Reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence.
“Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Marxism is not just a body of political and economic thought but also a practice of reading and writing, in which individual sentences give form to collective action and become social beings in their own right. Through a series of creative and interconnected readings of writings by, among others, Karl Marx, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, and Fredric Jameson, Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsió contextualize contemporary demands for social and racial justice by expanding our understanding of the relationship between literacy and class politics.
Reading between the lines, as it were, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive literary mode of activist writing that finds new resources for Marxist thought, crucial for confronting the inequalities of our current historical moment and for combating insurgent fascism and racism. Reading and writing, they argue, are never solitary tasks, but rather collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, antiracist work—Cadava and Nadal-Melsió demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.
Paperback
$29.95
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ISBN: 9780262047807320 pp. | 5.25 in x 8 in33 color illus.
Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, and Paper Graveyards. He has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject?,Cities Without Citizens, and The Itinerant Languages of Photography. He also has introduced and co-translated Nadar's memoirs, Quand j'étais photographe, which appeared with MIT Press in 2015 under the title When I Was a Photographer, and has curated installations and exhibitions at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Al-Ma'mal Center for Contemporary Art in East Jerusalem, and the Princeton University Art Museum.
Sara Nadal-Melsió
Sara Nadal-Melsió is a NYC-based Catalan writer, curator, and teacher. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, SOMA in Mexico City, and New York University. Her essays have appeared in various academic journals, edited volumes, and museum catalogs. She is the co-author of Alrededor de/ Around, and the editor of two special issues on cinema, The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism and The Militant Image: Temporal Disturbances of the Political Imagination. She has recently cocurated a show on Allora & Calzadilla for the Fundació Tápies in Barcelona and has written a book essay about it, as well as edited a companion volume on the Puerto Rican crisis. Her book Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Concept is forthcoming from Zone Books.