An Interview with J. Malcolm Garcia

To celebrate the release our new paperback edition of (the first ever!) National Book Award-winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren, we are proud to share Algren scholar Colin Asher’s foreword to this reissue, in which Asher explores Algren's dedication to the underdog, and his lifelong effort to humanize those who'd been pushed to the margins by mid-century American society.

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We Are All Members of One Another

The Chicago contained within these pages both is and is not the city Nelson Algren was raised in, helped to document while working for the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression, and then returned to after the conclusion of World War II when his service in Europe ended—thirty-six years old, single, his career stalled. The world of The Man with the Golden Arm shares geography, vernacular, and some history with that corporeal city, but every detail has been refracted through Algren’s aesthetic and moral sensibility. In here, the city’s cold beauty has been distilled to poetry, its shortcomings clarified and brought into relief, and its occupants feel more worthy of empathy than any of their equivalents you’re likely to encounter outside of these confines.

In its earliest incarnation—as an idea Algren pitched to a publisher in early 1946 in hopes of securing a contract that would allow him to write and avoid finding a job—Golden Arm was going to be a war novel. It was to begin as World War II was ending, and the narrative would focus on a protagonist living in France and supporting himself off the black market while he forestalled his return to the US. Algren had been stationed in Marseille after V-J Day, so he could see that part of the novel clearly, could remember what it felt like to live in a city hovering between the brutality and tedium of war and occupation and the promise of a future people were only just beginning to envision.

But writing about America after the war would require research. Like the New Journalists who came to prominence a generation later, Algren collected material for his writing by immersing himself in the environments he was interested in. So, he explored Chicago. He reacquainted himself with the Polish Triangle, which he had lived in and written about before being inducted. He spent time on West Madison Street, the city’s skid row, and befriended a group of petty thieves and addicts; soon he was a steady presence in their apartment, lingering in the background of their lives. And he became a regular at police lineups. He had been mugged before entering the service, and afterward, the police presented him with a card that entitled him to observe as detectives questioned detained men and women. Years later, he still used the card to collect material.

The Chicago that Algren rediscovered through that process was not the violent, Prohibition-era city he grew up in, and it wasn’t the beleaguered, war-weary, and ration-card-hungry city that he had been living in when he was drafted in the summer of 1943. Post-war Chicago was an ascendant place, a newly christened standard bearer of the America Dream—wealthier than he remembered, but colder as well. In this new Chicago, consumption and virtue were joined as one, and the sacrifices and nobler objectives of the war had been cheapened and transformed into commercial appeals: “Get Your Post-War Kitchen Now!” and “Santa Loves a Champion!”

On the city’s margins, Algren could meet or reconnect with people who had been written out of Chicago’s new narrative. He saw that their lives hadn’t changed, in material terms, after the Depression and the war ended, but that their spirits were newly burdened by the realization that they were being abandoned—people who, he later wrote, “live out their hand-to-mouth hours without friendship or love. They belong to no particular street in no particular city. They pass from furnished room to furnished room, and belong not even to their own time; not even to themselves.”

Since the beginning of his career, Algren wrote to reflect the moment in time he was living through, so he quickly lost interest in writing about the war and began to envision the book you’re holding. “[I]f you’re going to write a war novel, you have to do it while you’re in the war,” he explained later. “Two months after the war it was gone; but I was living in a living situation . . . I mean, the neighborhood I was living in, and these people, were a lot more real than the Army was.”

The Man with the Golden Arm is informed by Algren’s research, but not tethered to it. He often transcribed overheard conversations and interviews, and he would organize that material into lists of vernacular and snippets of dialog. From that raw material, he crafted characters who were amalgams of the people he knew and interacted with, and built a world for them to occupy that was constructed of mellifluous prose that transitions fluidly ix between observation and dialogue—melding characters and environment into a cohesive whole.

The war has ended in Golden Arm, and in its wake, the city has grown hostile to Algren’s people. They are grifters, card dealers, drunks, bartenders, and thieves, and each knows “the great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one.” Their lives revolve around the Tug & Maul Bar, the apartments inside Schwabatski “The Jailer’s” building at 1860 West Division Street, and the Saloon Street police station. And they have names so evocative they are almost stories in their own right. Arranged in stanzas, they read like poetry.

Frankie “Machine” Majcinek, “Zosh,” and Solly “Sparrow” Saltskin

“Record Head” Bednar, Antek Witwicki, and “Zero” Schwiefka

Molly Novotny and Drunkie John

Louie Fomorowski

Piggy-O

Most directly, Golden Arm is about Frankie Machine—a veteran, a card dealer who presides over a backroom game, and a husband. His wife, Sophie—“ Zosh,” to Frankie—is confined to a wheelchair. She had been in the passenger seat when Frankie drove a car into a light post and then a billboard. On the night in question, they had been celebrating the end of the war by drinking triple shots. Her injuries seemed minor but several days later—on the night of V-J Day—she claimed that her legs had stopped working. “The blessed, cursed, wonderful-terrible God’s-own-accident that had truly married them at last,” she calls it.

When Frankie first appears, he is twenty-nine years old and, though his service ended months earlier, still wearing a faded uniform and service brogans. He was wounded in the war, and the treatment he received for his injuries left him addicted to morphine, which he’s desperate to quit. Unlike most other characters in the book, he is attuned to the world growing skyward around him and susceptible to its judgments. He hides his addiction assiduously, and faced with authority, he seeks respect through reference to his service. (I got the “right kind” of discharge, he says, “and the purple heart.”) He often adopts a wry, self-effacing tone. In the army, he says, “I was the guy had to pick the fly crap out of the pepper with boxin’ gloves.”

Frankie is a bit of a striver, but the novel’s other characters are decidedly not. He aspires to become a professional musician, to leave his marriage, and kick his addiction. But they are content and certain of their worth. Louie Fomorowski, a morphine dealer who has outlasted most of his conx temporaries, makes no apologies for informing on friends to the police. Snitching, he says, is a racket like any other. Piggy-O, a blind man who sells for Louie and moves about resplendent in filth, asserts: “I got my kind of pride ’n you got yours.” And Solly “Sparrow” Saltskin—Frankie’s sidekick— proudly defends his lifestyle. He is a steerer for Frankie’s card game, a dog thief, and a shoplifter. But he insists his line of work is as respectable as any other. “Back me up with five grand tonight ’n tomorrow mornin’ I get a invitation to join the Chamber of Commerce ’n no questions asked,” he says.

Algren’s characters invite judgment with their choices—drinking and thieving and snitching and, in Frankie’s case, trying and failing to break dysfunctional habits—and Golden Arm gives voice to that instinct in the person of Captain “Record Head” Bednar. He is a career officer, nearing his pension, who presides over the Saloon Station lineup. When the novel opens, he is questioning Frankie and Sparrow and then quickly dismissing them. “You’re both a couple loose bums livin’ off the weaker bums,” he says.

Algren had created similar characters earlier in his career. In his second novel, Never Come Morning, a captain named One-Eye Tenczara presides over a police lineup. A version of the same character also appears in Algren’s short story “A Bottle of Milk for Mother.” And a character called simply the Captain passes judgment over a seemingly endless line of arrestees in “The Captain Has Bad Dreams.” All three had a nihilistic edge, their exposure to predation having calcified into callous indifference. But Bednar, so long into his career and so familiar with the people he encounters each night, has begun to entertain doubts about his role. He feels tainted by the guilt of the people who appear before him. In his dreams, he is pursued.

There is a priest who appears once before Bednar. The man has been defrocked, and when Bednar mocks him, asking why he had been laicized, the priest replies evenly, and in total: “Because I believe we are all members of one another.” Bednar is shaken by the line. The priest’s words plague him, and through his tribulations, Algren forces his readers to wrestle with their own culpability—dares them to deny the priest’s edict. Bednar has spent his life passing judgment, sorting the sinners from the saved, and he begins to fear that he never had any right to do so, that he has damned himself. He feels impaled, and yearns to leave his post and install himself on the other side of the jail’s bars, among the “innocents.”

Algren was no polemicist by the time he wrote Golden Arm, but he could be a scold. Eventually, Bednar comes to understand the harm he has done—realizes that the accused who paraded before him, and whom he xi had demeaned and condemned, for years, “had all along been members of himself.” But he lacks the strength to atone for his sins, and the price he pays for his weakness is severe. “All errors must ultimately be punished,” Algren wrote, and for the Captain, a man who had saved “himself at the cost of others less cunning than himself, the punishment must be simply this: more lost, more fallen and more alone than any man at all.”

