17.06.24: New Citations: Anarchism, Indigenous Resistance, Protest Music, Neo-Nazis, Street Art, Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs, Hip Hop, Punk, Utopian Societies

Anarchism

1988(1989): Peter Kropotkin: Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Black Rose Books

Indigenous Resistance

1991: Geoffrey York & Loreen Pindera: People of the Pines: The Warriors and the Legacy of Oka, Little Brown & Co.

1969: Mike Kanentakeron Mitchell & Mort Ransen: You Are On Indian Land, National Film Board of Canada

• Most of the documentary focuses on a single act of protest, Mohawks blockading the Canada/US border near Cornwall ON.
• I remember in early 2013 activists from Idle No More! Marched on the Sarnia/Port Huron border minutes after I crossed into the US
• Have there been any blockade actions at any US/Mexico crossings?
• Viewable on National Film Board website and Youtube

1993: Alanis Obomsawin: Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, National Film Board of Canada

• begins with discussions of the Oka crisis, the expansion of a golf course and allotment of land for a luxury housing development
• Obomsawin discusses the history of this golf course, once common land, the French Canadians began playing golf there to the detriment of Native farmers who used the commons for their cattle, then in the 1940s the town expropriated the land and made it a golf course officially.
• there is thus a long term period of a disrespect shown to Native uses of the land that continued into the 1990s (and beyond)
• the mayors of the region all supported the mayor of Oka, who refused to reconsider his project
• the Quebecoise of the region also chanted "savages" in response to their unhappiness about this event
• some interview subjects state that much of the town didn't like the development plans either and the mayor rejected the advice of everyone, including the premiere, to not go forward.
• Viewable on National Film Board website and Youtube

1991: Rick Hornung: One Nation Under the Gun: Inside the Mohawk Civil War, Stoddart

Protest Music

2005: Ronald D Lankford, Jr: Folk Music USA: The Changing Voice of Protest, Schirmer Trade Books

2016: Ronald D Cohen: Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-Wing Politics in 1930s America, University of North Carolina Press

• Read on hoopla

Neo-Nazi

2016: Mick Jackson: Denial, BBC Films

• Film depicts the late-90s trial, in an english courtroom of Holocaust denier David Irving’s unsuccessful libel case against historian Deborah Lipstadt.
• Watched on netflix

Street Art

2017: Colin Day: Saving Banksy

• A blend of Banksy in New York and How to Sell a Banksy - details Banksy’s visit to San Fransisco and the sitework he produced there as well as the attempt of a collector to extract a piece from its location, preserve it, and donate it, with a side trip into the art market
• Interview subjects include some notable street artists
• Many of the usual attitudes regarding Banksy vs other street art are expressed, and the repetition of the market values of his work
• Watched on netflix

1988: Dick Fontaine: Bombin’, CIT

• Documentary about graffiti in England, although much of it is about a Bronx artist, BRIM, visiting and touring England to talk about, and demonstrate, graffiti techniques
• Goldie and 3D from Massive Attack appear. 3D is shown rapping at a party and Goldie is later shown visiting Afrika Bambaataa in New York City where they discuss social issues
• On youtube

Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs

2017.06.17: Outlaws MC United States: http://www.outlawsmc.com/

Hip Hop

1984.06.29: Graffiti Rock: Pilot, SkyWise Productions

• Early attempt at a Hip Hop themed TV series based in format on American Bandstand
• Sampled by Beastie Boys
• Features breakdancers, Run DMC appears to do Sucker MCs. Vincent Gallo appears as ‘Prince Vince’, introduces Run DMC
• Battle between Treacherous 3 and Run DMC - they just do their rhymes from their songs
• Watched on youtube

17.06.19: Beyond Belief: Religion and Hip Hop, BBC

Punk

2016: Randy Rampage: I Survived D.O.A., BookBaby

• Autobiography of the original bassist for DOA.
• Was kicked out of DOA for much of the band’s existence. Did heroin, worked on the docks, and played in a metal band I never heard of called Annihilator which apparently was the best-selling Canadian metalband ever.
• Read on hoopla

Utopian Societies

1870: AJ Macdonald Writings on Utopian Communities, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven CT

Woody Guthrie - Bound for Glory

Bound for Glory
Woody Guthrie
EP Dutton & Co, Inc
1943
430 pp

Woodie Guthrie's autobiography detailing his life from 1912 to 1942. The book is written in his Oklahoma dialect. It describes the life of someone born into a middle-class lifestyle that collapsed into dirt poor poverty as his father failed in business. About half the book describes his childhood when later focuses on his depression-era vagabond life and his emerging songwriting/singing career and political attitudes.

