An NDP candidate's mistake and the politics of not-knowing

I have to admit, I'm skeptical that Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas NDP candidate Alex Johnstone really didn't know what Auschwitz was until last week. But I think the controversy that her claim to not-knowing has spawned raises some larger issues that are worth reflecting upon. One is the tricky question of responding to public not-knowing in general. And the other is around learning from the specific flavour of not-knowing which Johnstone has claimed, and the energetic incredulity and condemnation it has evoked.

The knowledge (or lack of same) of the candidate -- also the vice-chair of the local school board until a couple of days ago -- has become a topic of public conversation through the latest variation on a cycle that has been quite common in this election: Seven years ago on Facebook, she made a joke in the comments on a photo taken at Auschwitz, comparing fence posts in the image to a penis. Someone recently dredged up this fact, and then a reporter asked her about it. Her response was to apologize, and then to explain her actions by citing her lack of knowledge -- she had no idea what Auschwitz was until last week, and had she known seven years ago then of course she wouldn't have joked about it. Subsequently, of course, it is this admitted (or claimed) ignorance that has gone on to become the source of momentum for the controversy.

As I said, I'm skeptical that she really didn't know. I think it's more likely that she was grasping for a way to defuse something that she knew had explosive potential, she made a bad choice, and now she (and the party) are stuck with it and have to ride it out.

I certainly could be wrong, though. Paul Berton, the editor-in-chief of the local daily, wrote a column on Saturday making some quite sensible points about not-knowing and asking questions about what exactly we can legitimately expect political candidates (or any of the rest of us) to know in this era where knowledge is both much more plentifully accessible than a generation ago, and much more socially fragmented.

He writes, "After all, in a digital world, with news media expanding and information exploding, what else should we know? How much can we know?" and after presenting many cogent examples, concludes, "As the information highway gets ever wider, the definition of 'common knowledge' will get ever narrower. Only the most arrogant, as usual, can pretend to know it all." (Well, mostly cogent examples -- his admission that he has worked as a journalist in Muslim countries for a "considerable time" and "can't seem to keep track of the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam" sounds an awful lot like admitting to a shallow knowledge of the social context he was being paid to report on, which is not only in a different league than the other examples on his list, but that also, in the very casualness with which it was shared, potentially offers a disturbing kernel of insight into the ongoing serious problems with mainstream Western knowledge production about Islamic countries. But I digress.)

It doesn't completely abolish my incredulity at this particular instance, but I do have a fair bit of sympathy for the more general point. One small way in which I have long been conscious of a related phenomenon in my own life is that I am someone who reads a lot, and who reads a lot of different things, but who is not in any standard understanding of the term "well read." I've had a few people in my life over the years learn of my delight in and affinity for books both great and small, who then relate to me as someone who would fit into that category, which of course has led to awkward conversations where I have to navigate being assumed to have intimate knowledge of various 19th century English classics, the output of the literary superstar du jour, and so on, which I mostly do not have.

But more than that, I'm a writer and media producer. That means that I am regularly making claims-to-know in public contexts. I work hard at being careful as I do that, but it's the sort of thing where sooner or later, everyone makes a mistake, everyone runs into something that they don't know and arguably should have. And sometimes, someone notices and publically points it out. Heck, I've made lots of mistakes, and I can't claim I've always responded perfectly when people have told me so. And it's not just those of us for whom this kind of thing is work that face this, because really anyone who is involved in social media or even the different sort of public space that comes with social movement or community struggle is likely to face public not-knowing sooner or later.

On the one hand, I have little time for the sort of piece that has cropped up recently condemning the internet outrage and shaming machine, because often those pieces boil down to entitled people not liking the fact that social media gives marginalized people about whom they say awful things a chance to respond...and even, sometimes, a little bit of actual power to inflict consequences. Particularly if an instance of my not-knowing causes harm, then of course I should be held to account for it. But it's not clear to me that there's always real space to be genuinely accountable for an error of public not-knowing, to learn from it, and to move forward. Because if you write, make media, participate in social media, or organize for social change for any length of time, you're not only going to be displaying your knowing and not-knowing in public, you inevitably have to be learning in public. For years, the master post where I list links to my collection of non-fiction book reviews (sorry -- it's a bit out of date!) has warned of reviews "that I would write quite differently now, given that my knowledge base, life experience, and analysis have all evolved over the life of this blog and will continue to evolve...that's the potentially vulnerable side of putting at least part of your intellectual growth on public display." Even in off-line social movement contexts, we don't always do a good job of accounting for the messiness that gets wrapped around public displays of not-knowing: When does it really matter? When is it genuine? When is it a cloak for a more active sort of refusal to account for your own privilege? How do we respond when it causes harm? How do we create space for learning without indulging that harm? How much leeway should be allowed? How do we respond without creating barriers to participation? I don't write this with answers, but with a keen sense that more of us need to be asking the questions.

