Anarchist Essays
Brought to you by Loughborough University’s Anarchism Research Group (ARG), Anarchist Essays presents leading academics, activists, and thinkers exploring themes in anarchist theory, history, and practice. For more on the ARG, please visit https://www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ and follow us on Twitter at @arglboro
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Episodes
Monday Dec 12, 2022
Monday Dec 12, 2022
In this essay, Jim Donaghey reads the introductory chapter to the newly published book Smash The System! Punk Anarchism as a Culture of Resistance, edited by Jim Donaghey, Will Boisseau and Caroline Kaltefleiter, and published by Active Distribution in December 2022. The volume includes 18 chapters, offering a snapshot of anarchist punk as a culture of resistance across the globe. In these diverse and internationalist contexts we witness struggles against racism and colonialism in South Africa, resistance to neo-liberalism and state oppression in Latin America, resistance to police brutality and capitalism in Western, Central and Southeast Europe, struggles for equality and against patriarchy in the US, and anarchist resistance against injustice and authoritarianism in Asia.
Smash The System! is the first volume in the Anarchism and Punk Book Project series.
A written version of this essay is available on the Anarchist Studies blog.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Dec 05, 2022
Monday Dec 05, 2022
In this essay, Maia Ramnath discusses the concept of the racial capitalocene as a framework for linking anticolonialism and climate justice. As part of a critical dialogue across time with earlier movements, in this case the Progressive Writers Association in South Asia, this framework offers a global context in which to place specific liberation struggles that's appropriate to the present day, as anti-fascism and Afro-Asian solidarity did for the PWA at key periods in the 20th century.
Maia Ramnath is an independent scholar based in New York City. Occupations include writing, research, teaching, tour guiding, organizing, performing and choreographing (dance and aerial). Maia’s most recent publications are Art for Life: Conversations with the Progressive Writers Moment: on Pens, Swords, and Internationalism, from Antifascism to Afro-Asian Solidarity; "The Other Aryan Supremacy," in the collection No Pasaran!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis, and "Reawakening Asia Jaag Utha," in the forthcoming Lateral forum "Toward Third Worlding."
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Oct 31, 2022
Monday Oct 31, 2022
This special issue of the Anarchist Essays podcast features a discussion between JoNina Ervin, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, and William C. Anderson. It originally appeared on the Black Autonomy Podcast.
In October 2021, Pluto published the definitive edition of Anarchism and the Black Revolution by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin. The book first connected Black radical thought to anarchist theory in 1979, and now amidst a rising tide of Black political organizing, this foundational classic has been republished with a wealth of original material, including forewords by William C. Anderson and Joy James.
This episode of Black Autonomy Podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Pluto Press podcast 'Radicals in Conversation,' in which JoNina Ervin hosts a discussion between Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin and William C. Anderson about Black anarchism across the generations.
Ervin and Anderson discuss the reasons for the continued relevance and increasing popularity of Black anarchism today, what an ‘ungovernable’ radical movement might look like, and the contradictions inherent to single-issue and state-orientated political projects from the left. They also discuss Black nationalism, and put Anderson's book The Nation on No Map in conversation with Anarchism and the Black Revolution.
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Oct 03, 2022
Monday Oct 03, 2022
In this essay, Hannah Kass discusses how the state, capitalism, and property are interconnected systems, working together to produce peasant dispossession and hunger. To challenge these systems and their social relationships, she proposes food anarchy: a new pathway for the food sovereignty movement to wield in their struggle to challenge the current food regime.
Hannah Kass is a joint Ph.D student in the Department of Geography and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hannah's most recent publication is the journal article from which this essay is adapted: ‘Food anarchy and the State monopoly on hunger’, published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Kass, H. 2022. Food anarchy and the State monopoly on hunger. The Journal of Peasant Studies. DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2022.2101099
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Sep 19, 2022
Monday Sep 19, 2022
In this essay, Jennifer Cole discusses how Peter Kropotkin's early writings on mutualism sit alongside Charles Darwin's writings on human evolution and underpin current interests within evolutionary anthropology on how human psychology, altruism and morality developed. Kropotkin is largely ignored within biological and evolutionary academia, however, even though his approach to human development offer a more cooperative and caring blueprint for society.
Jennifer Cole, Lecturer in Global and Planetary Health at Royal Holloway University of London’s most recent publications include ‘Solidarity not charity’ and Manifesto for Mutual Aid.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Aug 22, 2022
Monday Aug 22, 2022
In this essay, Laura Galián delves into the history of anarchism in the south of the Mediterranean from a historical and historiographical perspective by reviewing the anti-authoritarian geographies of the southern shore of the Mediterranean and reassessing the postcolonial status of these emancipatory projects.
For the English version: 0.40-14:10For the Spanish version: 14.19-29.12
Laura Galián is an Assistant Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). Laura has recently published the book Colonialism, Transnationalism and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean (2020).
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Aug 08, 2022
Monday Aug 08, 2022
In this essay, Sophie Scott-Brown explores the life and times of anarchist autobiography. From Proudhon to Kropotkin, Goldman to Read, many anarchists have written their life stories and provided generations of readers an intimate glimpse of the radical life, but what else motivates this sort of memory making? Moreover, how has it changed over time and what can it tell us about the relationship between anarchist ideas and anarchist identities?
Sophie Scott-Brown is a lecturer in Philosophy at UEA. Her latest book is Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy (Routledge, 2022).
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Jul 25, 2022
Monday Jul 25, 2022
In this essay, Nathaniel Andrews explores both the role of children within anarchist activism, and anarchist understandings of childhood, focusing specifically on the Argentinian city of Rosario, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Nathaniel Andrews is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute. His most recent publication is a co-authored article with Professor Richard Cleminson, titled ‘Introduction: New Directions in Spanish Anarchist Studies’, which forms part of a co-edited special issue of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies . He is currently working on his first monograph: a study of prefigurative politics in the Spanish and Argentinian anarchist movements, between 1890 and 1930.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Jul 11, 2022
Monday Jul 11, 2022
In this essay, Sarah Gelbard reflects on the messy relationship between punk, anarchy, and anarchism and ways it can be conceived of as identity, politics, scene, performance, and/or practice. For punks in academia and academics studying punk, how do we position ourselves in relation to the work, to power, and with our comrades?
Sarah Gelbard is a Ph.D. candidate in urban planning at McGill University. Her research speaks to the ways marginalized and alternative urban groups negotiate with, subvert, and refuse the formal city-building project of mainstream placemaking and planning. She is a co-organizer of the Spaces of Struggle Radical Planning conferences and research group. Sarah is also the lead singer and bassist in the punk band Bad Missionary.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Jun 27, 2022
Monday Jun 27, 2022
In this essay, Frankie Hines argues that an anarchist literary theory requires engaging with the anarchist critique of representation and considering possibilities for non-representational literary modes. Rather than looking for representations of reality, he argues anarchist literature should instead be read for the political effects it produces; that is, as a form of direct action.
Frankie Hines received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Westminster in 2021, submitting a thesis entitled Evading Representation: The Literature of Contemporary U.S. Anarchism. He is the author of "‘A movement that renovates people, as well as buildings’: squatting and neodomestic space in Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood”, published in Textual Practice in 2021.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.