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Institute for Anarchist Studies
Email Newsletter

October 2005



IAS News 012 :: October 2005
Newsletter of the Institute for Anarchist Studies

In this Issue:

1 Welcome
2 Congratulations Summer 2005 IAS Grant Recipients!
3 Launching the 2005 Fund-raising Campaign
4 Perspectives on Anarchist Theory: Fall 2005 Preview
5 From the Organizers of RAT 2005
6 The IAS Speakers Bureau



Welcome

Many changes have taken place since the last Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) e-newsletter, and it is a pleasure to share some of that news with you, our electronic network of comrades, colleagues, and supporters.

Over the past several months, the IAS has gone about the challenging work of decentralizing our day-to-day administrative tasks. We are grateful for the patience and support we received from many IAS friends and donors during this transition period.

In the spring, we welcomed five new IAS board members: Rob Augman and Erika Biddle (New York), Mark Lance (Washington, DC), and Louis-Frédéric Gaudet and Helen Hudson (Montreal).

Sadly, the spring also brought farewells. Michael Caplan, a former IAS director, stepped down from the board in order to pursue new family and work commitments. Chuck Morse, the founder of the IAS, coeditor of the IAS's biannual journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, and the backbone of the organization since its inception, also resigned from the board in order to embark on new projects. We will miss both Michael and Chuck, and thank them for their invaluable contributions to the organization.

In June, the IAS awarded over $1,000 in grants for essay-length works to three radical writers. We would like to congratulate grant recipients Kazembe Balagun, Evan Daniel, and Ramor Ryan, and we encourage you to find out more about their projects below.

Over the last weekend of September, the fifth annual Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference unfolded successfully in Plainfield, Vermont. Coorganizers Cindy Milstein and John Petrovato are already planning next year's conference; you can read more in this e-newletter.

The IAS is also launching a Speakers Bureau this fall, drawing from a network of dynamic writers, activists, and academics. And the fall 2005 issue of Perspectives will be available within days. At eighty pages, it is the largest issue of the journal ever, and we have included the table of contents below to whet your appetite.

In order to sustain our grant program for radical writers and pursue the rest of these projects over the coming year, we need your support. This e-newsletter marks the beginning of the 2005 IAS Fund-raising Campaign. Our goal is to raise $15,000 by January 2006.All donations to the IAS come from individuals and collectives who aresympathetic to an anarchist vision, and want to contribute to critical scholarship - grounded in contemporary social movements - that scrutinizes systems of domination while also exploring nonhierarchical forms of social organization. We welcome and appreciate all donations, no matter how small, as tangible expressions of mutual aid. Please take the time to read more about the IAS's projects and our 2005 fund-raising campaign, and consider contributing today.

With thanks,
andrea
For the IAS

Congratulations Summer 2005 IAS Grant Recipients!

The IAS awards a total of $2,000 annually to radical writers and translators of essay-length works that treat themes of importance to the development of contemporary anarchist theory and practice. We are pleased to announce the recipients of the summer 2005 IAS grants. Each author was awarded $350 to support the completion of their project.

Kazembe Balagun was awarded a grant for Queering the X: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and the Third World. The essay is an intellectual intervention in the debates about gender, race, and sexuality. By promoting an intertextual dialogue between Malcolm X and Baldwin, the essay will foreground the queer influences in both men's analyses of racial oppression. Showing how both Malcolm and James's vision of a just society included aspects of an erotic, the essay will shift much of the rhetorical essentialism from both men's work and illustrate means by which radical/revolutionary activists can use both in an anti-authoritarian framework.

Kazembe is a New York-based cultural historian and frequently contributes articles to the NYC Indypendent. He is also a member of Estacion-Libre - People of Color in Solidarity with Chiapas.

Evan Daniel was awarded a grant for Rolling for the Revolution: A Transnational History of Cuban Cigar Makers in Havana, South Florida, and New York City, 1868-1895. From the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, Cuban torcedores (cigar makers) exemplified the highly autonomous work culture of skilled artisans and their newspapers, while workplace orators, or lectors, articulated an explicitly internationalist anarchist ideology. Despite this internationalist orientation, Cuban cigar makers played a pivotal role in the fight against Spanish rule by raising funds, disseminating propaganda, and eventually participating in armed struggle. This essay will ask how and why Cuban cigar makers who were anarchist internationalists ultimately supported a nationalist endeavor, adopting and adapting both anarchism and nationalism in order to respond to the cigar maker's changing social and material realities.

