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Claim No Easy Victories
“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.
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Heroes of the African Revolution Vol 1&2
We made this coloring book in order to expose African children to their authentic history. Malcolm X told us decades ago that we had to take responsibility for our children’s education because he understood that our people had been intentionally robbed of their true history. We can no longer rely on institutions to educate our children and must take it upon ourselves to equip our children with the truth so that they can bring a positive contribution to our people’s struggle for justice and freedom. This book highlights some of the key figures within the struggle to achieve Pan-Africanism which is the total liberation and unification of Africa. All of the brave women and men featured in this book were Pan-Africanists. They understood that people of African descent throughout the world faced the same issues and therefore had to unite in order to overcome those issues. We hope this book can inspire the next generation of African children to become Pan-Africanists and to join the struggle to liberate and unite Africa.
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Finding Voice
Winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for that year, Finding a Voice established a new discourse on South Asian women’s lives and struggles in Britain. Through discussions, interviews and intimate one-to-one conversations with South Asian women, in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and English, it explored family relationships, the violence of immigration policies, deeply colonial mental health services, militancy at work and also friendship and love. The seventies was a time of some iconic anti-racist and working-class struggles. They are presented here from the point of view of the women who participated in and led them.
This new edition includes a preface by Meena Kandasamy, some historic photographs, and a remarkable new chapter titled ‘In conversation with Finding a Voice: 40 years on’ in which younger South Asian women write about their own lives and struggles weaving them around those portrayed in the book.
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From Citizen to Refugee
In his introduction to this new edition of From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain, Mahmood Mamdani reminds us that long before 1972, most Ugandan ‘Asians’ had already been disenfranchised by law, both Ugandan and British. Despite a global industry that insists otherwise, Uganda Asians are a poor fit as victims: there was no large-scale loss of life during the expulsion, nor were there massacres of Asians, only of ‘indigenous’ peoples. Asians in Uganda, as in East or Southern Africa, he argues, were immigrants, not settlers: immigrants are prepared to be a part of the political community, whereas settlers ‘create their own political community, a colony, more precisely, settler colonialism.’ Mamdani insists that there is no single Asian legacy. there are several and they are contradictory. The Asian question in Uganda remains, but it is no longer the original Asian question. But it does allow us to think more broadly. Just as US law recognizes African Americans as Americans of African descent, so too must those of Asian origin in Africa consider themselves, and be considered, Asian Africans. It is in his bittersweet and touching book on the Asian expulsion from Uganda that one can trace the beginnings of author and intellectual Mahmood Mamdani’s world-view.. … In From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain Mamdani offers portraits of people reduced to a vegetative existence in refugee camps, feeling the burden of not being fluent in English and struggling with the uncomfortably cold weather. Not surprisingly, these few months played a pivotal role in shaping Mamdani’s theoretical and political leanings, and it is here that one can locate his preoccupation with the formation of racial, ethnic and class identities during the colonial era and his overarching concern with issues of citizenship.
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DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTION
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.
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Fanon Today
Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth is about how new generations are discovering their mission of humanizing the world by claiming Fanon as a thinker for our times. Why Fanon, why now? For the wretched of the earth, conditions have not improved since Fanon’s time and in some cases they have worsened. Reason and revolt are inescapable, quite simply because, as Fanon wrote, it has become ‘impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word’. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Fanon’s death (in 1961), the contributors to this book address the resonances of Fanon’s thinking on movements of resistance and mass revolutionary uprisings occurring in response to repression or state violence in Algeria, Brazil, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Pakistan, Palestine, Portugal, South Africa, Syria, Trinidad, USA and beyond. The driving force of each chapter of this unique collection of writings is Fanonian praxis, engaging with Fanon the thinker and Fanon the revolutionary.