In the literary traditions that Algren’s work grew out of—the naturalists and the proletarian writers movement—characters like Frankie and Sparrow and Zosh and Louie and Piggy-O would have been vessels of suffering. They would be conjured only to be destroyed and readers would be required only to pity them. But Algren’s aim is identification—he would have us reconcile ourselves to the knowledge that his people are people, no more or less a part of the human story than any others, or deny that knowledge and suffer Bednar’s fate. He had faith in the power of literature, but not blind faith. He believed that the written word could make clear the stakes for each of us, and that every person has the agency to choose whether to be a part of binding together or tearing asunder the human community—but he did not delude himself that he could convince everyone to choose well.

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When I first encountered The Man with the Golden Arm in 2009, during the Great Recession, the aspects of the text that struck me most profoundly were its moral clarity and its prescience. Algren gave voice to his values by making Bednar suffer for excluding people and passing judgment on them for their poverty and shortcomings. And his sympathetic, detailed psychological portraits of Frankie and the Tug and Maul’s other habitués read like an assertion of their intrinsic value.

Algren’s prescience is evident in the construction of the world he has those characters navigate. In Golden Arm, irrelevance is both sin and punishment, and jails and prisons are purgatories for people who never learned a trade because they sense “no work had any point to it.” People are so divided and lacking in charity that someone in need cannot “find five dollars in a city of four million people, most of them millionaires.” The logic of wrapping “all the little troubles into one big trouble” and escaping into drink or opioids seems self-evident. And the country has begun to atomize— its people stripped of their sense of belonging, their identities. Even Frankie Machine, a veteran with the “right” kind of discharge, has been abandoned. The conclusion of the war brought him nothing but hardxii ship—his addiction is the result of a battle wound that ended his service; he wrecked a car, wounding Zosh, while celebrating the dropping of the first atomic bomb; she stopped walking on V-J Day—and now, within the country whose freedom he was ostensibly fighting for, he feels displaced, alienated.

“You know who I am?” he asks.

“You know who you are? You know who anybody is any more?”

Algren’s world seemed outré to many readers in 1949. Even one of Golden Arm’s most positive reviews referred to his people as “warped” and “twisted,” and mentioned their “depravity.” But when I first opened the book during the Great Recession—one desperate and debt-laden person among many millions of others, as the opioid epidemic, mass incarceration, and homelessness claimed headlines each day—it felt very familiar. In some ways, thirteen years later, it feels more familiar still.

“The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed,” William Gibson said in 2003. Algren, working more than five decades earlier, had the same insight. When he returned from Europe, he was not distracted by the country’s triumphalist tone. He intuited that the truest measure of the country’s moral health was not the presence of a car in every driveway or the valuation of its largest corporations, but the quality of the lives being lived at the margins—that their present was a preview of our common future, that their fates would be everyone’s.

—Colin Asher

(Angela Davis, February 2022. Photograph by Jessica Chou/The Guardian. Styling by Indya Brown.)

Today is the 79th birthday of Dr. Angela Y. Davis.

To celebrate her life and work, we're excited to share this excerpt from Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, an extended set of interviews with Dr. Davis. We're also offering 40% off both Abolition Democracy and her other incredible short work, Are Prisons Obsolete?.

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Angela Davis, you are probably one of the top five most important black women in American history. In 1974, your book Angela Davis: An Autobiography was published by Random House. Since then it has become a classic of African-American letters that is central to the traditions of black women writers and black political thinkers. In many ways your autobiography also harkens back to the tradition of black slave narratives. How do you see this work now with thirty years hindsight?

Well, thanks for reminding me that this is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my autobiography. At the time I wrote the book I did not see myself as a conventional autobiographical subject and thus did not locate my writing within any of the traditions you evoke. As a matter of fact, I was initially reluctant to write an autobiography. First of all, I was too young. Second, I did not think that my own individual accomplishments merited autobiographical treatment. Third, I was certainly aware that the celebrity—or notoriety—I had achieved had very little to do with me as an individual. It was based on the mobilization of the State and its efforts to capture me, including the fact that I was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. But also, and perhaps most importantly, I knew that my potential as an autobiographical subject was created by the massive global movement that successfully achieved my freedom. So the question was how to write an autobiography that would be attentive to this community of collective struggle. I decided then that I did not want to write a conventional autobiography in which the heroic subject offers lessons to readers. I decided that I would write a political autobiography exploring the way in which I had been shaped by movements and campaigns in communities of struggle. In this sense, you can certainly say that I wrote myself into the tradition of black slave narratives.

In what way do you think that the black political biography plays a role within this tradition of American letters?

Well of course the canon of American letters has been contested previously, and if one considers the autobiography of Malcolm X as an example, which, along with literature by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, that has clearly made its way into the canon, one can ask whether the inclusion of oppositional writing has really made a difference. Has the canon itself has been substantively transformed? It seems to me that struggles to contest bodies of literature are similar to the struggles for social change and social transformation. What we manage to do each time we win a victory is not so much to secure change once and for all, but rather to create new terrains for struggle.

Since we are talking about canons, it seems to me that your work fits within another tradition—the philosophical canon. If we think of the work of Boethius, of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Antonio Gramsci, Primo Levi . . . these are philosophical figures who have reflected upon their prison experiences. Do you see your work contributing to this philosophical tradition of prison writing, and if so, how?

Well, often times prison writing is described as that which is produced in prison or by prisoners, and certainly Gramsci’s prison notebooks provide the most interesting example. It is significant that Gramsci’s prison letters have not received the consideration they deserve. It would be interesting to read Gramsci’s letters alongside those of George Jackson. These are two examples of prison intellectuals who devoted some of their energies to the process of engaging critically with the implications of imprisonment—at a more concrete philosophical level. Personally, I found it rather difficult to think critically about the prison while I was a prisoner. So I suppose I follow in the tradition of some of the thinkers you mention. However, I did publish a piece while I was in jail that could be considered a more indirect examination of issues related to imprisonment. I wrote an article entitled “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,”10 which helped me formulate some of the questions that I would later take up in my efforts to theorize the relationship between the institution of the prison and that of slavery. I produced another piece—a paper I wrote for the conference for the Society for the Study of Dialectical Materialism, associated with the American Philosophical Association—entitled “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” Both pieces were published in The Angela Y. Davis Reader in 1998. If They Come in the Morning, the book on political prisoners I wrote and edited with Bettina Aptheker, is another example of my prison writing. Finally, I also wrote an extended study of fascism which was never published. But it was only after I was released that I felt I had sufficient critical distance to think more deeply about the institution of the prison, drawing from and extending the work of the prison intellectual George Jackson.

You were trained as a philosopher, yet you teach in a program called the History of Consciousness at the University of California. Do you think that philosophy can play a role in political culture in the United States? And, has philosophy influenced your work on aesthetics, jazz, and in particular, the way in which you analyze the situation of black women?

Absolutely, and I think that I draw from my background in philosophy in that I try to ask questions about contemporary and historical realities that tend to be otherwise foreclosed. Philosophy provides a vantage point from which to ask questions that cannot be posed within social scientific discourse that presumes to furnish overarching frameworks for understanding of our social world. I have earned a great deal from Herbert Marcuse about the relationship between philosophy and ideology critique. I draw particular inspiration from his work Counterrevolution and Revolt that attempts to directly theorize political developments of the late 1960s. But at the same time the framework is philosophical. How do we imagine a better world and raise the questions that permit us to see beyond the given?

There are beautiful pages in your autobiography about your relationship with Herbert Marcuse, who was your teacher and mentor, and part of the Frankfurt School. You spent some years in Frankfurt in the late 1960s. You also studied with Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Max Horkheimer. Do you see yourself as a critical theorist in this Frankfurt School sense?

Well, I’ve certainly been inspired by critical theory, which privileges the role of philosophical reflection while simultaneously recognizing that philosophy cannot always by itself generate the answers to the questions it poses. When philosophical inquiry enters into conversation with other disciplines and methods, we are able to produce much more fruitful results. Marcuse crossed the disciplinary borders that separate philosophy, sociology, and literature. Adorno brought music and philosophy into the conversation. These were some of the first serious efforts to legitimate interdisciplinary inquiry.