Of course, the instance at the centre of this controversy is not some generic form of public not-knowing, but is rather a very specific kind of not-knowing that has evoked a very specific sort of response. It is generating so much attention because there is broad public sentiment (including from me, and very likely including from Alex Johnstone) that -- however we shape our expectations for what details about it each of us must know -- the Holocaust as an overall phenomenon must continue to be broadly known, and not-knowing about it must be challenged. It is, after all, the most prominent instance of horrific and inhuman violence and systematic mass murder -- of genocide -- in the 20th century. I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about knowing and not-knowing the past, how it happens, and why it matters, and it seems to me that challenging not-knowing in this area is absolutely vital, in part to honour those who were victims and those who resisted, and in part to contribute to building what is needed to ensure that such horror never happens again.

Of course when it comes to the very worst of the kinds of hateful collective violences that one segment of humanity has inflicted on another -- the Holocaust, the Middle Passage and slavery of Africans in the Americas, the settler colonial genocide on Turtle Island, and so on -- it is important not to diminish their magnitude and their specificity, including by making shallow comparisons to other kinds of phenomena. Nonetheless, it seems to me that it is also a dishonour to the memory of those who suffered/died/resisted/survived these great violences if we don't try to learn from them in ways that apply to responding to the many forms of unjust harm and violence that get organized into so many lives today, which even when not in the same league as those historical pinnacles of awfulness still have their own significance and impact on real people.

Which brings me back to not-knowing in the context of elections. In the context of mainstream public discourse in this country, including very prominently in the course of election campaigns, there are huge areas of foundational and ongoing unjust collective harms and violences (including some that are ongoing manifestations of the white supremacist slavery and settler colonialism mentioned above, and also including, both intersecting with those and beyond them, some connected to patriarchy and gender oppression) for which publically performing one flavour or another of not-knowing is not only not challenged in the mainstream, but is very actively reinforced. You cannot refuse to publically not-know about the full enormity, implications, and ongoing character of these collective violences and harms and how they are woven through what "Canada" continues to be, and still be taken seriously as a viable candidate or as a commentator worthy of mainstream access. Not-knowing is the expectation, the norm; and that's a huge problem.

And because I promised myself to try and keep my posts to a modest length in my new upsurge of blogging, I'm not going to try to make the full case for what I've just said -- overcoming the powerful weight of the socially organized, publically mandated not-knowing that I'm talking about is far beyond a single blog post anyway. But there are lots of resources out there that interested folks can use to chip away at this not-knowing if they so desire, from the small efforts I've tried to make on the blog, in my books, and in hearing from many different voices through my current radio work; to the useful collection I just finished reading, Critical Inquiries: A Reader in Studies of Canada (Fernwood Publishing, 2013); to both written work and recorded talks from activists and scholars like Himani Bannerji, Sunera Thobani, Rinaldo Walcott, Taiaiake Alfred, Patricia Monture, Gary Kinsman, Harsha Walia, Sherene Razack, Howard Adams, Glenn Coulthard, Leanne Simpson and many others; to the organizing that happens under banners like No One Is Illegal, Idle No More, and Black Lives Matter.

So even if the details of what Alex Johnstone did or did not know, and should or should not have known, remain up for debate, I think we need to be informed by the energy and insistence of the reaction to her not-knowing. I think we need to take that energy, to take the lessons of those pinnacles of historical collective violence and harm, and to apply the imperative to challenge not-knowing to the many ways that not-knowing about historical and ongoing collective violence and harm in which many of us are complicit are sanctioned and encouraged in this election and in mainstream public life more generally in Canada.