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Domains of politics and modes of rule / Sphères politiques et contrôle étatique
This work consists of a brief attempt to orient the study of the neocolonial state in Africa through an assessment of the manner in which it rules its people. It is argued that the state produces different modes of rule by deploying different politics over different parts of the population. In this manner, it can combine a genuinely democratic rule in the image of the West over some while subjecting the majority to colonial forms of domination. Imported political subjectivities from the West and its obsession with human rights discourse are reserved largely for a sphere of civil society in which the right to have rights is conferred upon citizens. In the domains of uncivil society and traditional society, the right to rights is not observed by the state so that different subjectivities, regularly including violence, govern the manner political problems and solutions are addressed both by the state and by people. In consequence, distinct political subjectivities prevail in the conceptualization of popular resistance in all three domains, and it becomes difficult to rally such different concerns and conceptions within an overall anti-neocolonial struggle.
Il s’agit d’une brève tentative d’orienter l’étude de l’État néocolonial en Afrique à travers une évaluation de la manière dont il gouverne son peuple. On soutient que l’État produit différents modes de contrôle étatique en déployant différentes politiques sur différentes parties de la population. De cette manière, il peut combiner une règle véritablement démocratique à l’image de l’Occident sur certains tout en soumettant la majorité à des formes coloniales de domination. Les subjectivités politiques importées de l’Occident et son obsession du discours sur les droits de l’homme sont largement réservées à une sphère de la société civile dans laquelle le droit d’avoir des droits est conféré aux citoyens. Dans les domaines de la société incivile et de la société « traditionnelle », le droit aux droits n’est pas respecté par l’État, de sorte que différentes subjectivités, y compris régulièrement la violence, régissent la manière dont les problèmes politiques et leurs solutions sont abordés à la fois par l’État et par le peuple. En conséquence, des subjectivités politiques distinctes prévalent dans la conceptualisation de la résistance populaire dans chacun des trois domaines, et il devient difficile de rallier des préoccupations et des conceptions aussi différentes au sein d’une lutte anticoloniale nation -
African Popular Culture and Emancipatory Politics
The current absence of any emancipatory vision for Africa lies at the heart of our political problems of racial capitalist and colonial oppression. Any attempt to rethink political emancipation on the African continent must be able to locate a universal conception of freedom within singular cultural experiences where people live. Irrespective of the specific manner in which such struggles for freedom were thought within different historical contexts, emancipatory politics always exhibited such a dialectic when it was based within popular traditions. Yet only some militant intellectual leaders understood the importance of this dialectic in thought.
The present volume outlines and discusses two particularly important views concerning the role and importance of popular culture in emancipatory politics in Africa. Each is the product of distinct forms of colonial capitalist exploitation: the former saw the light of day within a colonial context while the latter is directly confronted by the neocolonial state. All emancipatory politics are developed in confrontation with state power, and all begin with a process of discussion and debate whereby a collective subject begins to be formed. The formation of such a collective political subject has been fundamentally informed by popular cultures on the African continent.
The two authors whose essays are included here understood this and posit popular culture at the centre of their politics. The first, Amílcar Cabral, addresses the central role of popular culture in the independence struggle of Guinea Bissau in the 1970s; the second, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, addresses the centrality of African popular culture in an emancipatory politics for the current Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite the distance in time that separates them, both Cabral and Wamba-dia-Wamba develop a dialectics at the core of their politics which activates the universals of culture in the present. It is this that makes their views of central importance to emancipatory thought today. -
White Saviorism in International Development
Given the growing interest in understanding the meaning, manifestations, analyses and implications of racism in North/South relations, White Saviorism in International Development seeks to remedy the shortcomings of the development studies literature on the prevalence of White Saviorism in Western development initiatives in the Global South. The volume comprises theoretical chapters, testimonies, stories and lived experiences from 19 contributors from across the Global South. With sensitivity and intelligence, these practitioners and academics create a tapestry that unveils the implicit and explicit forms of White Saviorism in international development.