You ran twice as the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party in the United States before leaving the party in the 1990s. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, what role, if any, can communism play today?

Although I am no longer a member of the Communist Party, I still consider myself a communist. If I did not believe in the possibility of eventually defeating capitalism and in a socialist future, I would have no inspiration to continue with my political work. As triumphant as capitalism is assumed to be in the aftermath of the collapse of the socialist community of nations, it also continually reveals its inability to grow and develop without expanding and deepening human exploitation. There must be an alternative to capitalism. Today, the tendency to assume that the only version of democracy available to us is capitalist democracy poses a challenge. We must be able to disentangle our notions of capitalism and democracy so to pursue truly egalitarian models of democracy. Communism—or socialism—can still help us to generate new versions of democracy.

Do you think that the anti-globalization movement—the anti-WTO movement—can take up the role that Karl Marx assigned to the proletariat? In other words, can we say, “anti-globalists of the world unite”?

Well, this transition is a little too easy. But this is not to dismiss the importance of creating global solidarities, cross-racial solidarities attentive to struggles against economic exploitation, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia. And there is a link, it seems to me, between the internationalism of Karl Marx’s era and the new globalisms we are seeking to build today. Of course, the global economy is far more complicated than Marx could ever imagine. But at the same time his analyses have important contemporary resonances. The entire trajectory of Capital is initiated by an examination of the commodity, that seemingly simple unit of the capitalist political economy. As it turns out, of course, the commodity is a mysterious thing. And perhaps even more mysterious today than during Marx’s times. The commodity has penetrated every aspect of people’s lives all over the world in ways that have no historical precedent. The commodity—and capitalism in general—has insinuated itself into structures of feeling, into the most intimate spaces of people’s lives. At the same time human beings are more connected than ever before and in ways we rarely acknowledge. I am thinking of a song performed by Sweet Honey and the Rock about the global assembly line, which links us in ways contingent on exploitative practices of production and consumption. In the Global North, we purchase the pain and exploitation of girls in the Global South, which we wear everyday on our bodies.

The sweatshops of the world.

The global sweatshops. And the challenge is, as Marx argued long ago, to uncover the social relations that are both embodied and concealed by these commodities.

There is a great tradition of African-American political thought that has been deeply influenced by Marxism and communism. But one way that we sometimes talk about black political thought is in terms of two figures in tension. For example, there are the comparisons made by John Brown versus Frederick Douglass; Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois; Malcom X versus Martin Luther King. And in this we are able to discuss the tensions between black nationalism and assimilation or integration. How do you see yourself in relationship to the tension between nationalism and integration?

Well, of course it is possible to think about black history as it has been shaped by these debates in various eras. And we shouldn’t forget the debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. But I actually am interested in that which is foreclosed by the conceptualization of the major issues of black history in terms of these debates between black men. And I say men because the women always tend to be excluded. Where, for example, do Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells stand in these debates? But I am interested precisely in what gets foreclosed by this tension between nationalism and integration. And perhaps not primarily because the actors are male, but because questions regarding gender and sexuality are foreclosed.

So you see your work as contesting this way of viewing the black tradition of political thought . . .

Yes.

. . . that way of making sense of integration.

Exactly.

So you wanted to displace the focus and say there’s another way in which black political thought can proceed.

Absolutely, and I think that the assumption today that black political thought must either advocate nationalism or must disavow black formations and black culture is very misleading.

Yes, but one of the things that is attributed to globalization is the end of nationalisms. Do you think that there is a role for black nationalism in the United States? Has it become entirely obsolete, an anachronism?

Well, in one sense it has become obsolete, but in another sense one can argue that the nationalisms that have helped to shape black consciousness will endure. First of all, I should say that I don’t think that nationalism is a homogeneous concept. There are many versions of nationalism. I’ve always preferred to identify with the pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois who argued that black people in the West do have a special responsibility to Africa, Latina America, and Asia—not by virtue of a biological connection or a racial link, but by virtue of a political identification that is forged in struggle. We should be attentive to Africa not simply because this continent is populated by black people, not only because we trace our origins to Africa, but primarily because Africa has been a major target of colonialism and imperialism. What I also like about Du Bois’s pan-Africanism is that it insists on Afro-Asian solidarities. This is an important feature that has been concealed in conventional narratives of pan-Africanism. Such an approach is not racially defined, but rather discovers its political identity in its struggles against racism.

In addition to the recent thirtieth anniversary of your autobiography, we are also celebrating fifty-plus years of Brown v. Board of Education. Do you think that the forces of black integration, the forces of civil rights, have been betrayed and somehow rolled-back by the past two decades of Rehnquist serving as the Reagan-appointed chief justice?

The promise of those struggles has been betrayed. But I don’t think it is helpful to assume that an agenda that gets established at one point in history will forever claim success on the basis of its initial victories. It is misleading to assume that this success will be enduring, that it will survive all of the changes and mutations of the future. The civil rights movement managed to bring about enormous political shifts, which opened doors to people previously excluded from government, corporations, education, housing, etc. However, an exclusively civil rights approach—as even Dr. King recognized before he died—cannot by itself eliminate structural racism. What the civil rights movement did, it seems to me, was to create a new terrain for asking new questions and moving in new directions. The assumption that the placement of black people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the heart of government would mean progress for the entire community was clearly fallacious. In this, there were no guarantees, to borrow from Stuart Hall. The civil rights movement demanded access, and access has been granted to some. The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded. This is the only way the promise of freedom can be extended to masses of people.

But don’t you worry about the conservative court? I mean if we think about the role of the Warren Court in advancing the racial justice agenda . . .

Oh, absolutely!

The justices in today’s Supreme Court are very outspoken about their conservatism. What does this mean for racial justice in the future?

Of course I’m worried about that. The only point I’m attempting to make is that past struggles cannot correct current injustices and that people who tend to sit back and bemoan the betrayal of the civil rights movement are not prepared to imagine what might be necessary at this moment to challenge the conservatism of the Supreme Court. It’s very difficult to recognize contemporary racisms, especially when they are not linked to racist laws and attitudes and when they differently affect individuals who claim membership in racialized communities. I’m suggesting that we need a new age—with a new agenda— that directly addresses the structural racism that determines who goes to prison and who does not, who attends university and who does not, who has health insurance and who does not. The old agenda facilitates assaults on affirmative action, as Ward Connerly pointed out in his campaign for Proposition 209 in California. From his vantage point, what is most important today is the protection of the civil rights of white men.

Right. But very smart strategies are being used, ones that displace attention from issues of racial justice by speaking in terms of multiculturalism. An example is last year’s court decision in Michigan—Grutter v. Bollinger—that says that affirmative action must be administered for the sake of preserving multicul-turalism. What is the difference between multiculturalism and racial justice?

There’s a huge difference. Diversity is one of those words in the contemporary lexicon that presumes to be synonymous with antiracism. Multiculturalism is a category that can admit both progressive and deeply conservative interpretations. There’s corporate multiculturalism because corporations have discovered that it is more profitable to create a diverse work place.

Benetton multiculturalism.

Yes. They have discovered that blacks and Latinos and Asians are willing to work as hard, or even harder, than their white counterparts. But this means that we should embrace a strong politically inflected multiculturalism, which emphasizes cross-racial community and continued struggles for equality and justice. That is to say cross-racial community not for the purpose of creating a beautiful “bouquet of flowers” or an enticing “bowl of salad”—which are some of the metaphorical representations of multiculturalism—but as a way of challenging structural inequalities and fighting for justice. This version of multiculturalism has radical potential.

And along with the question of multiculturalism and racial justice, there’s another question that tremendously worries me personally, existentially. That is, we keep talking about the “browning” of the United States; that by the year 2050 a quarter of the American population will be of Latino descent. Do you think that this browning of America will entail an eclipse of the quest for racial justice?

Why should it?

Conservatives claim that questions of racial justice are essentially black questions . . . and that multiculturalism and racial integration of Latinos are separate from racial justice work, affirmative action or reparations.

