usable pasts

To speak of usable pasts is to adopt an active and pragmatic stance toward history. The usable past is an interpretive strategy that approaches history as a renewable resource in complex service of the present. This volume works in that spirit, bringing together 164 written documents, 20 images, and 32 short essays that reflect a wide mix of organizations, campaigns, tactics, and visions. Grouped into thematic sections that reflect multiple approaches to different sites of struggle and to struggle on different scales, the book’s sources reflect the modes of thinking and organizing among left-wing US social movements from 1973 to 2001. 

Click here to download the introduction to Remaking Radicalism.
Click here to download the Table of Contents. 

​Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele is a Brooklyn-based educator and organizer with decades of local, national, and international experience of human rights work. Lumumba currently serves on the boards of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute and the Center for Constitutional Rights and is senior community organizer at the University of Washington Bothell.
 
Umayyah Cable is an assistant professor of American culture and film, television, and media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Their research and teaching interests span the fields of ethnic studies, film and media studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, with a particular focus on the roles that art, film, and media play in the mobilization of Palestine solidarity activism in the United States.
 
Marisa Chappell is an associate professor of history at Oregon State University. She is the author of The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America and has written about social policy, social movements, and inequality in recent United States history for both academic and public audiences.
 
Jih-Fei Cheng is an assistant professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Scripps College. He has been involved in HIV/AIDS social services, media production and curation, and queer of color grassroots organizations. His current book project examines the science, media, and activism of AIDS in relation to the colonial history of virology and the historical transformations of global capitalism.
 
Norma Stoltz Chinchilla is a professor emeritus from the Department of Sociology and the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University Long Beach. She was an activist in the Central American solidarity and sanctuary movements of the 1980s.
 
Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis was the founding executive director of Queers for Economic Justice and the former director of SAGE/Queens. He is currently an assistant professor of social work at Seattle University. He is the co-editor of the three-volume book series After Marriage Equality.
 
Chris Dixon is a longtime anarchist organizer, writer, and educator. Originally from Alaska, he lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin territory, where he is a member of Punch Up Collective. His most recent book is Another Politics: Talking across Today's Transformative Movements. Find him at writingwithmovements.com.
 
Alexander Dwinell is a Brooklyn-based artist, publisher, and editor. As part of the South End Press collective he published such authors as Vandana Shiva, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Oscar Olivera. Exhibitions include Smack Mellon, Temporary Agency, and Carriage Trade and publications include Latin American Perspectives, Emergency Index, and Stencil Pirates.
 
Keona K. Ervin is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the author of Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis.
 
Sekou M. Franklin is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University and is the author of After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movements Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation.
 
Bob Fulkerson has been an organizer for social and environmental justice issues in Nevada since 1984. He lives in Reno with his husband, Mike Perrier, a public school counselor.
 
Craig Gilmore is one of the founders of California Prison Moratorium Project and former coeditor of Prison Focus.
 
Amanda Joyce Hall is a PhD candidate in history and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing a dissertation on the global grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s.
 
Grace Handy is an anarchist scholar and creator interested in critical theory, queer potentialities, and poetics. Handy graduated from Wesleyan University in 2018 and has been involved with Palestine liberation and prison abolitionist organizing as well as soundscape and bookmaking projects.
 
Vernon Damani Johnson has been a professor of political science at Western Washington University since 1986. He is currently also the director of the Ralph Munro Institute for Civic Education there. He was a founding member of the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force (state of Washington) in 1994 and the president of the Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity from 2000-2003.
 
Joo-Hyun Kang is a long-time queer organizer and currently director of Communities United for Police Reform, a New York City campaign fighting to end police violence and decrease reliance on/power of policing in daily life.
 
Stacy Kono was inspired to work on garment worker organizing because her grandma was a seamstress for many years and taught her that workers, especially immigrant and women of color workers, deserve respect for their labor. Kono lives in Berkeley, California.
 
Brooke Lober is a feminist scholar, teacher, and activist. In collaboration with the Freedom Archives, Lober is the director of the Women Against Imperialism Oral History Project, and is documenting the work of several collectives that reshaped the meaning of feminist and queer activism through their years of Bay Area-based transnational feminist organizing. Lober is a member of the Abolition Editorial Collective, for which she is co-editing a special issue on Abolitionist Feminisms.
 
