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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Jeff Wilson Presents: The Instinct For Cooperation

June21 at Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse in Baltimore, MD

An astonishing graphic novel that brings Chomsky's political analysis to bear on real people's stories on the frontlines of America's struggle for economic justice and human dignity, The Instinct for Cooperation innovatively balances those real-life stories of struggle with conversations the author has had with Chomsky on how best to understand them. Although the themes are wide-ranging, this book is ultimately about the importance and need for spaces of resistance in countering state and other institutional forms of violence. For example, when discussing the removal of books by police and sanitation workers from Zuccotti Park in November of 2011, Chomsky paused to say "Arizona knows all about that," referring to the 2010 ban of Mexican American Studies in Tucson schools under Arizona House Bill 2281, which deemed classes that taught "ethnic solidarity" to be illegal. Rather than footnote the reference, Wilson tells that story. Like Joe Sacco's animated political journalism, this book offers a unique perspective on current issues, while providing a major contribution to the understanding of Chomsky's political theories.

Jeffrey Wilson is a graphic novel author and Ph.D. Candidate in Geography at the University of Arizona. He published one of the first graphic novel interviews to appear in a peer-reviewed journal. His current comic book titled The Instinct for Cooperation: A Graphic Novel Conversation with Noam Chomsky is set for release on Seven Stories Press in March 2018. He is beginning work on his second book exploring community self defense against housing eviction in Detroit. The book is based on 35 interviews. You can learn more about that project here: detroitersresistingeviction.com

Born in Philadelphia in 1928, Noam Chomsky is known throughout the world for his political writings, activism, and for for his groundbreaking work in linguistics. A professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, Chomsky gained recognition in academic circles for his theory of transformational grammar, which drew attention to the syntactic universality of all human languages. But it is as a critic of unending war, corporate control, and neoliberalism that Chomsky has become one of the country’s most well known public intellectuals. The 1969 publication of American Power and the New Mandarins marked the beginning of Chomsky’s rigorous public criticism of American hegemony and its lieges. Since then, with his tireless scholarship and an unflagging sense of moral responsibility, he has become one of the most influential writers in the world. Chomsky is the author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward S. Herman), Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, and over one hundred other books. To this day Noam Chomsky remains an active and uncompromising voice of dissent.

June21, 6.30pm

30 W North Ave
Baltimore, MD 21201 United States