This article theorises the relationship between 1970s US Third World queer and feminist movements and Latin American anti-imperialist revolutions of the late twentieth century. I focus upon the historically occluded relationships between Third World feminists and queers in Chile and the United States throughout the transition to neoliberalism. My archive includes June Jordan’s little-known writings on Chile, the writings of Audre Lorde, and, primarily, a 1973 Third World feminist poetry reading staged in San Francisco shortly after the Pinochet coup. By (...) assembling this unconventional archive, I intervene into the domestication of US anti-racist queer, black and feminist of colour politics. I argue for the profoundly internationalist foundation of these formations. I work to re-animate a moment when the affective economies of anti-colonial ‘global revolution’ opened up space for the imagination of joint struggle – allowing a visceral sense of struggle’s urgency and vitality in ways that have since been partially eclipsed. (shrink)

The new edition of Manning Marable’sBeyond Black and Whiteseeks to explain the course of black politics in the United States over the last thirty years. Marable argues that this history shows the failure of liberal and nationalist politics to address the problems facing black Americans. Though Marable attempts to chart a course beyond these ideologies, his alternative of ‘transformative politics’, shorn of the revolutionary Marxism that defined his earlier writings, is no more capable of confronting racial inequality than the strategies (...) it seeks to replace. (shrink)

The new edition of Manning Marable’sBeyond Black and Whiteseeks to explain the course of black politics in the United States over the last thirty years. Marable argues that this history shows the failure of liberal and nationalist politics to address the problems facing black Americans. Though Marable attempts to chart a course beyond these ideologies, his alternative of ‘transformative politics’, shorn of the revolutionary Marxism that defined his earlier writings, is no more capable of confronting racial inequality than the strategies (...) it seeks to replace. (shrink)

Upon its publication in 1976, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis? Schooling in Capitalist America was the most sophisticated and nuanced Marxian social and political analysis of schooling in the United States. Thirty-five years after its publication, Schooling continues to have a strong impact on thinking about education. Despite its unquestionable influence, it has received strikingly little historical attention. This historical article revisits the scholarship of Bowles and Gintis and the milieu in which Schooling was conceived. Specifically, it contextualizes the production (...) and reception of Schooling to better understand the emergence of Marxist thought in the field of education in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. It also seeks to understand how the emergence of Marxist thought in the field was connected to the rise of an Academic Left?an intellectual shift in the academy toward Marxist social and political theory as a framework to theorize democratic socialist movement-building against capitalism and concomitant state sponsored oppression in the 1960s and 1970s. This history suggests that as we engage in historical and contemporary work on radical ideas in the field of education, we need to push ourselves continually to think about the intersection of education with other fields and disciplines. The article also pushes back against a widespread depiction of Schooling as crudely mechanistic. (shrink)

Although it is commonly assumed that Paulo Freire was widely influential in the field of education in the United States immediately upon publication of his classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in 1970, the historical evidence indicates otherwise. In fact, Freire's work only began to gain wide reception in the field in the mid- and late 1980s. In the process of charting a new history of the reception of Freire's work in the field, this historical article illuminates contemporary issues with (...) the use of Freire's ideas in educational conversations about social structure and agency. In particular, the article seeks to renew a close, contextual read of Freire's texts, especially Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and invigorate discussion about Freire's primary claim?that education must be the central feature of building movements for radical social change. Similarly, the article seeks to renew attention to the structural concerns that initiated the turn towards critical Marxist scholarship in the field?concerns about the relationship between school and society in the United States that the initial wave of critical scholars knew must be addressed before fully engaging ideas about the ways in which schools may participate in the push for social change. (shrink)

The essay addresses the rise of what we elect to call ‘the religious left’. Documenting the collapse between radicality and religiosity as identity politics embraces moral absolutism, the essay offers a critique of the culture wars and the ensuing flight from political confrontation. Attending in particular to the failures of the left, which we recognise as being a failure of the political imagination, so we turn a critical eye on claims of authenticity and the accelerated embrace of narratives of vulnerability (...) and victimisation in a post-liberal world. The result is an inward-looking political imaginary, which is as suffocating as it is debilitating. (shrink)

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw ends her landmark essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” with a normative claim about coalitions. She suggests that we should reconceptualize identity groups as “in fact coalitions,” or at least as “potential coalitions waiting to be formed.” In this essay, I explore this largely overlooked claim by combining philosophical analysis with archival research I conducted at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society Archive in San Francisco about Somos Hermanas, (...) the solidarity project of the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression, based in the San Francisco Women’s Building (1984–90). I extend my analysis into the present by drawing on the oral history and published works of Carmen Vázquez, a key organizer in both Somos Hermanas and the Women’s Building. I argue that conceptualizing identities as in fact coalitions—as complex, internally heterogeneous unities constituted by their internal differences and dissonances and by internal as well as external relations of power—enables us to organize effective political coalitions that cross existing identity categories and to pursue a liberatory politics of interconnection. (shrink)