Thursday 3/6 at 6:00PM

Labyrinth Books

122 Nassau Street

How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence.

“Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, these readings engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.

Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, and Paper Graveyards. He has curated installations and exhibitions at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art in East Jerusalem, and the Princeton University Art Museum.  

Sara Nadal-Melsió is presently Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program.  She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, SOMA in Mexico City, and New York University. She is the co-author of Alrededor de/ Around, and the editor of two special issues on cinema, The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism and The Militant Image: Temporal Disturbances of the Political Imagination. She has cocurated a show on Allora & Calzadilla for the Fundació Tápies in Barcelona and has written a book essay about it, To Be All Ears, To Be in the World: Acoustic Relation in Allora & Calzadilla, as well as edited a companion volume on the Puerto Rican crisis, A Modest Proposal: Puerto Rico’s Crucible. Her book Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Concept is forthcoming from Zone Books.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Her many honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship; the Association of American Geographers’ Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice; and the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice.