A society born of white supremacy and patriarchy must, by definition, ignore the voices of Black women. We know that, unfortunately, such an attitude will also naturally seep into every stratum of that society
Part of the contribution to correct that was the centering and airing of Black women’s voices through Some of Us Are Brave: A Black Women’s Radio Program that aired on Pacifica’s Los Angeles radio station (KPFK) from 2003 until 2011.
The program covered a myriad of issues by amplifying the voices of a broad cross-section of Black women. Some of those voices have been preserved here in this volume. In addition to capturing various moments in time with a ­variety of women, this is also a means of taking the intellec­tual production of and about Black women out of the hands of institutions that are both fundamentally ­anti-Black and anti-woman.
Volume 1 contains interviews under the headings The Shoulders on Which We Stand and Art for Our Sake.
Volume 2 covers Black Lives Have Always Mattered, Black Women’s Health, Bruthas on Sistas, and Sistas in Struggle.
In a media landscape that often falls short when it comes to representing the voices of Black feminists, this series is a breath of fresh air.
– Piper Carter, Detroit-based Arts & Culture Organizer,
Host of “Beyond Breaking Barriers” podcast on Black Power Media
It is a triumph of a book and I feel I am a better man for having read it.
– Jon Jeter, author
Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People, former Washington Post foreign correspondent,
former producer for This American Life

“Never has it been more certain that our victory depends principally on our own actions. Tell no lies, claim no easy victories . . .” —Amílcar Cabral
On the centennial of Amílcar Cabral’s birth, and fifty years after his passing, Claim No Easy Victories brings to life the resonance of his thought for today’s freedom movements.

World-renowned revolutionary, poet, liberation philosopher, and leader of the anticolonial independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, Amílcar Cabral’s legacy stretches well beyond the shores of West Africa. His profound influence on the pan-Africanist movement and the Black liberation movement in the United States and the English-speaking world spans the ages—and is only growing in an era of renewed anti-imperialist internationalist struggle.

In this unique collection of essays, radical thinkers from across Africa, the United States, and internationally commemorate Cabral’s life and legacy and his relevance to contemporary struggles for self-determination and emancipation.

Claim No Easy Victories serves equally as an introduction or reintroduction to a figure and militant history that the rulers and beneficiaries of global racial capitalism would rather see forgotten. Understanding Cabral then and now sheds light on the necessity of grounding radical change in the creation of theory based on the actual conditions within which movements develop.

The depth and dimension of Cabral’s theoretical ideas and revolutionary practice of building popular movements for liberation are assessed by each of the authors and critically reanimated for a new generation of freedom fighters.

The book features contributions by: Kali Akuno, Samir Amin, David Austin, Jesse Benjamin, Angela Davis, Bill Fletcher Jr, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, Lewis Gordon, Firoze Manji, Asha Rodney, Patricia Rodney, Olúfémi Táíwò—and others.

Being Anti-Colonial by Jayan Nayar presents a profound critique of the contemporary engagements with ‘decolonial theory’ and the popular usage of ‘decolonisation’. This work argues that much of the current discourse within critical theory tends to overlook the intricate, essentially praxiological underpinnings of the anti-colonial struggle, thereby comfortably situating itself within the post-colonial status quo. Nayar’s book serves as a radical call to authentically re-engage with the anti-colonial ethos, emphasizing the necessity to confront the enduring architectures of coloniality that define our present. Distinctly divided into two parts, the book first elucidates the conceptual groundwork to reconceptualise ‘anti-colonial’ as a philosophical stance deeply entwined with the fabric of the global (post)colonial reality. Through meticulously argued philosophical foundations, Nayar underscores the (post)colonial present as a state of ‘resettlement’, where the architecture of post-colonial world-making loses sight of its colonial matrices. Being Anti-Colonial is both an invitation and a challenge to the academic community to critically revisit and re-energize the conversation about coloniality.

This book collects four decades of writings on dialectics, a number of them published here for the first time, by Kevin B. Anderson, a well-known scholar-activist in the Marxist-Humanist tradition. The essays cover the dialectics of revolution in a variety of settings, from Hegel and the French Revolution to dialectics today and its poststructuralist and pragmatist critics. In these essays, particular attention is given to Lenin’s encounter with Hegel and its impact on the critique of imperialism, the rejection of crude materialism, and more generally, on world revolutionary developments. Major but neglected works on Hegel and dialectics written under the impact of the struggle against fascism like Lukács’s The Young Hegel and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution are given full critical treatment. Dunayevskaya’s intersectional revolutionary dialectics is also treated extensively, especially its focus on a dialectics of revolution that avoids class reductionism, placing gender, race, and colonialism at the center alongside class. In addition, key critics of Hegel and dialectics like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Rorty, are themselves analysed and critiqued from a twenty-first century dialectical perspective. The book also takes up the dialectic in global, intersectional settings via a reconsideration of the themes of Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, where nationalism, race, and colonialism were theorized alongside capital and class as key elements in Marxist dialectical thought. As a whole, the book offers a discussion of major themes in the dialectics of revolution that still speak to us today at a time of radical transformation in all spheres of society and of everyday life.

Part of what is revealed is what is wrong and toxic – in ourselves, in our relations with others, and in our relation with the rest of non-human nature. But it’s also terribly important to listen for and to seek out what is revealed that is good and life-affirming. Both are vital. Our current situation is deeply structured by capitalism and as such has made all of our lives, livelihoods, relations and goods tied up with, and dependent on, reproducing that system. It is clear that the real catastrophe is the inevitable and accelerating spiral of death that flows from that logic of capital and of money. But new (and old too) forms of experimenting in radically different ways of doing/being/relating that flow from it are also revealed – the ways of thinking and doing that reject the logic of power-over, of competition or profit, of exploitation and humiliation. Can these be sustained beyond the immediate corona crisis?; shouldn’t we be encouraging people to identify these areas and think/act them as a present future, planning and imagining how to extend them forward in time?; and expanding them to growing spheres of life? At the level of values and principles, we do wonder whether kindness, social solidarity, and an appropriate scale of time, aren’t perhaps the most important of these?

