culture

These Black Bookstores Are Committed To The Fight For Freedom

April 9, 2025 Katie Mitchell, In These Times. Create! Black America, Black Liberation, Bookstores, culture

Blooming from the tumult of the Civil Rights era, Black bookstores emerged during the Black Arts Movement as cultural hubs where some of the first seeds of slam poetry, spoken word and hip-hop were planted. In 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover hoped to curb “the establishment of Black extremist bookstores which represent propaganda outlets for revolutionary and hate publications,” ordering his agents to pursue a targeted, nationwide surveillance. Today, a new generation of Black bookstores is blossoming amid the upheaval of the Movement for Black Lives.

Gig Organizing 101

October 6, 2024 David Rovics, This Week with David Rovics. Organize! Aaron Swartz, Art, Community, culture, Music, Organizing

The great Seattle-based songwriter, Jim Page, was coming to the east coast back in the mid-1990's. I was living in Boston then, and offered to organize a gig. I was already well into my twenties, but I had never done such a thing before. Jim was and is fairly well-known in Ireland, with one of Ireland's most revered musicians, Christy Moore, having recorded a number of his songs, one brilliant example of which became a real anthem for anti-nuclear sentiment in Ireland, "Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Russian Roulette." Boston had (and has) a large population of people who were born and raised in Ireland, and a much larger population of people of Irish descent.

The Revolutionary Fire In The People Starts With A Song

September 13, 2024 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Arts, culture, History, Israel, Khalida Jarrar, Mallu Swarajyam, Palestine, Prison, Revolution

Mallu Swarajyam (1931–2022) was born with an appropriate name. From deep within the mass movement against British colonialism that was initiated by India’s peasants and workers, and then shaped by M. K. Gandhi into the movement for swaraj (self-rule), Bhimireddy Chokkamma drew her baby daughter into the freedom movement with a powerful name that signalled the fight for independence. Born into a house of reading, and able to get books through the radical people’s organisation Andhra Mahasabha, Mallu Swarajyam obtained a Telugu translation of Maxim Gorky’s Mother (1907).

We Need A Culture-In-All-Policies Approach To Democracy

September 1, 2024 Jeremy Liu and John K. C. Liu, Next City. Strategize! Art, Communities, culture, Democracy

Culture, unlike democracy, is self-propelled and self-propagating: it is persistent, in ways that democracy strives to be; it is effusive in ways that democracy should be; it is practical, as democracy must always be; and it is critical, in ways democracy is too often not. In these ways, culture’s strength and importance to civic life is that it runs through everything; it is the warp to democracy’s weft. The growing recognition of Indigenous wisdom about place and its management are important to acknowledge in any discussion of place-based work. The “new” ideas of regenerative and permaculture agriculture can draw a lineage to Indigenous wisdom, for example.

The Battle For Car-Free Streets And Community Celebration

July 23, 2024 Asia Mieleszko, Resilience. Resist! Carfree, Community, culture, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Urban Design

I first found myself in West Philadelphia in 2019 during Porchfest, an annual music festival that exists because approximately two square miles of Philadelphians collectively decide it should. And so it does, whether the city grants the annually requested street closures or not. In 2019, almost every other street was closed to motorized traffic, lined with rehomed cones and handmade signs stretching from one end of the intersection to the other to communicate the closure. Free from cars, the streets welcomed sprinklers, grills and bouncy castles. Swarms of kids muraled the asphalt with chalk while musicians crooned from the hallmark wooden porches of West Philly’s twin Victorian homes.

The Missing Inner Dimension Of System Change

June 27, 2024 Jamie Bristow and Rosie Bell, DeSmog. Create! Class Struggle, culture, Environment, History, Report

In 1972, the Club of Rome published the world’s first advanced computer modelling of projected climate impacts. The Limits to Growth would become an iconic critique of unbridled economic growth on a finite planet, and a foundation for the global sustainability movement. Yet 50 years later, its sequel — Earth for All — reckons with a host of lessons not learned. Released by the Club of Rome in 2022, the report is a sobering account of the radical socio—economic transformation now required to prevent ecological and societal collapse.

Digital Resources For A Free Palestine: A Roundup

March 17, 2024 Iman Husain, In These Times. Educate! culture, Education, Genocide, Israel, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Resources

In late November 2023, it was discovered that Israeli bombs reduced Gaza City’s municipal public library to rubble. The 25-year-old building was almost unrecognizable in the aftermath of the airstrike: Thousands of books, historical documents and archival material — once housed safely inside the library’s two floors and basement — were strewn across debris among chunks of ceilings and walls. The deliberate destruction of Palestinian cultural institutions and objects is just one part of Israel’s genocidal campaign, which has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians and wiped out hundreds of families since October 7 alone.