Well, you see, that’s the problem, and it seems to me that contemporary ideologies encourage this assumption that racial competition and conflict are the only possible relationships across communities of people of color. It is as if these communities are always separate and never intersect. But, if one looks at the labor movement, for example, there are numerous historical examples of Black-Latino solidarity and alliances. Regardless of which community might be numerically larger, without such solidarities and alliances, there can be no hope for an anti-racist future. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that this is a new era. Conditions of postcoloniality here in the United States and throughout the world convey the message that the “West” has been forever changed. Europe is not what it used to be. It is no longer defined by its whiteness. The same thing, of course, is true in the U.S. among black people who are used to being the “superior minority.” We must let go of this claim. There is this prevalent idea that because black people established the historical anti-racist agenda for the United States of Amer- ica, they will always remain its most passionate advocates. But black people as a collective cannot live on the laurels of its historical past. We have recently received harsh lessons about conservative possibilities in black communities. “Black” can not simply be considered an uncontestable synonym of progressive politics. The work of progressive activists is to build opposition to conservatism—regardless of the racial background of its proponents. That black and Latino communities cannot find common cause is one example of this conservatism. Our job today is to promote cross-racial communities of struggle that arise out of common—and hopefully radical—political aspirations.

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Take 40% off Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy by Dr. Angela Y. Davis

For more writings against the prison industrial complex, check out Abolish!: A Reading List on Police, Prisons, and Protest

Revelations about U.S. policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world's leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted list." She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.

Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.

In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration," and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

A Free E-book Against Police Repression

"The ideas that can and will sustain our movement for total freedom and dignity of the people cannot be imprisoned, for they are to be found in the people, all the people, wherever they are. As long as the people live by the ideas of freedom and dignity, there will be no prison that can hold our movement down.” ―Huey P. Newton

Defund the Police. Abolish Prisons. Refuse State Repression.

Contents:
- “Fighting to Win” from Full Spectrum Resistance: Building Movements and Fighting to Win by Aric McBay (2019)
- “The Problem is Civil Obedience” from The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy, Updated and Expanded 2nd Edition by Howard Zinn (2009)
- “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison” from Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (2005)
- “Women in Prison: How We Are” by Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard), 1978, from Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (2014)
- “We Remember the Days of Glory but Tend to Forget They Were Fourteen-Hour Days” from ’68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (2019)
- “Even Liars Know the Truth” from ’68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (2019)
- “Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?: January 3, 1970” by Huey P. Newton (1969), from The New Huey P. Newton Reader, edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise (2020)”

“The overturning of Roe is the perfect time for every supporter of abortion rights to examine their own commitment to the cause and to discover how they, too, can meet this moment. … Thinking local will be key in a post-Roe environment in which more than ever access to abortion is determined by one’s geography.”

—Robin Marty, author of Handbook for a Post-Roe America, for New York Times Opinion

get the healthcare you need — by any means necessary

January 22, 2023 marks fifty years since the passage of the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade (1973), and seven months since it was unceremoniously overturned by our current Supreme Court justices. In the months since the Court declared that the federal government cannot mandate states to allow pregnant people to end their pregnancies, we have grappled with the consequences of this decision, strengthening existing abortion networks and funds and establishing new ones to help serve the now-significant portion of the US population that doesn’t have direct access to abortion.

In a recent interview with Truthout, Handbook for a Post-Roe America author Robin Marty stressed the importance of sharing information about self-managed abortion whenever possible. Marty says, “Technology is the biggest way of pushing it: websites, emails, Twitter, all of these electronic disseminations.” However, these methods of accessing information are not available to everyone, particularly those without reliable internet access or those who fear reprisal should a family member or partner gain access to their search history. “We need to make this easy,” Marty said. “There’s an easy way for people to be able to access medication. There’s an easy way for people to be able to perform their own abortions. This is not difficult. And the fact that the government is blocking them from it, that is cruelty. It’s nothing short of cruelty.”

That’s why we’re making DRM-free (easily shareable) copies of The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America available to download for free from our website through Monday, January 23rd. Download a copy for yourself or send it to a friend, family member, or anyone else who might one day need to terminate a pregnancy.

The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America is a comprehensive and user-friendly manual for understanding and navigating recent cataclysmic changes to reproductive rights law, to help you get the health care you need — by any means necessary. Activist and writer Robin Marty guides readers through a post-Roe America, offers waying to fight back, including: how to acquire financial support, how to use existing networks and create new ones, and how to, when required, work outside existing legal systems. She details how to plan for your own emergencies, how to start organizing, what to know about self-managed abortion care with pills and/or herbs, and how to avoid surveillance. The only guidebook of its kind, The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America includes new chapters that cover the needs and tools available for pregnant people across the country.

This second edition features extensively updated information on abortion legality and access in the United States, and approximately one hundred pages of new content, covering such topics as independent alternatives to Planned Parenthood, "auntie networks," taxpayer-funded abortions, and using social media wisely in the age of surveillance.

RECOMMENDED READING

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 

Now a major motion picture directed by Audrey Diwan

Translated by Tanya Leslie

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child.

This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.

In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

Inextricably connected to issues of autonomy, privacy, and sexuality, the abortion debate remains home base for the culture wars in America. Yet, there is more common ground than meets the eye in favor of choice. Sarah Erdreich’s Generation Roe delves into phenomena such as "abortion-recovery counseling," "crisis pregnancy centers," and the infamous anti-choice "black children are an endangered species" billboards. It tells the stories of those who risk their lives to pursue careers in this stigmatized field. And it outlines the outrageous legislative battles that are being waged against abortion rights all over the country. With an inspiring spirit and a forward-looking approach, Erdreich holds abortion up, unabashedly, as a moral and fundamental human right.  

Edited by Barbara Seaman and Laura Eldridge

Science journalist Barbara Seaman (1935-2008) spent the last forty years of her life on the front lines as a women's health advocate. Throughout her career, she was also a tireless supporter of other women's voices. Here she brings together an essential collection of essays, interviews, and commentary by leading activists, writers, doctors, and sociologists on topics ranging across reproductive rights, sex and orgasm, activism, motherhood and birth control. The more than two hundred contributors include Jennifer Baumgardner, Susan Brownmiller, Phyllis Chesler, Angela Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Molly Haskell, Shere Hite, Susie Orbach, Judith Rossner, Alix Kates Shulman, Gloria Steinem, Sojourner Truth, Rebecca Walker, Naomi Wolf, and many others.

It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of our friend, the writer Russell Banks. We only published one book with him, the oral history project Dreaming Up America, but he was one of the nine actors who showed up at the Steppenwolf Theatre to be filmed performing in Nelson Algren Live, to celebrate Nelson Algren's centennial, playing Algren's father, among other roles. We could always count on Russell. When we introduced him to the International Parliament of Writers, he eventually became president of their Cities of Refuge program. 

Russell made the literary life look beautiful because his literary life was beautiful. No one was more gregarious or more fun-loving. He could take on the heaviest projects with the lightest of hearts, or make it seem so, and so many of his books, Cloudsplitter and Rule of the Bone to name just two, were enduring, great works of American literature. He rarely repeated himself. God rest his soul.

—Dan Simon

Read the New York Times obituary for Russell Banks here

““The opposite of despair is not hope,” Anielewicz famously said. “It’s struggle.” That’s an apt description of the They Said No series, whose stated mission is to demonstrate “the importance of standing up for what you know is right.” Perhaps, if these books rally enough young activists to say no to fear and despair, future Politkovskayas and Anielewiczes will be able to lead long and happy lives.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“They Said No” is a historical fiction series for younger readers about protestors, activists, poets, revolutionaries, and other brave change-makers from around the world, and it emphasizes the importance of standing up for what you know is right. These are books based entirely on fact, and yet by fictionalizing a particular turning point in the person’s life, they humanize and make more accessible the events described. It’s not an approach you often see here in the US, and we hope it’ll find an avid readership. The series launches with two volumes, one on the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, and the other on the slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, each with a stunning portrait on the cover by illustrator François Roca. Subsequent volumes feature Aimé Césaire, Harvey Milk, George Sand, Victor Jara, Janusz Korczak, Rosa Luxemburg, and many others.

A searing portrait of the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and its young leader Mordechai Anielewicz.

Set before and during the days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Say No to Despair, part of the new They Said No series of histories, is a compelling and profound look at the final days of the life of Mordechai Anielewicz, leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization that led the insurrection against Nazi control in Poland during the Holocaust. Tracing the moments before and during the uprising up to Mordechai’s death in 1943, Hausfater delivers an uncompromising story of a revolutionary with a lesson all readers must take with them. Both disturbing and moving, thrilling and devastating, Anielewicz's story elucidates the immense power of resistance and the obligations we have to defend each other from violence and capture—no matter the costs. As Anielewicz himself puts it, “The opposite of despair is not hope, it’s struggle.” 

