Antifascist Book Club

It’s December; the world is grim and gray but as the year finishes out, a new year approaches. I’m not betting that 2017 is going to be better than 2016, and 2016 has been a dumpster fire, but I am setting my heels to cope with it in a more useful way, and this project is part of that. The purpose here is to learn to see clearly how fascism develops, especially in the early stages, and to learn realistic ways to resist it.

I picked these books for practical reasons — I haven’t read any of them before, and all but one or two are available at my local library — but I’m hopeful that this list contains a solid mix of teachings, theory, and story.

As the ‘book club’ title probably clued you in, I’m committing to reading at least these twelve books in 2017 — one a month — and I’d like to invite you to join me and discuss them online (maybe under the hashtag #AntifascistBookClub? It would be cool but I don’t know if there’s interest in that sort of thing).

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear/ we rise.

• January: Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night. 268pp, novel about World War II, spies, propaganda, and a trial for war crimes. Quote that convinced me to include it on this list: “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral, I just happen to know what it is… We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
• February: Vaclav Havel, Open Letters. 415pp, nonfiction. This collection of essays, letters and speeches includes the essay “Power of the Powerless,” which is a key writing in the development of Havel’s philosophy of resistance under totalitarianism. I’m particularly interested in Havel’s thoughts on the role of dissident art and artists in the development of a free society.
• March: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. 275pp, nonfiction. This book began as a series of articles in the New Yorker exploring the trial of Eichmann for the genocide he oversaw during the Holocaust. It’s an exploration of human nature and the way the mind accommodates the brutality of fascism.
• April: Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals. 196 pages of practical approaches to direct action. Alinsky is a product of the 60s, but this book has a zillion single star reviews, even at the Seattle library, condemning it as “dirty, violent, extreme left-wing.” That alone would convince me I ought to read it, but I’m most interested in the ways Alinsky gets people off their asses and into the streets.
• May: Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings. 700pp, fiction. This novel about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley won the Man Booker Prize in 2015. It explores political violence both in the United States and in the places the US has colonized and/or made into client states. The American Dream can’t be understood without a clear knowledge of the underside of it, the violence that creates our safety.
• June: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 183 pp, nonfiction. While this book is primarily about the process of teaching, I’m deeply interested in Freire’s analysis of power in the context of colonization. Different methods of thinking can free individual minds, and free people change the world.
• July: Octavia Butler, Wild Seed. 306pp, fiction. The earliest book in Butler’s Patternmaster series, “it explores the ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people.”
• August: The Fire This Time, ed. Jesmyn Ward. 226 pp, essays and poems from young radicals about the state of race in America. This book is in conversation with James Baldwin’s 1963 The Fire Next Time, a writing on the unfulfilled promise of equality in America: “You know and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.”
• September: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things. 321 pp, fiction. Roy’s essays and nonfiction (including Capitalism: a Ghost Story, Walking with the Comrades, and Field Notes on Democracy) have made her one of the leading voices in anti-colonial and anti-globalization activism, and I might try to read some of her essays as well. But here’s the money quote from this novel, and the reason I’m picking it instead of her nonfiction: “They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.”
• October: Edward Said, Orientalism. This book is academic and apparently dense as hell, but Said’s critique of imperialism, global power, and the Othering of the East is essential and I think I can handle it. 400pp
• November: Nnedi Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix. 232 pp, novel. In the tradition of Butler, Okorafor imagines a near future where disruption of the system is possible. Dystopian SF reminds us not to get so used to the present that we forget that change is possible. Plus, Okorafor is just great in every way — and I’ll definitely deserve a reward after reading Orientalism.
• December: Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and Act Up’s Fight Against AIDS. 536 pp, nonfiction. Gould’s interviews with HIV/AIDS activists, essays and analysis explore “political imaginaries and their conditions of possibility; the psychic effects of oppression; ambivalence and activism; social movements as sites of collective world-making; the erotics, humor, and intensities of activism; solidarity and its fracturing; and political despair.” Staying in the fight is a difficult knot to untangle; how do I avoid getting ground down to the point where I stop resisting? I’m hoping this book will provide insight and inspiration going forward into 2018.

Additional Books to Explore:

• Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
• Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom From Fear and Other Writings
• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns
• Alexandre Dumas, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
• Cherrie L. Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature
• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Love Cake (poems)
• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America
• David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
• Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
• Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
• Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
• Howard Zinn (et al), Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century
• Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
• Gloria Munoz Ramirez, The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement