Book Reviews
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ReviewNo Shortcuts Around the Details
What the Algonquins of Barriere Lake’s Struggle Teaches Us About Canadian Colonialism
There are probably no tougher people within Canadian borders than the Mitchikanabikok Inik, the People of the Stone Weir, or, as they are usually called in English, the Algonquins of Barriere Lake. Mostly isolated within what Québec has called the La Vérendrye Wildlife Reserve, the band has held on to its culture and its forms of governance, and preserved knowledge of the land that has taken thousands of years to gather and understand. Shiri Pasternak’s new book, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State, is a history of the Mitchikanabikok Inik and their resilience and creativity in the face of unrelenting colonial pressure and encroachment, woven through with threads of personal history. This thread of discovery is transmitted through a deep and respectful account of the specific knowledge that the people of Barriere Lake have shared with Pasternak about their world and their history.
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ReviewWhy Don’t We All Rise Up?
Thinking About Resistance with Nangwaya and Truscello
Why aren’t people outraged?” is not a question I often ask myself—it seems that outrage is everywhere, overheard in conversations and witnessed in public life. On the other hand, “Where is the collective expression of this outrage? Where is the collective struggle?” are questions that perpetually niggle at my mind. Living on the edges of the continent, in an isolated rocky province with a near unbroken legacy of poverty, a horrifying colonial history and present, and currently in the midst of yet another economic crisis, I often ask where the collective struggle is to fight the existing state of affairs? In times such as these, as dire as they often seem, concerted collective action is notable here for its absence. Why is there no unrest? Why are “the poor” (the vast majority of the province’s population) not “rising up?” And, even if they are, as individuals, what can—and must—organizers do to translate general discontent and anger into sustained collective action? As an often lonely organizer on these shores, I picked up Ajamu Nangwaya and Michael Truscello’s edited collection, Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up? I wanted to see if and how I could apply its myriad lessons to my own struggle in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL)—an isolated province with a small population bearing little politically in common with economic centres like Toronto or Vancouver.
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ReviewThe Challenge of Anti-Racist Feminism
While there are anti-racist mobilizations organized by No One Is Illegal and other migrant justice organizations, the left’s capacity to respond to racism is limited. How, then, can we begin to lay the foundation for a renewed radical feminist and anti-racist movement?
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Review
Canada’s Imperialist Project
Todd Gordon. Imperialist Canada. Aribeiter Ring Publishing, 2010. Canada’s increasingly muscular role in global affairs has generated much discussion in recent years. The reason is not difficult to discern: never before in Canadian history has the country waged a counterinsurgency war abroad for a…
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Review
Decolonizing the Airwaves
Andrea Langlois, Ron Sakolsky & Marian van der Zon (eds.), Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada, New Star Books, 2010. When I told people I was reviewing Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada they asked: “There’s pirate radio in Canada?” Well, there is. In fact, recently newsp…
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Review
Ordinary Revolutionaries
John Holloway. Crack Capitalism. Pluto Press, 2010. In his new work of political theory, Crack Capitalism, John Holloway offers a passionate philosophical defence of the “ordinary people” who he describes as “rebels” and “revolutionaries” (5). Holloway’s heroes are not political leader…
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Review
Words Matter
Kelly Fritsch, Clare O’Connor, and AK Thompson, eds., Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (Oakland: AK Press, 2016). What then is time?” Augustine wondered in his Confessions. “If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know…
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ReviewTransforming the World, Transforming Ourselves
On October 5, 2015, Grace Lee Boggs passed away at the age of 100. A revolutionary, author, social activist, feminist, and philosopher, G.L. Boggs was a coordinating figure who played a key role in many political movements in the US since the 1940s. For this issue of Upping the Anti we wanted to com…
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Review
Anti Fascism: 100 Years in the Streets
A review of M. Testa, Militant Anti-Fascism. AK Press, 2015; and Dave Hann, Physical Resistance. Zero Books, 2013. “Make America Great Again.” It was as if no one saw it coming until the rhetoric of palingenetic ultranationalism, what Roger Griffin labeled the core “nationalist myth” that dr…
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Review
Confronting Injustice
From Individual Activists to Collective Organizers
Precisely at a time when we need it most, bold and imaginative activism has made itself difficult to find. It is not the case that activism in general is short in supply. One finds, in fact, that activist ideals and vocabulary have securely made their way into everyday life. But this has happened in…