Includes many illustrations by Guthrie himself.

Black Panther Party - The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution

The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution
Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams (eds)
Nation Books
2016
272 pp

The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution features photos of members of the Black Panther Party's rank and file. The subjects are profiled with a biography describing their post-Panthers work, and a brief interview where the subject describes the circumstances of their joining the party and the work they did as Panthers. Many of the former Panthers speak about the party's community work: their food programs and medical services, like the Winston-Salem NC Black Panther ambulance service. Not surprisingly, after the party's collapse, many of the Panthers went into community development, social work, and education.

The book features a couple of higher profile Panthers; Emory Douglas, the primary illustrator of the Black Panther newspaper, and some of the participants in the better known prison and court cases such as the Angola 3 and the Panther 21.

Black Lives Matter - "They Can't Kill Us All": Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

"They Can't Kill Us All": Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement
Wesley Lowery
Little, Brown and Company
2016
248 pp

I moved from Canada to live in a small American town situated within an hour and a half drive of a major northern city. For two years I lived there and almost immediately upon my arrival I was exposed to racism. As a white Canadian I was treated well, even though my neighbors detected the accent of an outsider when I spoke, even though I was there to occupy a professional position that could have been staffed by a US citizen. My exposure to American racism under these circumstances only came in the form of invitations to participate in racial prejudice as townsfolk warned me about the Mexican families on my street or the black gangs that operated in town. Very quickly I realized that the general presumption was that all Mexicans were in the US illegally and all young black men were gang members. Small towns in the area that were only 80-90 percent white according to the most recent census data were spoken of as being overrun, or dominated by racial minorities.

While I witnessed racial prejudice on a daily basis, expressions of explicit racial hatred were rare. When I left the US, I left with an understanding that racial prejudice is very common in American society and systemic racism is a very real component of its structure, but also very few White Americans would consider themselves racist. My assumption is that the friendly Americans I met, with their friendly warnings to be careful with all the gangs (in a town with pretty close to 0 violent crimes but with about %10 black population) wouldn't consider their view of black men as gang members to be racist, its merely cautious realism, because to them real racism is using the 'n' word. Conversely, to many Americans real racism is raising race as an issue in a world where segregation and slavery and the most explicitly racist American systems are ancient history.

Wesley Lowery, a Washington Post correspondent, tells the story of covering the emerging Black Lives Matter movement, right from the day after Mike Brown's murder in Ferguson MO, where Lowery made a name for himself by being the first journalist arrested by Ferguson PD. I remember at the time of the Brown murder, images of Brown scowling at the camera (although some were captioned as Mike Brown but were clearly someone else) were circulating through social media as a way of legitimizing his killing. Lowery's story goes from Feruson to Baltimore post Freddie Gray, and other sites of police killing to note the rise of a new 'Racial Justice Movement'. This is the first book I've read that's clearly about Black Lives Matter, as other BLM media indirectly addresses the movement, such as Lezlie McFadden's (Michael Brown's mother) 2016 memoir and the excellent Netflix Luke Cage series.

The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy, and the Islamist Challenge from Tunis to Damascus

The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy, and the Islamist Challenge from Tunis to Damascus
Adeed Dawisha
WW Norton and Co
2013
288 pp

The Second Arab Awakening is an overview of the Arab Spring, providing a state-by-state analysis of the popular pro-democracy uprisings that took place in numerous middle-east and North African nations beginning in early 2011.

The first 'awakening' referred to by this book's title were the mid-twentieth century anti-colonial revolts in a number of these countries, revolts that led to the emergence of the dictatorships the 2011 uprisings rose against. Dawisha discussed that history in relation to the recent uprisings.

Many of the Arab Spring books that have been published in English were rushed to publication before January 2012, containing hopeful visions of the near future. Dawisha's book was published in 2013 when the Arab Spring had resulted in a variety of results across the Arab world. By then the most successful-seeming uprisings of 2011 looked, in 2013, as a youth-facilitated transfer of power from secular military dictatorships to Islam-centric political parties. The author discusses countries like Jordan, that introduced democratic reforms without popular uprisings, but by 2013 the less successful Springs were brutally repressed while Syria entered a nation-destroying civil war.