Evan lives in New York City, where he is a processing archivist at the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, and a PhD student in history and political science at the New School for Social Research.

Ramor Ryan was awarded a grant for Zapatista Spring: Autonomy and a Water Project. The essay will tell the story of a solidarity project to install a potable water system in a Zapatista base community located on occupied land. Offering their technical knowledge, solidarity, and enthusiasm for the Zapatista struggle for autonomy and self-determination, a group of anarchists from Mexico City, the United States, and Europe were sent by the Zapatista Revolutionary Clandestine Committee to the village of Rafael Moreno deep within the Lacandon Jungle. Living and working with the companeros for ten weeks, the activists experienced rebel joy and the wretched hardships of abject poverty in equal measure. "Zapatista Spring" will explore the notion of international solidarity, and examine questions provoked by the water project experience: How are meaningful bridges of solidarity built between privileged activists of the North and those of the disadvantaged South? When is solidarity no more than charity, and when does it really help build autonomy?

Ramor lives in Chiapas and has worked on a dozen water projects in different regions of the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas. His book Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile

Launching the 2005 Fund-raising Campaign

For nearly a decade, the IAS has worked to support the development of the theoretical tools necessary for critiquing systems of domination and envisioning alternatives to them. At a time when genuinely radical movements in North America are at low ebb, we believe that it is more important than ever to create opportunities for anti-authoritarians to analyze contemporary challenges and strategies, and reflect critically on movement practices and dilemmas. Through our grant program and other efforts, the IAS supports and sustains forums in which such theoretical work is possible, and contributes to nurturing a global community of anarchist scholars and public intellectuals.

Over the past ten years, the IAS has funded over fifty projects by authors from countries around the world, including Argentina, Canada, Germany, South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the United States. We have funded movement research, anthologies, translations, historical studies, online publications, and books that serve as organizing tools - and others that read like pirates' tales. Last winter, the IAS modified its grant program to fund and provide editorial as well as publishing assistance to writers and translators of essay-length works only.

The IAS has been able to offer this unique and crucial support thanks to the generosity of our comrades and allies around the world, and we are asking for your assistance once again. We are trying to raise $15,000 by January 2006 in order to continue to award grants to radical writers, develop our publishing efforts, and support ourother projects.

Your donation will help the IAS to:

* Award US$2,000 in grants to writers and translators of essay-length works that treat themes of importance to the development of anarchist theory and practice;

* Provide editorial and publishing assistance to the essay writers and translators we fund. Many completed essays will be published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory or in a new books series to be published in collaboration with AK Press;

* Sponsor the annual Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, a scholarly space in which to reexamine and reinvigorate the social and political tradition of anarchism;

* Publish Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, our biannual journal for theoretical debates and projects reflective of a diversity of anti-authoritarian tendencies; and

* Coordinate our new Speakers Bureau.

As an expression of our appreciation for your support, we are offering book gifts (http://www.anarchist-studies.org/support/books) to IAS donors who reside in the United States or Canada, thanks to the good people at Raven Books in Amherst and Boston, Massachusetts. IAS donors who give US$25 or more are entitled to receive at least one great book from their collection. All donors will receive an annual subscription to Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.

Please donate today!: http://www.anarchist-studies.org/support/donate

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory: Fall 2005 Preview

The fall 2005 issue of Perspectives on Anarchist Studies will soon be published! To entice prospective readers, we offer a sneak preview of the contents of this upcoming issue.

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory
Volume 9, Issue 1, Fall 2005

COLUMNS
What's Happening
By John Petrovato

Words and Revolution:
Regarding a Moratorium on "Freedom" and "Democracy"
By Alexis Bhagat

FEATURES

Equality and the Avoidance of Politics
By Todd May

Anarchism in Bolivia: Through the Writing of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

A Mestizo's Identity: Concerning a 1929 Anarchist Manifesto
By Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

The Voice of the Peasant
By Luis Cusicanqui
Translated and introduced by Alejandro de Acosta

A Brief History of Anarchism in Bolivia
By Zulema Lehm A. and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Translated and introduced by Melissa Forbis and Cale Layton

Argentina, December 19 and 20, 2001: A New Type of Insurrection
By Colectivo Situaciones
Translated and introduced by Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza

Four Questions for Anarchist Art
By Josh MacPhee

ROUNDTABLE

"Neither Butchers nor Lunatics": New Anticapitalist Organizing in Beirut
By Mary Foster and Jerome Klassen

TRIPTYCH

International Solidarity
By Mark Lance, Ramor Ryan, and Andréa Schmidt

BOOK REVIEWS

Reclaiming a "Hidden" Tradition: Is Anarchist Economics Hitting the Mainstream?
By Eric Laursen

Operaismo, Autonomia, and the Emergence of New Social Subjects
By Stevphen Shukaitis

Walking on the Edge of Revolt
By Louis-Frédéric Gaudet

Species of Anarchist Memory
By Alexander K. Hirsch

IAS UPDATES

Every donor to the IAS's 2005 fund-raising campaign will automatically receive a year-long subscription to Perspectives.

Otherwise, subscription rates are as follows:

United States and Canada: US$10 per year.
All other countries: US$15 per year.
Institutions US$20 per year.
Bulk copies are available at a discount.

Please make checks payable to:
Institute for Anarchist Studies
P.O. Box 1664
Peter Stuyvesant Station
New York, NY 10009

Past Issues of Perspectives: http://www.anarchist-studies.org/publications/perspectives

From the Organizers of RAT 2005

To all those who made the trek to Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) 2005, we'd like to extend our thanks for contributing to the serious conversations and camaraderie that mark this annual conference. (And for those who didn't attend, we hope to see you next year.) We trust that all sorts of good intellectual as well as political connections were made, even as we also helped to further the ongoing "renewal" of anarchist scholarship and praxis together. And of course, we look forward to RAT 2006, and even more challenging topics as well as debates.

As we mentioned at RAT 2005, please feel free to send along your comments about this year and/or suggestions for the next conference. And consider proposing a presentation or panel at RAT 2006 (stay tuned to http://www.homemadejam.org/renew for details; we'll send a call for proposals via the IAS e-newsletter too). We are also looking for suggested questions as the basis for debates next year, so pass any ideas along to us in the coming weeks and months.

Finally, over the coming months, our wonderful team of volunteer audiotapers should have various RAT 2005 presentations available for your listening pleasure. We hope to send out links to the first batch of recordings in the November IAS e-newsletter.

With warmth and solidarity,
Cindy Milstein
and John Petrovato
RAT coorganizers

Renewing the Anarchist Tradition: http://www.homemadejam.org/renew/

The IAS Speakers Bureau

The IAS is pleased to announce our new Speakers Bureau. The Speakers Bureau is a project that arranges speaking engagements for many diverse and dynamic thinkers drawn from our network of scholars and activists.

Speakers and Topics

Ashanti Alston - is a former member of the Black Panther Party and an ex-political prisoner. He is a board member of the IAS and publishes the Zine "Anarchist Panther." He has been a guest lecturer at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, speaking on the Panthers and the history of black nationalist movements. He recently spent six months in Chiapas studying the autonomous structure of Zapatista communities and writing his memoirs. He resides in New York, where he served as the regional coordinator for Critical Resistance, a national organization committed to ending the prison-industrial complex.

Topics: Lessons from the Black Panther Party; history of black nationalist movements; black anarchism; and the Zapatistas.

Kazembe Balagun - is a writer/educator living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College with a BA in Africana studies and philosophy, he was a member of the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM). He is currently a member of Estacion Libre, a people of color organization in solidarity with Chiapas. His articles have appeared in The Indypendent, Left Turn magazine, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.

Topics: Queer theory; African American cultural history; and black liberation.

Paul Glavin - is a writer, an acupuncturist, and an IAS board member. He has been active in social and political movements for over twenty years. Paul is a founding member of the Youth Greens, an ecological anarchist organization, as well as a former member of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, the Free Society Journal Collective, and the AWOL political collective. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and has been published in Z Magazine, Clamor, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, and The New Formulation.

