Anna Tsing, UC Santa Cruz
The first decade of the twenty-first century brought us back the pamphlet, in all its rowdy iconoclasm. To learn something about political possibility, pamphlets are still the best. Better yet, pamphlets today have multiple authors engaging in not-fully-contained dialogue. Unlike the ubiquitous blog, they are not one person’s off-the-cuff opinion but rather a more carefully woven and collaborative tapestry of what politics might be. Here are two pamphlets I liked enough to teach last spring. But don’t expect to find them easily! Unlike blogs, it’s in the nature of the best pamphlets to be hard to find.
Beverly Brown and Lin Nelson, with Peter Kardas and Sarah Loose. 2010. The Making of a Popular Educator. Portland, Oregon: Jefferson Center for Education and Research
Beverly Brown was an inspired organizer who chose not just to go to the countryside but to advocate for forest workers, who hardly fit stereotypes of political progress. When she was dying of cancer, she had a series of conversations with Lin Nelson, which became this pamphlet. (To get it, you have to write the Jefferson Center.) Brown’s insights involved listening to ordinary people in all their strangeness, a rare political skill, which she learned as a child in meetings of the radical right’s John Birch Society. If the U.S. left has any desire to talk to the rural right radicals who have taken over so much public discourse, we will need Brown’s insights. Nor is this just about whiteness. Brown organized Southeast Asian refugees working U.S. forests to discover their rights through slow and patient chains of translation. Meanwhile, Brown offers some insightful reflections about being a lesbian and working with rural traditionalists at the same time. Working across difference is painstaking, but this is a kind of political activism we all need to understand.
Anonymous. 2011. Desert. Stac an Armin Press.
The author is not only anonymous but probably multiple and perhaps even serial in the sense that several versions of this pamphlet exist. (One seems to have shown up recently on line, but it is not quite the same as the one I read.) Meanwhile, the press does not exist, and the one Internet-based bookseller that carried it, AK Press, seems to have dropped it. Still, it’s worth it if you can find it. This anarchist pamphlet offers a reflection on the world we have, complete with out-of-control climate change, environmental destruction, patriarchy, imperialism, war, and the rest. We will not win, say the authors. Let’s look at the situation realistically, instead of pretending. And why have we all been pretending? This is a great place to begin thinking politically.
I taught these two pamphlets together with J.K. Gibson-Graham’s A Postcapitalist Politics (2006, University of Minnesota Press) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth (2009, Harvard University Press) to stake out terrain for discussion of what radical politics might mean today. Gibson-Graham and Hardt and Negri are among our best turn-of-the-millenium anti-capitalist critics, showing the possibilities of feminist and heroic opposition, respectively. But the pamphlets challenge them further, twisting their solutions into unforeseen alternatives. That’s what pamphlets do.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work on a pamphlet myself when the U.S. invaded Iraq—and I was furious without a clear outlet for my fury. The result was a collaboratively edited collection of short essays, poems, and art, not just about the war, but also, more generally, about political thinking and possibility. It was a strange process for an academic. Instead of years toiling over a book, we pulled the pamphlet together in a few months of enthusiasm and hard work, and we designed and made it with a local small press, itself dedicated to the political possibility of pamphlets. And while the story of the war is out of date, there are amazing essays in there that speak even more to these times. (See Paulla Ebron’s “Green Lady,” for example, for a personal reflection on how we learn to fear the other.) But it’s a pamphlet: ephemeral, opinionated, a glimpse of pasts and futures but not a finished map. In these times, there’s something to this.
Bregje van Eekelen, Jennifer Gonzalez, Bettina Stoetzer, and Anna Tsing, 2004. Shock and Awe: War on Words. Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific Press.
