PRA's Year in Books
A Gift Guide and/or Reading List to Close Out 2021
While the past few years have brought myriad distressing new developments from the Right and Far Right, it’s also been the occasion of a boom in serious and nuanced scholarship and reporting on these movements.
At the end of a year marked by unprecedented conspiracism; nationwide attacks on public schools, public health, and honest accounts of U.S. history; calls for burning books and banning reproductive freedom; and, not least, a violent and coordinated attack on the democratic process itself, we thought we’d highlight some of the journalists, activists and academics whose books are helping inform our resistance.
White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism
By Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective
The book, coauthored by an international group of scholars and activists known as the Zetkin Collective, marks the first systemic inquiry into the Far Right’s interventions in the climate crisis. Using case studies from 13 countries in Europe, as well as in the U.S. and Brazil, Malm and the collective explore the links between climate denial, racism, and far-right intersections with the environment and fossil fuels.
A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Radical Justice Liberate Everyone
By Daniel Martinez HoSang
Daniel Martinez HoSang looks at movements across the last three centuries—from fights against forced sterilizations, for domestic workers’ rights, and the environmental justice movement today—that illustrate the need to dismantle failed systems in order to rebuild an equitable society. HoSang talked to PRA this June about the limitations of liberal ideas of freedom, and what a wider conception of liberation means.
Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump
By Spencer Ackerman
Ackerman’s account takes us on a tour of three administrations, Republican and Democratic, and into the belly of the security state beast. The cumulative effect is a picture of the business-as-usual uses of surveillance, repression, and violence against Arab and Muslim Americans day after day and year after year, regardless of who sits in the White House. This, he notes, is in stark contrast with the ways in which White nationalist violence, consistently the most deadly, has been neglected or ignored by federal law enforcement.
A Field Guide to White Supremacy
Co-edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez
In her latest book, an anthology co-edited with Gutiérrez, Belew broadens the scope to look at the interlocking ways that White supremacy and oppression are manifested, including issues of patriarchy, attacks on Indigenous sovereignty, attacks on trans and non-binary people, and antisemitism. The anthology includes almost two dozen essays, some reprinted classics but mostly new, illuminating issues such as the complex way the anti-immigrant movement has fueled right-wing politics, or the long history of organized White nationalism that undergirds the modern Alt Right.