Facebook racism & making good political use of "WTF?" moments

Lately, we've been subjected to a rather higher density than usual of a particular kind of moment in public life. These are moments that combine what are (when you're on the left) fairly common emotions like outrage or frustration or dismay, with something else: surprise. It isn't necessarily the flabbergasted sort of surprise that would indicate total and unexpected novelty, though it can be, but at the very least it involves a sense that there is some part, some aspect or flavour or component, that's new in whatever has prompted the reaction.

For instance, I would argue that Donald Trump has been a generous source of such moments, and really as a political phenomenon could be understood as one big example of what I'm talking about. He's incredibly awful, of course, and evokes all sorts of outrage and opposition from those with left inclinations. You can make a case, however, that he is the logical culmination of a 40 (or even 60) year trajectory in the Republican Party and shouldn't be surprising – it's not like Republican presidential hopefuls saying outrageous things is new, but there's still something about him that pushes the bounds of what you previously thought possible and makes you go "WTF?"

The example that has got me thinking about this is less spectacular and closer to home than Mr. Trump, but not necessarily any less troubling: In the space of a couple of weeks, seeing someone in my social media circles share something that's blatantly racist and/or Islamophobic and/or anti-migrant has gone from pretty rare to...well, quite a bit less rare. And perhaps because I'm somewhat buffered from it by the kind of information bubble we all exist in online, from what I've heard, at least some other people are seeing a lot more of this stuff than me.

On the one hand, the circulation of racist sentiment among white Canadians is completely unsurprising. We live on stolen land in a country founded on genocide and slavery and existing in conditions of ongoing colonialism and white supremacy. Our first Prime Minister was a vocal proponent of a "White Canada." Anyone who experiences racism or who listens to those who do will know that manifestations of such things, from the small and everyday to the big and life-threatening, have never not pervaded the lives of racialized and colonized folks in northern Turtle Island. For all of these reasons, "OMG, Canada used to be so tolerant what happened" is a disingenuous response at best.

At the same time, there is something new here – not unprecedented, but somewhat novel in its details. Partly the novelty is the combination of how widespread and unabashed the sharing is, with how odious and hard-right the sentiments – not all of the memes that are going around have these markers, but some that I've seen are quite clearly from a particular openly fascist British organization, or from some weird fringe white supremacist organization here in Canada. And partly it is the way that this is tied to what I wrote about back in March about the novel ways in which the Harper gang is deploying electoral racism. It's opening new ground in what I describe in that post at the "electoral economy of violence," and I fear that now that it's open, there is no going back. And because this is coming from a powerful mainstream institution that mainstream media is institutionally obliged to treat seriously, that shapes how such racist awfulness gets treated more broadly – folks who follow politics in the UK and Europe, for instance, will be familiar with how mainstream right and centre-left pandering to racist fringe outfits leads to their politics getting more serious mainstream treatment overall. At the same time, though aspects of this newish mode of Con electoral pandering to white supremacy have been clear for at least a year, I think there's something very specific about this recent upsurge: I first started to notice it intensely a few days after the alarming news of Harper hiring some Australian thug who specializes in nasty racist campaigning to be his campaign closer. Given that correlation, I think there is deliberate effort and money going into getting this social media upsurge of hate among folks who are not otherwise sympathetic to the Right, or at least its more xenophobic elements. And that tactic done in that way is new too, in the Canadian context.

What I want to say here, though, is less about that phenomenon specifically, and more about where thinking about it has led me. Whether it's Donald Trump, or the sudden jump in breadth and number of hard-right memes in Candians' Facebook feeds, or the blatantly laughable and disturbing demonstration of mainstream media subservience to power in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader of the UK Labour Party, all of these moments that evoke enraging surprise/not-surprise have something in common. I think they are all moments in which some disjuncture between dominant narratives of how the world works and how the world actually works become temporarily more visible, to more people.