The deeply researched and partly imagined story of the fearless, internationally recognized journalist who was assassinated for believing that ‘words can save lives.’

Anna Politkovskaya: No To Fear tells the story of Anna Politkovskaya’s courageous life, narrated from the perspective of her longtime mentor and friend, the dissident writer Vassily Pachoutinsev. From their first meeting when she was a young literature student writing about poet Marina Tsvetaeva to her rise as an internationally recognized journalist, through Vassily we see Anna develop from junior reporter, to covering social issues after the fall of the Soviet Union, to becoming a fearless defender of human rights. Throughout the author brings the history to life by including key conversations that might have happened between them at pivotal moments in Politkovskaya’s life.

A scathing critic of the second Chechen war, Politkovskaya published most of her political work while working at the Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper at the forefront of the fight for free expression in Russia. For their outspokenness several members of its staff were murdered, presumably silenced by Russia's Vladimir Putin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Even after a poisoning attack and a mock execution, Politkovskaya persisted, adamant in her fight for her children's and grandchildren’s world, critiquing the situation in Chechnya and Putin until her assassination in 2006.

The narrator, Pachoutinsev, explains how her legacy lives on, inspiring those in pursuit of justice and the truth both in Russia and abroad. 

One of the greatest fighters for gay rights, here is the incredible story of Harvey Milk. 

Called ""the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States," Harvey Milk fought against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In the 1970s when Harvey is elected into office in San Francisco, homosexual relations are still against the law in the United States, and homophobia is being stoked by outspoken conservatives and the religious right. Just ten months after being elected, Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone are assassinated by a homophobic former colleague. The killer finds sympathy from his jurors and gets a light sentence. Milk's death becomes a metaphor for the experience of gays in America and his legend as a fighter for gay rights is cemented.

 The only story for young readers of the legendary Chilean songwriter and activist who became a symbol of peace amidst the brutality of Augusto Pinochet's regime.

On September 11, 1973, in Santiago de Chile, Augusto Pinochet took power and installed a dictatorship in place of the democratic government of President Salvador Allende. That day Victor Jara, a young songwriter and activist, poet and playwright is arrested and imprisoned with hundreds of other people in the Santiago stadium because of his association with the socialist opposition. His hands, so crucial to playing music, are broken by one of Pinochet's soldiers. He is executed in the stadium days later, but his protest songs will continue to resound to this day, as does his defiance in singing, "Venceremos," We Will Overcome, in the stadium.
 
Pinochet will die at an advanced age without having answered for his crimes that were committed in an effort to crush dissent. But we celebrate the brave and defiant artists and activists like Victor Jara who help us to remember our humanity in the face of oppressive dictatorships.

The only YA book to tell the story of Aimé Césaire, the rise of Negritude, and the crusade for Black African and Caribbean independence from colonial rule.

Aimé Césaire was a poet and, later, a politician from the Caribbean island of Martinique, who spoke out against the sufferings and humiliations endured by the peoples of the former French colonies. In Aimé Césaire: No to Humiliation, we are with Césaire in 1930s Paris. The young Martinican poet and his friends Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas are launching the Negritude movement. Together, they celebrate their Black African roots, protesting French colonial rule and policies of assimilation. They invite West Indians, Senegalese, Guyanese, and others to reject the suffocating French colonial presence and to take pride in their accents, their cultures and their shared histories. Aimé's great book-length poem, Notebook on the Return to the Native Land, and other works, are a global inspiration. His speeches enliven the crowds back home in Martinique, and he rises in the political arena, defending Martinican identity. As a writer, as the Mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy of the French National Congress, Aimé Césaire continues to write and to fight against colonial power and for the dignity of Black peoples everywhere.

The only YA book to tell the story of George Sand and the courageous fight for women’s rights in the 19th century.

George Sand was the most popular novelist of the mid-19th century, and the pen name of Amandine Aurore Dupin. Sand wasn’t looking for scandal or subterfuge by using a pseudonym, but for freedom to live and to write, which she found by dressing as a man, writing under a man’s name, and loving who and how she chose. Her actions were an affront to the prejudices of the 19th century and a formidable lesson in courage.

Young Aurore grew up torn between two women and two worlds: the conventional and narrow bourgeoisie of her paternal grandmother, who raised her in the countryside, and the modest, Parisian environment of her whimsical mother. Refusing to become the stereotype of femininity, she dreams of another world, where she can breathe, uncorseted, away from the strictures of social expectation. She ignores the slander and rumors that follow her, and builds a free woman's life, deeply respected by friends and contemporaries like Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and many others. Using her fame as a writer, she fights for women’s and workers’ rights. She is the model of an emancipated woman.

Three new titles from our Triangle Square Books imprint offer radical works of the imagination for young adult readers, ages 10 and up.

A necessary guide to critical media literacy for tweens and teens; a new, extensively updated edition of Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States; and the first and only YA biography of Kurt Vonnegut.

From foundations in critical thinking skills to practical tools and real-life perspectives, this book empowers young adult readers to be independent media users.

During the recent presidential election, “media literacy” became a buzzword that signified the threat media manipulation posed to democratic processes. Meanwhile, statistical research has shown that 8 to 18 year-olds pack more than eleven hours with some form of media into each day by “media multitasking.” Young people are not only eager and interested to learn about and discuss the realities of media ownership, production, and distribution, they also deserve to understand differential power structures in how media influences our culture.

The Media and Me provides readers with the tools and perspectives to be empowered and autonomous media users. The book explores critical inquiry skills to help young people form a multidimensional comprehension of what they read and watch, opportunities to see others like them making change, and insight into their own identity projects. By covering topics like storytelling, building arguments and recognizing fallacies, surveillance and digital gatekeeping, advertising and consumerism, and global social problems through a critical media literacy lens, this book will help students evolve from passive consumers of media to engaged critics and creators.

The seminal American history book for middle grade and high school readers, newly revised and updated for the centennial of Howard Zinn's birth.

With new contributions by Latinx scholar Ed Morales and adapter Rebecca Stefoff, based on newly available scholarship, here is a new and revised edition of Howard Zinn's seminal text, A Young People's History of the United States. A new chapter, introduction, conclusion and further updates throughout the book expand our understanding of Latinx history in the US through the political movements and cultural contributions of Latino Americans, as well as expanded coverage of Native history and Asian American activism. 
 
This now-classic work of radical and activist US history gives readers the viewpoints of workers, enslaved people, immigrants, women, Black people, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, American Indians, and others whose stories, and their impact, are rarely included in books for young people. Beginning with a look at Christopher Columbus's arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, then leading the reader through the struggles for worker's rights, women's rights, and civil rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ending with the recent protests against continued American imperialism, Howard Zinn presents a radical new way of understanding America's history. In so doing, he reminds readers that America’s true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices, not our military generals.

The first and only YA biography of the great American novelist and humanist comes out on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle, and many other brilliant novels and short stories, is one of our greatest American writers, often using science fiction, humor, and a humanist view of society, religion, politics, and human nature in his writing to show us the absurdity and the loveliness of life on earth. Born in 1922, Vonnegut's life was full of great fortune and great despair: his family was wealthy, but lost everyting in the market crash of 1929; he was the youngest son in a loving family, until his mother fell into a depression and committed suicide; he joined the army in WWII with great pride for our country, but experienced instead a world of destruction and horror. These and many others were the experiences that made him a writer. But how did he channel the highs and lows of his life into great writing?

Dan Wakefield, a friend and mentee of Vonnegut's for decades and a fellow Hoosier, distills the facts including Kurt's novels, essays, interviews, letters and personal experiences, into a beautiful telling of the making of a writer. Using the second person "You," it is as though Wakefield is a friend walking through Kurt's life alongside him, a guide for readers to his extraordinary life. Here is an American life, a burgeoning artist's life to inspire anyone who has read Vonnegut's work or who themselves aspire to write.

To celebrate the release of Whorephobia: Strippers on Art, Work, and Life, edited by Lizzie Borden, we are proud to share Borden’s preface to the collection, in which she both introduces readers to the book’s contributors and shares the unmistakeable impact of sex work on her artistic output.

