Category Archives: Blog

Marcello Tarì’s “There Is No Unhappy Revolution” reviewed by Chrys Papaioannou

Posted on February 4, 2023 by

“Written from the standpoint of an intellectual who remains committed to the political project of insurrectionary communism, Tarì’s monograph-cum-manifesto will no doubt rouse readers who take textual pleasure in the insurgent lyricism of militant collectives such as The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun and Colectivo Situaciones.”

Posted in anarchism, autonomy, Blog, power, resistance, revolution, the Left

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“Emory Douglas: The Art of the Black Panthers”

Posted on November 11, 2022 by

“From 1967 to the Party’s dissolution in the early 1980s, Douglas designed the art that came to define the Black Panthers and their iconography.”

Posted in Blog, fine arts, resistance, revolt

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Rachel Collett reviews “Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women” by Kristen Ghodsee

Posted on November 11, 2022 by

“In exploring the lives of the revolutionary socialist feminists, Red Valkyries demonstrates the value and importance of feminism in the 21st century.”

Posted in Blog, gender, revolution, rights

Christopher Clark reviews Jonathan Beecher’s “Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848″”

Posted on November 7, 2022 by

“It follows nine contemporary intellectuals – d’Agoult, the novelists George Sand, Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, the statesman Lamartine, the liberal theorist and parliamentarian Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialists Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Alexander Herzen – into the revolution, links arms with them as they pass through its euphoria, confusion and violence, and tracks their steps as they re-emerge into the post-revolutionary world.”

Posted in Blog, defeat, revolution, tragic politics

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Maria Popova: “The Spirit of Revolt: The Radical Russian Dissident Prince Peter Kropotkin on How to Reboot a Complacent Society”

Posted on November 1, 2022 by

“There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the old order; they suffocate in the stifling atmosphere of prejudice and traditions.”

Posted in anarchism, Blog, power, revolution

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“The German Revolution of 1918: Revolutionary November” (video)

Posted on October 23, 2022 by

Posted in Blog, revolution

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Conor Bean reviews “Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution” (2021) by Maurizio Lazzarato

Posted on June 12, 2022 by

“He remains adamant that any revolutionary organizing on the horizon must accept the effective displacement of the working class from the position of central revolutionary subject, set aside Leninist and Maoist organizing models, and embrace the potentials for historically oppressed subjectivities’ ‘becoming-revolutionary’ in the course of anti-capitalist activity (232)”

Posted in Blog, crisis, freedom, power, revolution

The tragedy of post-colonial self-determination

Posted on June 10, 2022 by

In her challenging book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019), political scientist Adom Getachew discusses self-determination in the Anglophone Black Atlantic, with special emphasis on post-colonial independence as well as Caribbean and African federations.  It would be interesting to compare the political thought of intellectuals and statesmen such as George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, which she explores, with that of contemporary writers.  In particular, it would be fascinating to study the failure of self-determination that started in the 1960s in light of contemporary tragedies of autonomy that focused paradigmatically on Haiti, such as Monsieur Toussaint (1961) by Edouard Glissant, Toussaint (1961) by Lorraine Hansberry, Drums and Colors (1961) by Derek Walcott, The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963) by Aimé Césaire, and C. L. R. James’ revisions to The Black Jacobins (1962) that recast it as a post-colonial tragedy.

8 June 2022

Posted in autonomy, Blog, founding, governance, revolution, theatre

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The tragedy of Haiti in history, drama, and performance

Posted on May 30, 2022 by
Last week, as I read in The New York Times the four-day series
“The Ransom – The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers”
and I continued work on Aimé Césaire’s superb drama The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, 1970)
for my book-length project The Tragedy of Revolution,
I took the train to Chicago and caught the last performance of the wonderful American premiere of this Shakespearean tragedy.
On the way home, I was reminded of what the Martinican Césaire said when talking about a visit to the Caribbean island:  “In Haiti I saw mainly what should not be done!  A country that had supposedly conquered its liberty … and which I saw more miserable than Martinique, which was a French colony! … It was tragic.”
30 May 2022

Posted in Blog, founding, freedom, governance, hubris, revolution, terror, theatre, tragic politics

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Onur Isci: Book Review: “Nationalism, Secessionism, and Autonomy” by André Lecours (2021)

Posted on May 15, 2022 by

“Throughout the book, the author seeks to answer the question of why some nationalist movements take a secessionist form while others do not. The answer he gives lies not in the character or content of the nationalist movement in question, but in the autonomy of the region in which the movement emerged within a sovereign state.”

Posted in autonomy, Blog, freedom, power

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