Recognizing a mismatch between dominant stories and actual workings of power, and how those deceptive stories are not only ubiquitous but absolutely essential to the maintenance of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that is our social world, is nothing new. Lots of important work done by both movements and writers since at least the 1920s has focused on pushing against dominant myths about how our supposedly liberal-democratic societies work – myths about universal equality, about fairness, and so on – and drawing attention to all of the ways that liberalism and capitalism inherently, by their very structuring, cannot help but fail to meet those ideals. Organizing in this vein may use other terms and may have other focuses, of course, but it generally has a similar shape to this. So, for instance, we have dominant narratives about the "free press" and the role of (mainstream) media in democracy, but there's no shortage of writers and movements that have shown that the mainstream media is quite a different beast than those stories would have it (albeit in ways that are usually quite a bit more complex, less personal, and more systemic than the unhelpful image that sometimes crops up of a capitalist behind the curtain issuing orders for how to confuse the public next). And lots of organizers and writers have taken on dominant notions bound up in left-liberal nationalist visions of "Canada" as tolerant and welcoming and relatively racism-free, and demonstrated that this is completely at odds with the lived realities of lots and lots of people.

I think these moments of surprise/not-surprise that I'm talking about often involve some sort of shift in how power is actually functioning, big or small, that jars, at least a little, with the currently dominant version of the stories about how the world works. This means the workings of power become a little more visible for a moment, until stories and expectations shift to take this new detail into account, or until the moment is forgotten. The different ways in which these moments are experienced – how much surprise is actually felt, and how each person narrates it – are of course related to the different ways in which differently situated and differently politicized people exist in different relation to these realities and narratives. I think it's an interesting testament to the power that these dominant narratives have that many of us who might know full well at an intellectual level that the social world is not at all like X or Y still feel some surprise when that becomes more visible. And experiencing surprise, whether genuinely or as surprise/not-surprise, is not, as some folks who work very hard to perform rad-ness occasionally take it, a reason to be scornful. Rather, it is an opportunity to make the actual workings of power in the social world more visible. These moments are, to use a hyperbolic and somewhat old pop culture reference, glitches in the matrix. We need to make use of them. And we don't do that by only emphasizing continuity, but by combining that with an acknowledgement of what is new and different – of the bits that mean that whatever it is has become newly visible to new people.

So, in the case of this disturbing uptick in disturbing Facebook memes, those of us who have the space to do so in our lives (and whether we directly experience it or not) need to harness that socially produced sense of surprise, that instinct that something new is going on. Not only do we need to point out, where we can, how the specifics of the content are wrong and awful, but we need to take the upsurge as an opportunity to investigate and talk about the what and the how of what's going on. This newness makes visible a corner of the ways in which white supremacist social ordering and the stories that support it pervade what we currently call "Canada" in ways that are not new and that dominant myths about multicultural tolerance so often hide, so part of what we need to do is follow the thread that is momentarily visible and give it a bit of a pull, so that more of those actual workings of power become visible for more people.

Turning Opportunity Into Crisis Into Process

One of the joys of returning to the city I moved away from over a decade ago has been reconnecting with some very lovely people in what promises to be much more sustained ways than occasional visits in the interim have allowed. And one of the advantages of knowing very lovely people, at least some of whom think there are a few things that you are moderately competent at doing, is that when you reconnect with them, they offer you opportunities to do those things.

Sounds great, right? Well, yes, it is.

Except I had a rather surprising density of such possibilities put before me on Monday (along, later in the day, with a fairly substantial amount of alcohol), and it threw me into a mini-crisis that rather derailed my work day on Tuesday. Which is not to say that I am at all ungrateful for the various potential opportunities that were raised in conversation that day, nor that I have yet made anything resembling a definite decision about how to relate to any of them. The crisis, rather, was sparked by the way that having to think seriously about these potential courses of action has forced me to take my slow, gentle, and I'll admit somewhat meandering process of returning to more-than-bare-bones writing practice after four months away, and make it way more definite and clear.

At the moment, my single biggest commitment is to my weekly, half-hour, interview-based radio show, Talking Radical Radio, which broadcasts weekly on 8 or 9 stations across the country and much more occasionally on a handful of other stations, and can be heard online at the site linked just above and at Rabble.ca. That work has kept going through the ins and outs, ups and downs, tos and fros of moving. What was set aside was, most significantly, work on a major writing project that I first envisioned a couple of years ago as an entirely separate thing, but that has evolved into an effort to make use of the vast stores of wonderful content that I'm collecting through the radio interviews; to put together some ideas about knowing the world through encounter, relation, and movement; and to say some suitably critical yet accessible things about this thing we call "Canada." As I've mentioned before, earlier in the year I wrote about two-thirds of a chapter in that project, and it's the sort of thing that could become a book, or it could fizzle out and become one of the many false starts that litter any writer's life.

In returning to a more capacious writing practice, I have deliberately chosen not to plunge full-tilt back into that work. Partly that's because there were a couple of other, smaller things I needed to get out of the way first (including last week's book review). But it's also because even back in the early months of the year, I was feeling quite dissatisfied with my limited scope for making stuff that was not either A) the show or B) some project so big that, even if it does come to fruition, noone will see for years. Not only was this state of affairs unsatisfying, it also did not feel like it was a very strategic way to build my own capacities and opportunities moving forward. I didn't come up with any good ways to address that dissatisfaction pre-move, but it kind of feels that the current moment – with the freedom of being in the middle of a break not of my choosing, and with certain other writing and community obligations left behind, however sadly, in Sudbury – is as good a time as I'm ever going to have to see what I can figure out.

The sense of crisis that briefly engulfed me yesterday was a result of being presented with a few very concrete somethings that I could occupy myself with, including one or two which might even generate some income, and feeling that bump up against, and even threaten to muscle aside, this precarious combination of intense desire and equally intense vagueness and uncertainty around my writing practice.

As I said, no decisions have yet been made. But whatever I do about other opportunities that Hamilton might present, I need to figure things out around writing, and yesterday's mini-crisis has pushed me to be more definite, sooner, than I might otherwise have been about doing that.

The goal is to have a framework for approaching smaller-than-a-book writing projects that balances spontaneity with a certain amount of deliberateness to make sure I have a sense of direction and forward movement when it comes to substance, craft, and audience. Which is a pretty broad thing to say, and deliberately so. It just means that I want to make sure that I'm doing things that (might?) help me keep getting better at figuring out what I want to say, figuring out different and better ways to say it, and connecting more effectively and/or more broadly with readers and folks who publish stuff. So, really, what most people who write try to do, each in our own ways.

In practice, in the short term, that means writing more pieces and more kinds of (mostly shorter) pieces for this blog. Even before yesterday, I was already thinking that a practice of that sort might be in order, though it would probably have taken me another while to work myself up to it. And it didn't hurt that, last night, I ran across this interesting article by a graphic designer who has developed a practice of producing and publishing a piece of work that he identifies as 'awful' every day. I'm not going to shoot for daily or for 'awful' (though way back at the beginning, blog publishing helped me get more comfortable with having done not-great work that other people could see, and that will certainly continue) but I am going to write.

Some of what I write will likely look more like a standard blog post than what I usually publish on the site. Some might respond to specific short pieces of writing – like book reviews, but in response to an article and or an essay rather than a book. Some might be vaguely experiential or memoirish, though I suspect still tying whatever the focus is into the social world in a pretty explicit way. Some may not feel like they fit at all, and deviate from my usual while actually getting farther from any sort of dominant, readable, bloggish norm. And some, I suspect, will be like this one (or at least similar in spirit, if in content quite different) and talk about writing process, in general or in relation to the nascent maybe-book, which I will also ease into relating to more directly in the coming weeks. (That last was actually the idea of another lovely person, this one not in Hamilton, whom I spent time talking with about some of these things yesterday morning. Thanks, M!)

But, really, I don't know yet what it's going to look like, or whether any of those possibilities will actually end up being part of what I do in the next month. And I don't know how long it'll last, just that it will be more and different, and that for the time being it will be here.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm way behind on editing next week's show...

Review: Transformation Now!

[AnaLouise Keating. Transformation Now! Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013.]

Take the fact that I am writing this review at all as a sign of my regard for some of this book's ideas. I've only recently returned to any sort of consistent writing-and-making practice beyond journalling, a sparse scattering of letters and posts, and the radio show, after four months of having most of my time beyond that tied up in moving. I finished reading this book (for the first time) early in the move-prep but never quite found the time to write a review. Normally, this long after, I would've just let it slide. However, some of the book's ideas are very relevant to some of the work that was before and is starting again to be current for me, while others connect with certain things that I have written in the past and offer me ways for me to deepen what I've done. Which isn't to say that I have no reservations about the book, but I'll get to those in due course.

The subtitle of the book promises a "post-oppositional politics of change," a phrase that is likely to intrigue some and set off warning bells for others. I suspect that what that phrase evokes for many in both of those categories is really a somewhat different thing than what the book actually contains -- it is not at all, if you read it with care and generosity, an argument for a formless blahblah liberalism that refuses to take seriously the immense violence and injustice of the world. Quite the opposite, really. But it is quite a subtle book, I think, and an approach to politics that makes no claim to have everything figured out. In fact, I would argue that it is best treated not as complete and self-contained, but as a source of generative ideas that can be taken up and engaged with as part of the ongoing transformation of our existing politics rather than as any sort of replacement for them, as a necessary corrective and addition that is compatible with a range of both more and less radical starting points.

Here's my take on the basic argument of the book: In the West, our ways of seeing and talking about the world are deeply organized via binary oppositions, from Descartes' mind-and-body split on up. This is no less true in movements and communities-in-struggle that are working hard to create change, or in those corners of academic institutions where folks concerned with justice and liberation and critical analysis of the world have carved out some space. Indeed, vigorous embrace of binary oppositions and a stance of energetic oppositionality can often be central for those of us who are trying to create change. This, the book argues, profoundly shapes how we understand the world, how we understand ourselves, and how we understand our struggles. Furthermore, it leads us to misunderstand all of these things. It leads us to homogenize and discount difference within categories, and to refuse to see points of consonance and similarity across them. And understanding the world less well means being less effective in changing it. As well, the book argues that entrenched and rigid forms of oppositional thought and practice lead to particular kinds of approaches to creating change -- approaches that can certainly be crucial and effective in some moments, but that often hold on long past such moments and end up getting universalized in ways that limit our potential for creating truly transformative change.

To get a flavour of the ideas involved, you can listen to this in-depth interview with the author, AnaLouise Keating -- a scholar, an activist, and a disciple of legendary (and, sadly, now deceased) feminist Gloria Anzaldua. (In fact, it was only after I started to read this book that I realized I had encountered Keating's work once before, many years ago, when I read an important collection co-curated by Keating and Anzaldua called This Bridge Called Home.)

One of the key commitments in Transformation Now! is to take up theoretical work done by women of colour scholars and writers of the past. It quite rightly points out that, even when key works by radical women of colour are cited in and beyond the academy, it is often done in ways that are superficial or tokenistic or that cherry-pick narrow points without really making an effort to engage and build upon the central ideas they present. And Keating is very clear that her commitment to focusing on some of these works by radical women of colour is not based on some shallow commitment to representation for its own sake, but because she believes that some of the most innovative and important theorizing of the world to happen in North America in the last several decades has been done by women of colour, and we all lose by leaving those ideas marginalized. So, for example, she argues that, despite how often the collection This Bridge Called My Back gets cited and described as a feminist classic and put on reading lists, very little work has been done by subsequent generations of writers (particularly in the academy) to actually build on the theorizing done by its contributors. So she does some. As well, she makes great use of some of the central concepts developed by Gloria Anzaldua throughout her career to get at ideas of relationality, complexity, and transformation.

One area in which the book discusses its core ideas, and an area that I found particularly interesting, was in the context of what gets labelled, often dismissively, as "identity politics." There is a rich tradition of writers and activists, not only but primarily women of colour, articulating the importance of experience and identity to efforts to create change, and doing so in ways that emphasize complexity, multiplicity, and relationality. As those insights have spread to other contexts, both in movements and among scholars, the ways that they get deployed have changed. In the terms of this book, they have become bound up in binary oppositional politics, and have therefore lost much of their original openness to complexity, multiplicity, and relationality. To put it in somewhat different terms, I would argue that they have for many people become absorbed into ways of treating identity that are reified, and ways of doing politics that adhere to liberal assumptions about both the nature of the social world and about politics. The book doesn't really explore how this transition happened, but I would guess that beyond the hold that binary thinking has on movements and critical scholars in general, it can be tied to things like the overall push under neoliberal capitalism to reify identities, the impact that the social relations of the academy have on any radical idea, and the sadly predictable result of lots of privileged people taking up these ideas and applying them in simplistic ways such that more radical implications get bleached out.

In contrast with these reified/binary oppositional identity politics, the book poses not a downplaying of the importance of experience and its sedimentation into identity -- that is, the approach some liberals and (in a different way) some (mostly white) radicals have used to respond to the limits of mainstream invokations of identity and intersectionality -- but rather an even greater emphasis on them. It is a recognition that inherited identity categories exist because they say something important about the social organization of our lives, and that it would be cruel and foolish to advocate just abandoning them, but also that such categories are very far from capturing everything that is personally and politically significant about our lives and the social world. It is attention to the fine grain of experience, to what the book talks about as the complex weave of both commonalities and differences that invariably exist within and across inherited categories. It is insistence that in that complexity exists the possibility for new kinds of action, new modes of transformation. It is relational and dynamic rather than centred on rigid, stagnant categories. It is a recognition that, yes, it is and must be central to our politics that we have such-and-such experiences of marginalization and such-and-such experiences of privilege, but we must attend to the how of it, to the contextual eddies and currents, to the possibilities for surprising alliances and unexpected shifts in self-understanding. We are always more than what we are told we must be -- to use language I have picked up in other places, we always overflow; we always exist within, against, and beyond.

I particularly appreciate the three deceptively simple but very powerful lessons that she derives from theorizing done in This Bridge Called My Back. She sees these lessons as a basis for moving from currently dominant approaches to intersectionality that remain bound up with binary oppositional concepts and politics (and, I would add, reified ones), towards a more radical and nuanced "politics of interconnectivity." She argues, on this basis, for "making connections through differences," "positing radical interrelatedness," "and listening with raw openness." In all of these, a commitment to "intellectual humility" and to recognizing the inevitably incomplete character of our knowledge of ourselves and of the world are absolutely essential. And I agree -- these are crucial lessons, crucial tools for us to take up as we try to know the world and change it.

As I have mentioned in some of my infrequent posts in the last year, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how we know the world through encounter, relation, and movement, and I think this book is incredibly relevant to that work. It makes it very clear that we miss a great deal when we insist on ordering our knowing of the world through an abstracted series of binaries, and we gain immensely when we attend to how the social organization of our lives and communities through the workings of power actually happens -- how those complex lived realities of commonality and difference actually weave through our lives. This includes, in the book, an emphasis on the value of considering unlikely juxtapositions of very different sources of knowledge, to explore those commonalities and differences and the complex socially organized relationships that they are part of. So, for instance, an early chapter reads Ralph Waldo Emerson, Toni Morrison's Sula, and Gloria Anzaldua in relation to one another, as a way of theorizing the individual and the social. And this is part of why I think this book offers a much deeper reflection on some ideas that I had begun to fumble my way towards in my own books -- the idea of understanding the social world, either historically or in the present, by beginning from my experience, and your experience, and her experience over there, and figuring out how they are all interconnected. It is relational, it is open to complexity, and it works to understand how things are actually happening, with an underlying commitment to doing so in the service of just and liberatory social transformation. Or, at least, that's the theory...I don't necessarily make grand claims for how effectively I've been able to realize any of that so far.

Related to this is the book's emphasis on developing an understanding of the social world that transcends the binary between a very atomized version of liberalism, and a sort of rigid and unthinking structural determinism. In everyday conversation about the world, and even in most writing outside of very specific niches, these are really the only easily accessible options for thinking about how the social world exists. And neither is very useful. Again, in my past work I've tried to learn from some of the approaches that are out there for getting beyond this binary, and one of the things that I have considered as a focus for a future project (not the one I'm returning to writing at the moment, but perhaps the next one) is figuring out new ways to offer tools to people for beginning to think about themselves as being in the social world beyond the very limited possibilities offered by this binary.

Despite all of these interesting and useful ideas, back at the beginning I mentioned that I had some reservations -- some specific elements that, in the spirit of the book's commitment to finding complex commonalities and differences rather than falling into the binary of devotion or rejection in relating to other people's work, I think deserve further thought and development.

For one thing, I wonder if the book is perhaps a bit too stark in how it poses the distinction between binary oppositional (or reified) identity politics on the one hand, and more complex and relational integration of experience and identity into political work on the other hand. I can appreciate why doing so is important for clarity. And I also think there is a tendency -- again, particularly among that subset of white or otherwise privileged progressives and radicals who don't particularly like identity politics anyway -- to conflate what are actually quite different ways of deploying identity and experience. Given that, drawing out the differences is a crucial task. But my sense -- and I welcome feedback from folks who disagree, because I feel very tentative about this point -- is that, particularly among people who experience a significant degree of marginalization, the language that they often have available to talk about their experience and the world is hard to distinguish from more problematic variants of identity politics, but their actual practice of said politics often organically incorporates much more recognition of complexity and relationality than you will find in a significant proportion of related scholarship, from most powerful institutions that have taken up identity politics for their own ends, and from many privileged individuals (both those who recognize the importance of experience and identity and those who scoff at it).