There Will Be Reading And Singing And Dancing Even In The Darkest Times

March 8, 2024 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! culture, Palestine, Red Books Day, Socialism

It is nearly impossible to think of joy while Israel continues its genocidal violence against Palestinians and while the terrible war escalates in the eastern flank of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured and millions displaced in Gaza and near Goma (DRC). In both these places, the immediate demand must be to end the violence, but rising alongside it is the need to end the root of this violence (such as ending the occupation of Palestine). When there are conflicts of this kind, we get trapped in the present, unable to think about the future.

This Valentine’s Day, Look To Marxists To Reimagine Love, Romance And Sex

February 14, 2024 Sarah Jaffe, In These Times. Educate! Capitalism, culture, Marxism, Transgender Rights, Valentines Day

Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci has been quoted quite a lot in recent years amid our various political catastrophes from Trump to Covid-19 to climate collapse and the political center’s seeming inability to resist any of the above. The most famous line from his Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935 while a political prisoner of the Mussolini regime, is probably: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This is sometimes more loosely translated as “The old world is dying and the new cannot be born; now is the time of monsters.”

The Only Right That Palestinians Have Not Been Denied Is The Right To Dream

February 2, 2024 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Arts, culture, International Court of Justice (ICJ), Israel, Mural, Palestine

On 26 January, the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The ICJ called upon Israel to ‘take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts’ that violate the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Although the ICJ did not call explicitly for a ceasefire (as it did in 2022 when it ordered Russia to ‘suspend [its] military operation’ in Ukraine), even a casual reading of this order shows that to comply with the court’s ruling, Israel must end its assault on Gaza.

Cultural And Communicational Decolonization

December 11, 2023 Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez, Orinoco Tribune. Strategize! culture, Decolonization, Imperialism, Media, Neocolonialism

Without the organization of culture and communication within our community, our best decolonizing efforts occur as islands of “good intentions,” even if they are educated, ingenious, and passionate. There is no correct practical application without correct organization. That is a major weakness and an urgent current task. What should such a community organized against symbolic manipulation look like? Perhaps we do not know it completely, but it is inexcusable to know how we do not want it to be, [without considering what it should be.] That is why we need a semiotics for de-colonization.

Car Culture: Everything You Need To Know

October 1, 2023 Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch. Create! Cars, climate crisis, culture, Environment, pollution, Transportation

When you Google, “America’s love affair with…” the first word the algorithm fills in is “the automobile.” The third is “cars.” (The second is, surprise, surprise, guns.) In the U.S. — and increasingly in other parts of the world too — cars and driving have a significant impact on our daily lives. They determine the use of our streets, shape the design of our cities and suburbs, define coming of age for many young people, and affect the quality of the air we breathe. From anthropomorphized vehicles like Herbie: The Love Bug and the cars of Cars, to road trip epics like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Thelma & Louise to bangers like “Fast Car” and “Route 66,” automotive travel has had an outsized impact on our imaginations.

We Did Not Evolve To Be Selfish; We Can Choose How Our Cultures Evolve

August 24, 2023 April M. Short, ZNet. Educate! Community, culture, Evolution, History, livable future

Ours is a critical time in the cultural evolution of humanity that is likely to shape our long-term future, or lack thereof. As a species, we have been on a self-destructive trajectory that has led us to our current polycrisis of unlivable economic conditions, worsening climate disasters, and the potential of an unspeakably devastating war, as the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 puts it. The changes we all need to make, if we want subsequent generations to enjoy life, will most likely require big shifts toward improving connections with each other and the planet, and away from extraction and individualism.

Without Culture, Freedom Is Impossible

September 23, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Art, culture, Socialism

In 2002, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro Ruz visited the country’s National Ballet School to inaugurate the 18th Havana International Ballet Festival. Founded in 1948 by the prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso (1920–2019), the school struggled financially until the Cuban Revolution decided that ballet – like other art forms – must be available to everyone and so must be socially financed. At the school in 2002, Castro remembered that the first festival, held in 1960, ‘asserted Cuba’s cultural vocation, identity, and nationality, even under the most adverse circumstances, when major dangers and threats loomed over the country’. Ballet, like so many cultural forms, had been stolen from popular participation and enjoyment. The Cuban Revolution wanted to return this artistic practice to the people as part of its determination to advance human dignity. To build a revolution in a country assaulted by colonial barbarism, the new revolutionary process had to both establish the country’s sovereignty and build the dignity of each of its people. This dual task is the work of national liberation. ‘Without culture’, Castro said, ‘freedom is not possible’.

Teaching The Past To Improve The Future

April 21, 2022 Coshandra Dillard, Learning For Justice. Resist! culture, Education, History, Teachers

Last fall in Southlake, Texas, a Carroll Independent School District (ISD) school administrator provided baffling guidance to a group of teachers following the passage of a state law banning the teaching of critical race theory (CRT). Heard in a secret recording, she tells the teachers to present multiple viewpoints on contentious subjects and specifically names the Holocaust. “Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing…that has other perspectives,” the administrator says. There are audible gasps. One teacher asks, “How do you oppose the Holocaust?” An author of the Texas bill subsequently argued that school administrators misrepresented what is in the new law.

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