---

PREFACE

by Lizzie Borden

In the late 1970s and early ’80s in downtown New York, my friends and I hung out in funky bar/strip clubs like the Baby Doll and the Pussycat Lounge to watch our friend Cookie Mueller go-go dance. Cookie, the inimitable John Waters actress and writer, supported herself and her son largely on Social Security checks, an occasional film part, and columns for downtown magazines. Go-go dancing was just one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle of her survival.

I was a filmmaker at the time. Downtown—meaning anything below Twenty-Third Street—was where those of us seeking to escape traditional, often middle-class backgrounds came to make art. We were the first gentrifiers of raw, industrial loft spaces that had once housed turn-of-the-century sweatshops. In this scene, sex was everywhere: We saw nude performances by dancers and theater performers in galleries and art spaces. We took the subway to Times Square to sneak into “tip-and-touch” places. We’d seen all of Fellini, and we revered Sam Fuller’s film The Naked Kiss. We scoffed at Vegas showgirls with their perfect android bodies. But despite the ubiquity of sex in the city’s artistic and commercial life at the time, I’d always been mystified by what went on in the strip clubs that seemed to populate every street, male bastions advertised by neon signs. Who were the strippers who worked in them? What were they expected to do? And what made them want to do it?

So, I was in awe of Cookie and the other downtown writers, painters, and musicians who performed at the clubs in their thrift-store costumes, platform shoes, layers of eyelashes, and tons of glitter, alongside plenty of working-class dancers from the outer boroughs. They were as far from Vegas showgirls or Fellini vixens as one could imagine. The ironic casualness with which they vamped to popular songs in their underwear, using a pole only to keep their balance, changed my concept of who strippers could be.

Their comfort eased my own leap into a world of paid sex.

I’d been working on a film for several years by then, editing eight hours a day and shooting whenever I had a few hundred dollars. At some point, I learned that a few of my closest artist friends worked for a madam in a small brothel. My best friend dared me to do it with her; she told me it could be a way to afford to keep my film going. This kind of working was like Cookie’s go-going—nothing like the media stereotypes of street-based hookers or high-class call girls. Whatever our job, and whoever the client, we were riffraff, wearing what we could glean from our closets in order to meet the madam’s requirements. (“Dress as if you’ve just had lunch with your in-laws and are on your way to meet your boyfriend.”) We were solving our own jigsaw puzzles so we could make our art.

My way of justifying working at the brothel was to tell myself it was part of what I considered my “real work” of writing and directing, so I always went to work armed with a tape recorder. After a few months, I had enough material for a script—and had received a grant for the film I’d been working on—and I quit the brothel. My friends eventually quit, too; we were privileged by our middle-class position to leave when we wished. Among us was a shared secret.

What we didn’t share was the bravado of the go-go girls, onstage for everyone to see. On the street, when we encountered one another after years of being out of contact, we’d exchange cautious looks coded with reminders of our decades-long agreement: we wouldn’t out one another about the brothel. Our camaraderie shrank under the suspicious pressure to deny the past, a pressure I now understand to be the result of our internalized societal whorephobia.

That term, whorephobia—which, back then, had yet to be coined—describes this shame perfectly.

 

* * *

 

My feature film Working Girls, about a day in the life of a group of women working in a brothel, was released in 1986. My cover story—except to the sex workers I befriended— was that my film was about “a friend.”

As part of the promotional campaign, I had the opportunity to meet even more incredibly dynamic women who worked in the sex industry when my producers and I assembled several panels featuring sex workers and activists for discussions after screenings. In San Francisco, I met Margo St. James, a founder of the group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), who advocated for the decriminalization of prostitution; Carol Leigh, the poet/writer/ activist who coined the term sex worker; strippers from the pre-unionized female-centric strip club the Lusty Lady; and Susie Bright, cofounder and editor of the woman-produced sex magazine, On Our Backs. In Los Angeles, I spoke with ex-cop turned sex worker and activist Norma Jean Almodovar, author of the bestselling book Cop to Call Girl. In New York, I had the pleasure of interviewing writer and spokeswoman for PONY (Prostitutes of New York) Tracy Quan; porn actor and educator Veronica Vera; pioneering porn film director Candida Royalle; and porn provocateur and artist Annie Sprinkle, whose cutting-edge performances included inserting a speculum to allow audience members to view her cervix. Later, I visited professional dominatrix (“prodomme”) Terence Sellers’s leather-walled dungeon.

All these encounters opened my eyes to the variety of jobs included in the world of sex work and the differing interests, desires, and needs of those who performed them. For example, escort Tracy Quan would never want to perform on a stage, but some strippers I knew might cross the line into seeing a regular client privately. Activist and self-proclaimed “whore” Carol Leigh was out and loud, but prodomme Terence Sellers operated in ultra-coded secrecy. Even so, we were all united against the exclusionary politics of radical feminist antiporn activists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, both early SWERFs, or sex worker exclusionary radical feminists, who argued that sex work was inherently degrading and oppressive. We all supported the decriminalization of sex work.

While political organizing by sex workers was active and passionate before the advent of social media, much of it was localized. In San Francisco, unrelenting activism around the Lusty Lady resulted in its becoming the first strip club to be unionized. In New York City, organizing took place through zines, in the back pages of weeklies, and on Al Goldstein’s cable show, Midnight Blue. Tracy Quan has written about how it shook things up for her when she became involved with PONY, stuffing envelopes at Annie Sprinkle’s apartment.

After I moved to Los Angeles in 2001, I met Jill Morley, who had come to LA to pitch a TV series based on stories she had written about her experiences go-go dancing in New York and New Jersey during the late eighties and early nineties. She also had a few stories by sister go-go dancers Debi Kelly Van Cleave, Susan Walsh, Terese Pampellonne, and Elissa Wald; and one by Cookie. The experiences relayed in these few stories could not have been more different. Debi Kelly Van Cleave and Terese Pampellonne both met their husbands in go-go clubs. But while Debi, a young, self-educated single mother, liked her customers and gained confidence onstage, Terese, a professional modern dancer, held the men in the go-go bars in disdain, refusing to give lap dances. Jill, more upbeat, used dancing as material for plays but hid her coke habit. Elissa Wald’s memoir evokes a Times Square club and its denizens with affection; Susan Walsh, a part-time reporter for the Village Voice, despised dancing; her dark stories grapple with existential questions. Susan disappeared in 1996 and is presumed murdered, her vanishing still under investigation. Cookie Mueller, too, died prematurely, in 1989, of HIV/AIDS.

These stories revealed their authors’ erotic imaginations, fears, desires. Dancing colored much of what they did, thought, and felt inside and outside the club. I asked Jill if I could publish the stories, and they became the foundation for this anthology.

At first, I wanted the book to remain within the time frame of the 1980s and ’90s in New York and New Jersey. It was an exciting time, before New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani erased the character of Times Square by closing porn theaters and peep shows. Susan Walsh—and, as I discovered later, Kathy Acker—performed in live sex shows there. Downtown, artists like Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, and Karen Finley used their own naked bodies in controversial, sexual works. Annie Sprinkle ruptured the boundaries between art and porn when she performed on downtown stages. I discovered later that writer Chris Kraus (I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker) also stripped during this time, as did the late novelist and slam poet Maggie Estep and the iconic ex-stripper/burlesque performer Jo Weldon.

Yet, strangely, I couldn’t find enough stories about stripping in this milieu to fill an entire anthology, although there were many about burlesque. Several writers did both. But burlesque is entirely theatrical, while stripping is transactional, creating gray areas often difficult to negotiate. Stripping itself wasn’t a uniform experience—sometimes dancers worked behind a barrier, as in peep shows; sometimes contact with customers led to full-service sex work. I considered adding stories about other kinds of sex work, but these jobs likewise seemed too different from stripping. Being a domme or an escort—operating one-on-one rather than in a group—can be very isolating, as can the more recent work of camming and sugar dating—young people seeking arrangements with older patrons. By contrast, every story I read about stripping involved, at least in part, relationships with other dancers in the club. I thought of a remark from Tracy Quan about how political organizing changed her view of her work:

I met people who worked in peep shows, in different kinds of brothels and dance clubs, on the street, in the domme sector. There were phone sex workers at our meets. I also had the chance to meet guys who sell sex. I loved having contact with people outside my scene and I developed this feeling that we’re like a nation, with provinces and constituencies, but still a nation of sex workers.