I also wonder about how best to frame the relationship between the "post-oppositional politics" that the book is trying to articulate and the binary oppositional politics upon which it builds. The book is very clear in some cases that it is not attempting to treat these two modes of politics as themselves a binary, with the "post" clearly trumping the present mode. It is, in these cases, careful to talk about this new approach adding to oppositional politics, which cannot help but continue to be an important part of the lives and struggles of many different people situated in many different ways. But the book is not always as careful as that, and there are moments when it feels like it is dismissing oppositional politics in a much more total way -- I don't think it actually is, but it reads that way in places. More importantly, the book does not tackle what is to me the crucial question of how to make decisions about relating in practice to these different modes of approaching analysis and political action. Not that I'm looking for a recipe book -- that would be a very bad idea, I think -- but it seems absolutely central to lay out some tools that might be useful for people on the ground trying to navigate this political landscape in practice. In scenario X, what is the risk of moving away from starkly binary understandings, and what might be gained? How is that different in scenario Y? What are the ways to take up the recognition of complexity and relationality at the heart of this book's approach, while still being a productive part of movements on the ground that are necessarily oppositional?

Related to that is what looks to me -- and I know full well I'm extrapolating pretty intensely here -- like a deliberate decision by the author to write a book that will easily be misread, a book that requires the very kind of nuanced, humble, generous reading that it advocates. I don't think this is an accident. Among other reasons, I think that partly because one chapter in the book is an analysis of a book by an otherwise much-respected Indigenous woman scholar that is often ignored and criticized because it could and does get used in really politically troubling ways by white and other non-Indigenous women. The undercurrent of Keating's effort to re-read that work in more positive ways involves (it seems to me) a recognition that radical women of colour should not have to orient their writing choices around avoiding misreading and misuse by privileged folk, and instead should be allowed the space to produce the tools that say what they want to say in the ways that centre themselves and those with whom they have political affinity as the imagined reader. (And I recognize that even the way I'm deploying identity-related words in that sentence sits uneasily with the spirit of the book I'm reviewing, but as Keating herself acknowledges, it's hard to avoid sometimes. As well, I suspect (and the book admits) that many people will not be convinced by her reading in this chapter, and I'm not going to weigh in on that, because it's one of those conversations that I feel that I can only sit quietly and listen to.)

And regardless of whether it is a deliberate feature of Transformation Now! or not, I think there is a real danger of it being misread -- or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that it is open to a wide range of different readings, given the danger of presuming (and dubiousness of fixating on imaginings of) authorial intent. Not only can I imagine, as I said at the top, both embrace and dismissal of the book based on such a (mis)reading, I can also imagine it being weaponized in debate in really troubling ways by (probably mostly) privileged folks. I can imagine people towards the apolitical end of the Peace Studies spectrum, for instance, deploying some of the language in this book to push for peace over efforts to create justice, or for some defanged version of dialogue instead of open struggle, in situations where I think those would just be bad, bad, bad ideas. I can imagine class-privileged white university students using some of the language in this book to argue against identity politics in their entirety, to argue against struggle, to argue against radicalism. I can imagine these people thinking they are taking up and using these words exactly as the author intends as they do these things, and invoking her identity and credentials to legitimize their politics against and over marginalized peers. And these really would be misreadings and misuses, no matter the openness to multiple readings made possible by the book. I find it pretty hard to know what to do with all of that. At the very least, I don't think I would feel comfortable writing a book that left itself open in this way. But, frankly, I have immense respect for (what at least to me looks like) the author's decision to write the subtle, complex book that she wanted to write; that requires the kind of reading she calls for; that speaks to people who are willing to do the work to read not just the words but also the field of meaning from which they emerge; and that refuses to put at the centre of its writing people who can't or won't do these things. It's gutsy, and it's a challenge to us as readers and writers that we must take seriously.

So. It's always tough to know how any given instance of reading will filter down into yet-to-be imagined pieces of writing. But this book will certainly be in my mind as I write over the next little while.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]