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Politics of Turbulent Waters
For the past 10 years, the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) has been on the front line of the struggle for environmental justice, climate justice and food sovereignty in Africa and the globe. It has been a decade of non-stop probing of the exploitation of resources, peoples and nations, which has given rise to numerous environmental and climate injustices. HOMEF has had a decade of witnessing and standing against the injustice, the powers and structures (industries and policies) suffocating the rights of the people to a healthy environment and standing with the neglected to take charge of their once self-managed food and agricultural systems. The struggle has necessitated the reawakening of communities’ consciousness to the injustices that besiege them and to their ‘people power’ – power to be utilized in seeking the desired change.mPolitics of Turbulent Waters is a compendium of selected articles in the 36 issues of the Eco-instigator published from 2013 to 2022. The Eco-instigator is yet another tool used by HOMEF to pull together thoughts and reports of activities that advance environmental justice and food sovereignty. Issue by issue, these thoughts and reports flow from within HOMEF and other environmental/climate justice and food sovereignty advocates from across Africa and the globe.They form this rich assemblage (Politics of turbulent waters) to commemorate HOMEF’s 10th anniversary. The title of the book is one of Nnimmo Bassey’s (the director of HOMEF) numerous articles that have graced some pages of the different issues of the Eco-instigator. The article cum title encapsulates the messages that the book intends to convey to you, the reader. It crystallizes the dire condition of Africa and its waters and the power imbalance together with the spatial disposition that plunged the continent into the calamitous environmental situation it faces. It speaks of the politics of economic development and market fundamentalism that avows to maintain the status quo in terms of destructive exploitation of Africa’s marine and other natural resources.
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Revolutionary hope vs. free-market fantasies
John S. Saul, born and first educated in Toronto, Canada, moved to Tanzania almost sixty years ago and, since then, has also taught in Mozambique and South Africa as well as back in Canada at York University. In Tanzania, he discovered the centrality of the war for freedom from white rule and global capitalist dictate then taking shape further south – in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. Both his scholarly interest and his activist bent drew him to support and to seek to better understand the struggles in these nations-in-the-making, a political choice that now culminates in a final trilogy of books under the general title, The Rethinking Southern African Liberation Trilogy. The first volume of this trilogy, On Building a Social Movement: The North American Campaign for Southern African Liberation Revisited, was published by Africa World Press / Fernwood Books (2017). The present book is the second in that trilogy, with a third volume entitled Class, Race and the Thirty Years War for Southern African Liberation – A History set to conclude his work to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
Here, Saul’s extended first chapter lays out the broad premises of the thinking that has guided his endeavours, ideas that takes the core reality of economic production and exploitation centrally but that are alive to the tangible impact on outcomes of a wide range of other social realities, including class, race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, the environment, politics and the state. A second section covers the essential unity of theory and political practice that underpins Saul’s findings. And a third and final section paints illuminating pictures of some core aspects of the diverse regional contexts — sites of both recolonization and continuing struggle, and all contexts whose trajectories will be further explored in his forthcoming third volume. -
Mau Mau From Within
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
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Lessons from Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger
Audre Lorde’s now classic, “The Uses of Anger,” was first delivered at UCONN, Storrs in 1981. One of two keynote lectures, it offered Lorde’s address of the National Women’s Studies Association conference topic of “women responding to racism.” In their introduction, Gordon, Orozco Mendoza, and Zane reflect on the inheritance, lessons, and responsibilities that UCONN Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies must grapple with if it is to deepen and fulfill its radical mission. Guided by the imperative to look backward to understand the present and forge a future, the book closes with a sankofic interview with M. Jaqui Alexander and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, conducted by Briona Simone Jones.