We are much more likely to actually change the world when we listen and tap into all the many ways in which people’s own questions and thinking, their ways of relating and acting, refuse the logic of toxic power and monetised exchange for profit. Here, we will discover already-existing breaks and practices that, instead, embody and embrace the values and principles for a better way of reproducing life.

This pamphlet tackles the question: how do we get from A to B, capitalism to post-capitalism?

It is critical reading to understand why:
Capitalist-oriented industrial agriculture and its destruction of habitat are the upstream causes that led to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other past and future pandemics of devastating, emerging viral pathogens.; COVID-19 may trigger a collapse of the global capitalist system but it is not the cause; Health-care and public-health systems organized around capitalist principles don’t do well in pandemics, compared to those not organized around capitalist principles; The current economic collapse, triggered by a pandemic, opens a door for revolutionary transformation.
Rinky-dink Revolution involves actions and inactions that are easy, safe, mundane, unglamorous, and feasible within every person’s life.

The book explores the challenges Palestinian filmmakers confront to develop a cinema that gives expression to the national narrative. The research is based on collaborative work to research and screen Palestinian films involving Film Lab Palestine, Sheffield Palestine Cultural Exchange and Sheffield Hallam University as part of the Creative Interruptions research project (https://creativeinterruptions.com/palestiniancinema/). We explored the political, economic and cultural factors that impact on Palestinian film production and some of the barriers encountered in profiling and screening Palestinian films in Britain.

The pamphlet begins with two letters written by Paul the Apostle in which Christianity first acquires a universal address. The new religion came to exclude people who were not Christians from the count of the human. This became explicit around a thousand years later when Pope Urban II authorised the First Crusade.

In 1492 planetary history was split in to two. Muhammad XII of Granada conceded defeat to Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic monarchs of Portugal and Spain, who went on to expel the Jews from the territory under their control. Europe became a Christian project. In the same year Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean and Europe also became an imperial project with a planetary reach.

The origins of the racial ideology can be seen in this period, in which ideas about religion came to be entangled with fantastical ideas about the imagined purity of blood. But it was in the English colony of Virginia in the seventeenth century that the legitimation for the exclusion from the count of the human began to move from claims made in the name of religion to claims made in the name of science. This is the point at which modern racism, rooted in the appearance of the body, began to cast its malignant shadow across the planet.

The author argues that the struggle to put an end to the epoch of world history that opened in 1492 will require new ideas, and new practices. It follows the Caribbean tradition that runs from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in affirming the need for a counter-humanism, a radical humanism, a humanism that, in Césaire’s famous phrases, is “made to the measure of the world”. There is a need for a shift in the ground of reason towards the lived experience and struggles of people rendered, in Wynter’s phrase, as ‘pariahs outside of the new order’.

This pamphlet is part of the Thinking Freedom series published by Daraja Press.

The inside story of the struggles of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, referred to by British colonialism as the ‘Mau Mau rebellion’, is little known today. The autobiographical material written by Karari Njama (a senior leader in the Mau Mau hierarchy) and compiled by Donald L. Barnett was first published by Monthly Review Press in 1966, as Mau Mau From Within: An analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt. It was reprinted in 1970; it has remained out of print for many years. As the late Basil Davidson put it in his review of the first edition: “Njama writes of the forest leaders’ efforts to overcome dissension, to evolve effective tactics, to keep discipline, mete out justice … and to teach men how to survive in those merciless forests. His narrative is crowded with excitement. Those who know much of Africa and those who know little will alike find it compulsive reading. Some 10,000 Africans died fighting in those years . Here, in the harsh detail of everyday experience, are the reasons why.”

The book is an extraordinary story of courage, passion, heroism, combined with recounting of colonial terror, brutality and betrayal. It is a story of how the very idea of being ‘Kenyan’ was intimately linked to the idea of freedom, a connection that was destroyed not only by the firepower of the British, but also by those who collaborated and established themselves as the beneficiaries of neocolonial rule. Disconnecting notions of freedom from identity left only a caricature that rapidly descended into tribalism and ethnicity.

This momentous story of the struggle for freedom described here is relevant not only for a new generation of Kenyans but also for all those engaged in emancipatory struggles internationally. For so long as the experiences arising from the struggles described in this book are perceived as merely ‘African’ or ‘Kenyan’, it is not possible to fully grasp the contributions they have made to the struggle for a universalist humanity.

What is recounted in this publication is more than an ‘analysis of a peasant revolt’. It is above all a history of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. As Ngūgī wa Thiong’o points out in his Preface to this new edition, ‘we don’t have to use the vocabulary of the colonial to describe our struggles.’ We were tempted to rename the book ‘Kenya Land and Freedom Army from Within.’ But because the original title has wide recognition, and and as one of the characteristics of movements of the oppressed is to appropriate derogatory terms

hese letters and poems are invaluable fragments of a living conversation that portrays the indomitable power in humans to stay alive in the face of certain death – to stay alive even in death.

Reading through the treasure trove of the letters and poems compiled here as The Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa evokes intense memories of his resolute struggles against an oil behemoth and a deaf autocratic government. His crusade frames one of the most tumultuous periods of Nigeria’s history; his tragic story evokes anger and demands action to resolve the crises that first led the Ogoni people to demand that Shell clean up Ogoni lands or clear out of the territory.