 

* * * 

 

Despite the challenge of finding them, I decided to stick to stripping stories only for this book.

When I met Jill Morley at the turn of the millennium, except for Lily Burana’s landmark 2001 memoir Strip City, a recounting of Burana’s affectionate farewell to stripping, published writing about stripping consisted mostly of memoirs primarily intended to be, as Jo Weldon has described them, “redemptive narratives.” But there soon appeared a new kind of writing about stripping, in the form of stripper blogs. Many blogs seemed to be journals and/ or advice columns, “dos and don’ts” for wannabe strippers; some discussed the best song sets to play for dancing, or the best stage lighting, or how to handle bad customers. The responses to these posts from fellow strippers revealed an immense desire for communication and community, and as the internet expanded, more such sites appeared. Distinct voices began to emerge, credited to intriguing names like #Sassylapdancer, Mounting&Counting, #survivetheclub, and DiaryOfAnAngryStripper. Tits and Sass, a website that published writings by workers from every branch of the sex industry, became a lively forum.

One of the most influential strippers who became prominent in this period was Jacq Frances, aka Jacq the Stripper, who was also a writer, stand-up comedian, and cartoonist. (She is now retired from stripping.) I met Jacq after she published her first book, The Beaver Show. She became a star with the publication of her second book, Striptastic!, a collection of cartoons about stripping, which she wrote and drew after interviewing hundreds of other strippers. From this work, she created her business brand and began to conduct workshops around the country, selling stripper “merch” that led to her apparel line, Strippers Forever. Now she is developing a TV series.

Lindsay Byron (aka Lux ATL), based in Atlanta, stopped dancing in 2016 and now likewise conducts empowerment workshops and retreats for women.

Overseas, Sassy Penny, now a lawyer, was one of the founding members of the East London Strippers Collective, which created fundraising events in which strippers modeled for life-drawing classes.

Antonia Crane, who authored the introduction to this book, has been stripping and writing about stripping for more than two decades. While her stories explore, among other things, aging and disappointment in relationships, she uses her powerful voice in print and social media to rally strippers in her organization, Strippers United (formerly Soldiers of Pole). Formed after the 2018 passage of FOSTA-SESTA—legislation ostensibly designed to stop sex trafficking but that, in fact, deprives sex workers of means of advertising on the internet through sites like Backpage and Craigslist, thereby forcing many onto the streets and subjecting them to arrest by the FBI—Strippers United protests against wage theft and other problems affecting sex workers and rallies for the decriminalization of the profession. Crane rages at marches and strikes, but her writing is laced with self-deprecating humor, wonder, and tenderness.

For the Incredible, Edible Akynos, founder of the Black Sex Workers Collective in New York City, the pull toward activism was fueled by the pervasive racism in strip clubs. While she ultimately quit stripping because of anti-Black hiring and firing practices, her lush writing lays bare the soul of a romantic with a sly sense of humor and great empathy for her clients.

AM Davies’s activism has been similarly unflagging, although she was recently forced to stop dancing due to an unthinkable accident, which she recounts here in her devastating piece.

Like Akynos, Selena the Stripper, a Black and Latine non-binary sex worker, stripper, podcaster, and writer who is now president of Strippers United, seeks to empower sex workers of all races and genders through political organizing.

Meanwhile, Kayla Tange performs an Asian identity in the clubs, but she reclaims her power by creating performance artworks that purposely confound the audience with their own stereotypes.

All their stories reveal the seeming contradictions that can coexist in this line of work. Although New York stripper, burlesque dancer, and activist Essence Revealed chronicles depression in her essay for this collection—a condition likewise caused by the degradations of anti-Blackness in the business—she’s equally honest about the perks of the job and the skills it has taught her, which she now uses to conduct online empowerment workshops.

While some strip clubs are notoriously dangerous, turning a blind eye to harassment and even rape, Reese Piper, who is on the autism spectrum, finds strip clubs safer for her than many other places because of their strict rules governing interaction between customers and dancers.

 

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Social media connections now provide a support system for strippers that wasn’t feasible a mere fifteen years ago. Many strippers now know one another online, if not always in real life, and support one another through lonely nights in clubs with no customers, fights with mean girls, family problems, romantic problems, legal problems, and the economic, safety, and health issues they have all confronted throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. In this book, I’ve tried to convey some of this sense of community by having some of the dancers interview each other. Jill Morley interviews Jacq Frances, Lindsay Byron, and Jo Weldon. Antonia Crane chose to be interviewed by Dr. Vanessa Carlisle, a scholar and professional domme. Chris Kraus was interviewed by Alison J Carr, a British academic and performance artist; Carr also interviews Sassy Penny, with whom she has worked in London. This is more than a village: it is a bustling, global community.

At the same time that it has brought them together, the internet has also made sex workers of all kinds more visible to the general public—not just their professional personas but also their personal lives. Yet, whether sex workers are being lauded by observers who claim to support them while declining to fight for their rights or being condemned by those who vilify all sex work, the habitual othering of sex workers persists, allowing those who have never done the job to maintain an imagined boundary between themselves and these ostensibly enigmatic, problematic figures. After Akynos addressed Antonia’s writing class at UCLA, Antonia asked about her goals for the Black Sex Workers Collective. Akynos invoked Jacq Frances:

Jacq has campaigns where she makes fun of the strait-laced job versus the stripper—that’s changing the conversation on how we look at work, at sex workers. And we want to do something like that, where we’re making comparisons to the Hollywood casting couch, to what sex workers might go through in a strip club, because I feel like the conversation of what sex work is and who we really are needs to shift. A lot of conversation about sex workers makes me uneasy because I feel like we’re talking about us as if we’re aliens. I just don’t want to hear a conversation like, “Let’s find out who sex workers are.” I want to ignore that and just talk about us like we’re regular, because we are regular. So instead of, “Let’s sit down with the sex workers and find out what their life is like,” it’s like, “I’m right in the grocery store line with you, boo; you just need to stop it.”

For some writers in this collection, stripping was an early aspiration. For Jo Weldon, it was a romantic ideal inspired by performers she admired in movies. For Susan McMullen, it was a joyful escape from the Canadian provinces with her best friend, Lindalee Tracey, of Not a Love Story. Jodi Sh. Doff ran away from a middle-class Long Island home with the intention of finding a pimp in Times Square; Akynos grew up near Playboy’s New York City office yearning to be a porn centerfold. But for many other contributors, including the go-go dancers whose stories originally inspired this book, stripping was and continues to be their only viable economic option for supporting other pursuits. One reason is the widespread stagnation of educational and job opportunities, especially for writers and artists, in the decades since Cookie Mueller danced. Like her, dancers today piece together their lives, stripping to augment teaching jobs and acting gigs and freelance work and grad school stipends while raising kids and caring for elders and trying to change the world. Postpandemic, their employment prospects have only worsened.

Whereas most of the contributors to this anthology who worked in the seventies or eighties danced for only a few years before moving on, these days, stripping is a lifestyle choice and a career for many. Some strippers now have over twenty or thirty years in the business. But although the empowerment narratives that have emerged in tandem with strippers’ increased visibility and their work’s longevity—embodied in performances by pop artists like Cardi B, music videos, twerking in thousands of self-posted videos on social media, films like Hustlers and Zola, TV series like P-Valley, and the popular embrace of pole dancing as a sport—may suggest acceptance, strippers today still face overwhelming stigma and whorephobia, in addition to other challenges. The stigma reaches back in time—two writers who danced briefly in the eighties and whose writing had been in this collection for years dropped out of this project because they were concerned about the negative impact it could have on their current careers. And labor conditions for dancers working today are worse than ever. Activists are trying to change media portrayals of their work and, along with these, the actual working conditions in clubs. When she is interviewed for TV, Antonia Crane demands that a sex worker be present on the production team, a request that frequently raises eyebrows. She and others have also called for hiring sex workers for meaningful paying jobs, as opposed to sometimes decorative “consultant” credits, on TV shows and films that portray sex worker characters. Crane is acutely aware of the darker realities behind the empowerment narratives. As she remarks in her interview with Dr. Vanessa Carlisle:

I find myself hungry for a less celebratory experience. Where’s the melancholy stripper who’s a woman of color, who’s queer, who gets turned away from her strip club because they have too many Black girls? Show me the story of the melancholic Black stripper. Show me the human, sad issues.