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A Mutiny of Morning
Nikesha Breeze has taken pages from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, taken his words, and forced them to leave his colonized mind. She has made the words her own in poetic form. She illuminates the invisible Black voices inside, a radical, surgical, and unapologetic Black appropriation, at the same time as a careful birthing and spiritual road map. The resulting poems are sizzling purifications, violent restorations of integrity, pain, wound, bewilderment, rage, and, sometimes, luminous generosity. This is a work of Reclamation. The author, Nikesha Breeze, has slowly, page by page, reclaimed the text of the book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. This racist turn-of-the-19th-century book was pivotal in the continued dehumanization of Black people and in particular of African people, as it painted an image of bestiality on the Congo people and the continent. It is laced with racist imagery and language. The author has reappropriated the book, page by page, making “BlackOut” poetry for each page, isolating methodically the words to create new poems of power and black voice within the text —stealing the language and reappropriating the power.
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Post Capitalist Philanthropy
“Post capitalist philanthropy is a paradox in terms. A paradox is the appropriate starting place for the complex, entangled, messy context we find ourselves in as a species.” This is how long-time activists, political strategists, and accidental philanthropy advisors Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy start their treatise on Post Capitalist Philanthropy. This book is a result of decades of practice and research, including a hundred plus interviews with leading activists, philanthropists, philosophers, social scientists, cosmologists and wisdom keepers.
The authors take us on a journey from the history of wealth accumulation to the current logic of late-stage capitalism to the lived possibilities of other ways of knowing, sensing and being that can usher in life-centric models. This “ontological shift”, as they call it, is at the heart of the text – creating new-ancient-emerging realities is not simply about how we redistribute wealth or “fight power”, but rather, how we perceive and embody our actions in relationship to a dynamic, animistic world and cosmos.
This book is made available by Daraja Press on behalf of the Transition Resource Circle.
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The Shadow
Ahmed Miqdad and John Portelli explore the intricate themes of death, memory, and hope by connecting personal and political losses in Gaza, Palestine, and Malta. In this collection, they confront death as a persistent element—whether through the immediate threat of genocidal violence in Gaza or the slow decline from cancer—and acknowledge each other’s pain and vulnerability. This mutual recognition shifts their dialogue from a personal battle with mortality to a collective existential experience, linking individual mortality with shared suffering and understanding. The book is illustrated with art created by Malak Mattar.
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Gaza Held in Time
Gaza Held in Time: A Tapestry of Two Lives offers a personal and deeply emotional account of life in Gaza, chronicling the experiences of two young individuals before and during the recent conflict. Through alternating narratives, Tareq, who eventually left Gaza, and Yara, who remained, explore themes of survival, displacement, memory, and the enduring human spirit. The authors aim to humanise Gaza beyond news headlines, illustrating the rich cultural fabric of the region and the profound impact of war on daily life, while also challenging readers to remember and engage with their story.
Written by four hands, from inside and outside Gaza as if a rope also physically kept the two narrators tied together. There is no page that does not simultaneously strike the reader’s reason and heart, both in the transmission of pain and injustice and in the memory of a beauty that those wpho have known Gaza can confirm, despite the siege and periodic Israeli attacks. No surrender to pity, rather a severe refusal of any compassion and hypocrisy that undermines the dignity of one’s people. If calling a work that exudes pain a jewel does not offend the authors, I allow myself to say that this little book is a true jewel. – Patrizia Cecconi, author of Vagando di erba in erba, racconto di una vacanza in Palestina Tareq
AlSourani and Yara Nasser, both still teenagers, provide an extraordinary evocation of the endless fear, loss, humiliation and horror of life in Gaza over the last twenty months. Still in Gaza, Yara’s poetry captures the numbness of those managing to survive, like “dead people walking.” Crossing into Egypt, Tareq expresses the guilt and anguish of escape, while loved others remain. In writing that is as profound as it is stunning, both teenagers write of the Gaza they loved, pre-invasion, desperately trying to hold on to a faint hope for the future, while knowing they must find a way of remembering, however painful, when memory is resistance. Their words should haunt us forever. – Lynne Segal, writer, academic and activist, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Devastating… these could be our children. A brave and necessary book. – Yahia Lababidi, Palestinian poet and author of Palestine Wail