Topics: Anti-authoritarian organizing; capitalism, the state, and ecology; an anarchist perspective on the Black Panther Party; and the radical roots of acupuncture detox in the revolutionary movements of the 1960s.

Mark Lance - is a professor of philosophy, and professor of justice and peace at Georgetown University. He is widely published on philosophy language, logic, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Mark is an IAS board member, and coeditor of the interdisciplinary journal Peace and Change. He has also been an activist on a wide range of issues for twenty years, and publishes in a number of activist journals. Currently, Mark is writing a book on "constructive anarchism."

Topics: Palestine and the duties of North Americans; taking democracy seriously; why do revolutions fail; constructive anarchism and the meaning of community; the responsibilities of citizenship in a time of empire; taking terrorism seriously; and academic lectures on a range of issues in philosophy.

Todd May - is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He teaches and writes on recent French thought, particularly poststructuralism. Todd is the author of The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. In addition to his academic work, he has been involved in liberation struggles from gay rights to antiapartheid work to the Palestinian rights struggle.

Topics: The intersection of philosophy and anarchism; poststructuralism; and Palestine.

Cindy Milstein - is a coorganizer of the Renewing Anarchist Tradition conference, an IAS board member, and a member of the Free Society Collective and Black Sheep Books collective in Montpelier, Vermont. Her work appears in anti-authoritarian periodicals and several recent anthologies, including Globalize Liberation (City Lights Books), Confronting Capitalism (Soft Skull Press), and Only a Beginning (Arsenal Pulp Press).

Topics: Anarchism; contemporary anticapitalist and anti-authoritarian movement(s); direct democracy; globalization; changing character of statecraft and politics; and contemporary issues from an anarchist perspective.

Ramor Ryan - an Irish anarchist, has lived in Chiapas, Mexico for many years. He has also worked as a journalist in print, radio and television. His writing has appeared in several anthologies and a variety of magazines. Ryan's first book, Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile, will be published by AK Press this spring.

Topics: Anti-imperialist struggles in Ireland and Latin America; anti-capitalism; Zapatistas and grassroots autonomy.

Andréa Schmidt - lives and works from Montreal. She has organized around migration justice issues, reported from occupied Iraq and Haiti, and written dispatches on international solidarity and anti-imperialism. Andréa is an IAS board member, and an editor of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.

Topics: Anti-imperialism inside fortress North America; Canadian imperialism; anarchism and direct action; and international solidarity.

Bill Weinberg - is an award-winning journalist and editor of the online magazine World War 4 Report (WW4Report.com), which was launched immediately after the 9-11 attacks. He is the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso, 2000), and War on the Land: Ecology and Politics in Central America (Zed, 1991). As a correspondent for Native Americas, the quarterly journal of Cornell University's American Indian Program, he has won three awards from the Native American Journalists Association for his reportage on indigenous issues from Nicaragua to Arizona. He is currently working on a book about Plan Colombia and indigenous resistance movements in the Andes. Bill lives on New York's Lower East Side.

Topics: Latin America; Plan Colombia; the Zapatistas; indigenous movements (especially in the Andes, Mexico, and Central America); secular Left resistance in Iraq and the Islamic world; the "war on terrorism" and the corporate agendas it masks; and building alternative media.

Some speakers are able to present to French- or Spanish-speaking audiences.

To schedule a speaking engagement or coordinate around a speaker passing through your area, please contact us by e-mail or post. An inquiry form is available on our Web site.

Host organizations are expected to provide all transportation costs, and an honorarium and lodging or lodging costs. A portion of the honorarium will go to support the work of the IAS, and the rest to support the work of the speaker.

Contact Us:
Institute for Anarchist Studies
P.O. Box 1664
New York, NY 10009

Phone: (917) 753-2663 E-mail: info@anarchist-studies.org

Speakers Bureau Inquiry Form: http://www.anarchist-studies.org/article/articleview/108/1/2



That's all for this issue of IAS News. If you think any of this information would be of value to a friend or organization, please feel free to forward this newsletter.

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