slovakian culture through a historical lens. I did not get what I was looking for. But I did discover an interesting discussion on how the development of a spoken and written Slovakian language affected the collective consciousness, but perhaps more fascinating-- how language affected the study of Slovakian history.
I sat down on Halloween to read a scary story about a haunted house. But when I closed the cover, I saw reflected in the windows of Hill House the mechanics of White Supremacy.
Under the Yoke by Ivan Vazoff is a story of a Bulgarian insurrection against the Turks, a love story fueled by patriotism, a wilderness-adventure spanning the Balkan mountains, where the occasional fight against a pack of wolves isn't uncommon, a village comedy at times, and, in the end, a striking tragedy, all filled with the tropes of Slavic literature.
Miklós Vámos's most recent novel The Book of Fathers is a family saga stretching across 300 years of Hungarian history. Each chapter contains the life and death of the first-born son of each generation of the Csillag family beginning in 1702 and ending in 1996. The book's images, like the one above, are what tie the threads of life, death, Judaism, revolution, parenthood, and time itself together, forming bridges that span consciousness and chill the blood with disturbing and poetic repetition.
Oppression, like many things, is a spectrum. There are a few people who exist at the extremes-- either free from any persecution or, on the other extreme, persecuted from every possible angle. But all too often we don't discuss the rest of the spectrum in the middle, where the relationships between oppressor and oppressed blur, become tangled, and, in their bewildering complexities, reveal a great deal about a society's true self. It is easy-- especially when attempting to make a case for one specific people-- to focus on the surface level of their immediate reality. But it is far more important to take the time and energy to delve deeper, into the tangle, where you can learn the whole truth.
Through Buyandelger’s extensive and dedicated fieldwork, we are allowed to glimpse into how one tribe of Mongolians— the Buryats— are recollecting their personal and communal histories after centuries of suppression and persecution, not only as the marginalized tribe within Mongolia, but also under Soviet domination and Russian aggression dating back to Catherine the Great.
White people/European colonizers punish Indigenous communities for EVERYTHING they do, not because what they do is wrong, but because those practices don’t fit our agendas and quests for power. Now; however, that white people have realized that psychedelics have immense potential for healing (and profitability), we want to control them again, but this time with FDA approval.
Mermaids beach themselves. Crocodile doctors take advantage. Statues cover up murders. Femmes dance through the frame as Witches, Goats, Skeletons, Goddesses of War. And cakes save the world. All of this surrounds our imaginative, Kung-fu fighting hero— Kai Cheng Thom— a “Dangerous Femme”.
We have all witnessed Islamophobia. We just didn’t know to call it that. In American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, Khaled A. Beydoun spells out the layers of Islamophobia, in individuals, the media, and the state. He explores the policies that promote Islamophobia here in the US (before and during Trump.) And he pinpoints the intersections of Muslim identity with other groups that are targeted here in the US— communities that are policed, surveyed, and punished day in and day out.