 

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Much has been written about strippers and sex workers by civilians, including feminist academics who, despite never having walked in their platform stilettos, feel entitled to argue for or against social and political programs that could have devastating effects on the lives of the sex workers they’re writing about. Watching strippers from the sidelines, I, like many observers, have been dazzled by their extraordinary confidence, enamored of their brave nakedness and sense of play. I wish I could catch it and internalize it by proxy.

For want of such an ability, I have instead gathered together the essays that make up this anthology. These stories, by strippers themselves, are glimpses into their lives of camaraderie and celebration, joy, pride, despair, frustration, self-doubt, and fear—lives that are complicated, contradictory, and bold. 

To celebrate the release our new hardcover edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler, we are proud to share renowned author Jesmyn Ward’s moving introduction to this reissue, in which Ward writes of the hope that Butler’s work affords its readers, offering a ray of light to those enduring tragedy.

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INTRODUCTION TO BLOODCHILD

By Jesmyn Ward

I can’t remember when I first read Octavia Butler’s work. It wasn’t in high school. I never encountered her in my coursework, as my required reading looked nothing like the books I found in my personal reading: I read The Last of the Mohicans, Catch-22, and The Catcher in the Rye and little there resonated with the world I knew. I had grown up in a poor/working-class family in rural Mississippi, where I spent years eating government cheese, red beans, and rice, and drinking powdered milk. I lived in my grandmother’s four-bedroom house with fourteen other relatives and watched my extended family bear the brunt of poverty and racism throughout my childhood and adolescence. I spent those years wandering through my school library stacks, finding books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Richard Wright, Gabriel García Márquez, and Margaret Atwood. I found sustenance in literary writers and in science fiction and fantasy writers, too, needing the escapism of that kind of storytelling, which I had been drawn to since I was a small child and first read Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley—but the only science fiction and fantasy I could find in my school library were by Frank Herbert, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Isaac Asimov.

I didn’t encounter Octavia Butler’s fiction in university, either. I majored in English, and I sought out creative writing classes and literature classes that specialized in the African Diaspora. I read African writers and Black British writers and Black American writers and Black Caribbean writers, but all the work I read was poetry and literary fiction. It was good to study these artists, to seriously consider the kind of work I had been starving for in high school, but even though I attended school in the mid- to late 1990s, when Octavia Butler was a living writer, full in her artistic flowering, I never found her work in the bookstore stacks or on the syllabi of my courses. I never really encountered any sci-fi or speculative fiction: when students submitted science fiction short stories or fantasy in creative writing workshops, my peers shunned them. They said the work was amateur, not serious, wasn’t about real people and therefore, real issues. I sat quietly at my desk, swallowing their critiques whole, quietly ashamed of the pleasure I got from reading sci-fi and fantasy.

I must have read Octavia Butler’s work for the first time in the early 2000s, when I was living in New York City as a young twenty-something, working as a publishing assistant. I had more money, not much, but more than I’d had in college and high school, so I’d take the train to The Strand, where the stacks stretched on and on. My browsing blossomed; I needed that. I was floundering through life. Tragedy had loosed me from my moorings, my understanding of what the world was and how it worked, and it sent me spinning: a drunk driver killed my brother Joshua in October 2000, and his killer was never held accountable for his death. I’d voted in my first presidential election and watched in confused horror as Bush was appointed by Supreme Court ruling. I’d watched smoke billow from the Twin Towers on 9/11 and then spent hours walking from midtown to Brooklyn, peppered in ash. I’d marched through Manhattan to protest Bush’s pre-emptive war with Iraq, foolishly thinking our collective uprising would have some kind of impact, bitterly disappointed when I discovered it did not. I’d visited home and jumped from my car’s window and swum through the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, and then lived in shock in the desolation of the aftermath.

I found Parable of the Sower by chance in The Strand’s stacks. I devoured it. Butler’s prose was forthright and rhythmic. Her imagery was stark and startling. Her character development was disturbingly true to what I knew of the world, of poverty, of desperate human beings. It was harrowing and dark, and it seemed to reflect some ineffable terrible truth I found mirrored in the world. It reminded me that worse presents were possible. I sought out more of her books and found Parable of the Talents, the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, and Bloodchild and Other Stories. In Bloodchild, Butler says this about readers: “Actually, I feel that what people bring to my work is at least as important to them as what I put into it.” In my twenties, I found this to be true, sunk in grief, bewildered at the savagery and terror of the 2000s; when I discovered Butler’s work, I discovered myself. I saw myself in her characters, empathized with them as they struggled to live in untenable worlds, in untenable circumstances. I knew they knew the taste of ash, the black scramble of floodwater.

I’m in my mid-forties now. If life revolves in cycles, I find myself in another crucible, another terrible span of time. The COVID-19 pandemic lingers and evolves, leaving weakened immune systems and millions of bodies in its wake. The Supreme Court struck down Roe, and the politicians in power can’t seem to grasp the urgency of the moment, to understand that not only are childbearing people uniquely disenfranchised by this ruling, but that we will die without access to abortion health care. My partner of thirteen years died at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, leaving me with two grieving children and the charge of living in a fractured, unthinkable present. His death tasks me with this: every day I must wake and live. I must choose to move and breathe and speak and believe that there can be good in this world, in humanity, even though this fresh grief invites a drift toward despair, even though, as the ill characters do in “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” I have wanted to claw out my own heart in hopelessness.

In multiple allusions in the preface and afterwords in Bloodchild, Butler alludes to the despair and bewilderment she encounters in her own life, and how she wrestles with it in her work. “Amnesty” is about an interpreter, kidnapped and tortured by aliens as a child, who works for and with that same alien race as an adult to improve communication between humans and their visitors. In the afterword to “Amnesty,” Butler writes that the story was inspired by “the things that happened to Doctor Wen Ho Lee of Los Alamos—back in the 1990s when I could still be shocked that a person could have his profession and his freedom taken away and his reputation damaged all without proof he’d actually done anything wrong.” “Speech Sounds” follows a pandemic survivor who has witnessed the devolution of humanity after a fast-spreading disease robs those left of speech or the ability to read and write. In the afterword to “Speech Sounds,” Butler writes: “‘Speech Sounds’ was conceived in weariness, depression, and sorrow. I began the story feeling little hope or liking for the human species, but by the time I reached the end of it, my hope had come back. It always seems to do that.” She elaborates on this in the afterword to “Bloodchild,” the title story, with:

When I have to deal with something that disturbs me . . . I write about it. I sort out my problems by writing about them. In a high school classroom on November 22, 1963, I remember grabbing a notebook and beginning to write my response to news of John Kennedy’s assassination. Whether I write journal pages, an essay, a short story, or weave my problems into a novel, I find the writing helps me get through the trouble and get on with my life.

This is how Butler finds her way in a world that perpetually demoralizes, confounds, and browbeats: she writes her way to hope. This is how she confronts darkness and persists in the face of her own despair.

This is the real gift of her work, a gift that shines in Bloodchild: in inviting her readers to engage with darker realities, to immerse themselves in worlds more disturbing and complex than our own, she asks readers to acknowledge the costs of our collective inaction, our collective bowing to depravity, to tribalism, to easy ignorance and violence. Her primary characters refuse all of that. Her primary characters refuse to deny the better aspects of their humanity. They insist on embracing tenderness and empathy, and in doing so, they invite readers to realize that we might do so as well. Butler makes hope possible. That hope might be tenuous, and our lives might not be what we envisioned in these ruptured realities, but new ways of being are near. These are futures where we might turn from despair and build another family after a pandemic. Where we might elect to foster life and connection. Where we might wake every day and choose to breathe, to walk, to do work and heal ourselves and others even though we struggle with suicidal ideation, with nihilism, with grief. Bloodchild is a template for how to survive, how to thrive, in broken worlds, and Butler’s work is ever prescient, ever powerful. Her voice: a rough balm.

—Jesmyn Ward

DeLisle, Mississippi, August 16, 2022

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On the 100th anniversary of his birth, we remember our dear friend and Seven Stories author Kurt Vonnegut, grandmaster of American literature, whose imaginative, empathetic, and generous works of fiction and non-fiction continue to delight readers of all ages even 15 years after his death. 

To celebrate his life and work, we're offering a 30% discount on all books written by, written about, and books that feature writing by Kurt Vonnegut, until 11:59pm EST on November 14, 2022.