A greatly moving essay that expresses the belief that not only Palestinians can survive without surrendering and that buildings may fall, but voices do not. – Paul Aarts, lecturer in international relations and Middle East politics at the University of Amsterdam
This book is a moving, intimate account of what it means to try and survive erasure. To remain true to self, to friendship, to love, in the face of unimaginable cruelty. It is by writing this tender, deeply human testimony that Tareq and Yara defy this crime of erasure committed against them, indict it even. A hugely courageous act. – Rinke Verkerk, Dutch journalist and writer, De Correspondent
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Welfare for a Humane Future
Welfare for a Humane Future by David Matthews and Howard Waitzkin critiques the capitalist welfare state, emphasizing its role in sustaining racial capitalism’s exploitative structures. The authors argue that welfare under capitalism reinforces racial and class divisions, as seen in historical policies like the New Deal, which excluded Black workers. They envision a post-capitalist welfare system rooted in communal values—love, solidarity, and participatory democracy—drawing inspiration from global examples like Rojava’s democratic confederalism, Venezuela’s communes, and Cooperation Jackson’s solidarity economy. Key components include cooperative housing, community-controlled healthcare, and universal basic income, all managed through local assemblies. The book highlights mutual aid and grassroots organizing as pathways to transformative change, urging readers to build alternative institutions within capitalist societies. By prioritizing collective well-being over profit, the authors advocate for a welfare system that empowers communities and fosters equity.
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Zone of Nonbeing
Although much has been written about racism in Western Europe, there is relatively little about racism in Eastern Europe, and certainly a dearth of stories coming directly from those black people born and brought up there. This book, written by a Pole of African descent, is focused on racial struggle in Poland within a global context.
The first part of it regards the history of racial relationships between Blacks in general and white Poles. It presents Blacks who were Polish citizens or lived in Poland from the 18th century to the Fall of Nations (1989), such as Katarzyna Rohoczewska and August Agbola O’Browne, and tells the stories of two great Polish anti-racists, General Kościuszko and poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid. This part also explores the colonial ambitions of Poland and Poles from the end of the 18th century (Beniowski’s attempt to colonize Madagascar) to colonial expeditions in the late 1930s. Lastly, it discusses the official anti-racism of the People’s Republic of Poland with the actions of its government and the views of the white citizens. The second part deals with the thoughts and experiences of the author as a student as well as a teacher, drawing a picture of racism in the Polish education system. Then, it shows the anti-migrant propaganda of politicians in Poland and the European Union and their hypocrisy regarding the refugee crisis in the EU.
The main chapter of the 2nd part, and the entire book, tells the story of Maxwell Itoya’s murder in May 2010 within a larger context of police brutality towards Blacks all around the world. Finally, the last part presents racist elements of Polish culture (literature and mass culture) with an explicit interest in In Dessert and Wilderness by Henryk Sienkiewicz. The next chapter focuses on James Baldwin being the author’s literary hero. It points out why Baldwin’s writings, especially essays, have been so crucial for a young Black Polish writer and what we still can learn from his books.
Two last chapters deal with the yet non-existent movement of Black Poles and attempt to answer the question, What is to be done?
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A Manifesto on Palestine
Ibraheem Rasras’s “A Manifesto on Palestine: Rethinking Liberation from Below” argues that genuine Palestinian freedom necessitates a bottom-up, ethical, and collective resistance, departing from the hierarchical and technocratic methods adopted by the Palestinian Authority (PA). The manifesto identifies the core problem as not only material dispossession but also an epistemological crisis, where liberation structures are undermined by forces they seek to fight. It critiques how the Oslo Accords transformed resistance into managerial governance and how dominant Palestinian factions have instrumentalized resistance. The author proposes “ethics of resistance” and “anarchic programs” as a new strategy, emphasizing self-organization, cultural revolution, and drawing from everyday life experiences. By integrating critical theory, psychoanalysis, and anarchist anthropology, the manifesto aims to foster a decolonial and unified path to liberation, challenging both external colonial rule and internal authoritarianism.