Scholar-activist Paul K. Longmore was professor of history at San Francisco State University until his untimely death in 2010. His wide-ranging work included The Invention of George Washington, The New Disability History: American Perspectives (coedited with Lauri Umansky), Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, and the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity.
 
Simmy Makhijani teaches in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Makhijani is also cofounder and former codirector of United Roots, a green youth arts and media center in Oakland, California, and continues to be active in multiple activist/organizing spaces.
 
Matt Meyer is Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association and senior research scholar for the Resistance Studies Initiative at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The author or editor of numerous books, most recently White Lives Matter Most: And Other "Little" White Lies, Meyer writes extensively on issues of decolonization, revolutionary nonviolence, political prisoners, and Pan-Africanism.
 
Luis Alejandro Molina has organized for over thirty years in the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, Hartford, San Francisco, and Chicago around issues including Puerto Rican political prisoners and Puerto Rican self-determination. He currently sits on the coordinating committee of the National Boricua Human Rights Network.
 
Isabell Moore is a community organizer, teacher, and supporter of Siembra NC living in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is a PhD candidate in history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
 
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs researches and writes on mass incarceration, racial capitalism, and freedom movements in Louisiana. She has long been involved in anti-prison and anti-policing activism and was a co-founder of AORTA (Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance). She is currently an assistant professor of geography and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. 
​
Jessi Quizar researches race and urban land struggles in the United States, particularly urban agriculture movements and Black self-determination. She has been a community organizer, is a parent of four, and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Northern Arizona University.

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is an assistant professor of sociology and Latina/o studies at Northwestern University. Over the past twenty years, he has been deeply involved in the work of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago. Most recently, he helped found the Puerto Rican Chicago Archive Project.
 
Loretta J. Ross is a scholar, organizer, and one of the principal creators of the concept of reproductive justice. She is a cofounder of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and from 2005 to 2012 was the organization's national coordinator.
 
Tamara Lea Spira is an associate professor of queer studies at Fairhaven College and in the American Cultural Studies Department at Western Washington University. Her forthcoming book, Movements of Feeling, examines the vibrant call to remember the interlinked traumas of slavery, colonization, sexual violence, and state violence that came to preoccupy feminist and queer of color writers in the United States and Chile between 1975 and the end of the Cold War.
 
Suzy Subways coordinates the SLAM! Herstory Project, an oral history of the Student Liberation Action Movement. A member of SLAM! and Love and Rage in the 1990s, she is currently an editor of Prison Health News and the Philadelphia Partisan, an anarchist member of Philly Socialists, and a sometimes fiction writer.
 
Julie Sze is a professor of American studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis's John Muir Institute for the Environment. Sze's research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender, and power; and urban/community health and activism.
 
ethan ucker is a prison abolitionist organizer, researcher, and educator. He has worked in youth prisons, high schools, and group homes across Chicago to address harm through community-controlled practices of healing and accountability. He is the co-founder of Circles & Ciphers, a hip-hop infused restorative justice organization led by and for young people of color who are impacted by violence.
 
Lesley Wood is an associate professor and chair of sociology at York University. She is active in antipoverty and various other movements in Toronto. She is trying to understand how ordinary people change the world.
 
Elizabeth Yeampieere is an internationally recognized Puerto Rican attorney and environmental and climate justice leader of African and indigenous ancestry born and raised in New York City. A national leader in climate justice movement, Elizabeth is the cochair of the Climate Justice Alliance and director of UPROSE.
 
Patricia Zavella is a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her most recent publication is The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism (New York University Press, 2020).
 
Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele is a Brooklyn-based educator and organizer with decades of local, national, and international experience of human rights work. Lumumba currently serves on the boards of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute and the Center for Constitutional Rights and is senior community organizer at the University of Washington Bothell.
 
Umayyah Cable is an assistant professor of American culture and film, television, and media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Their research and teaching interests span the fields of ethnic studies, film and media studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, with a particular focus on the roles that art, film, and media play in the mobilization of Palestine solidarity activism in the United States.
 
Marisa Chappell is an associate professor of history at Oregon State University. She is the author of The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America and has written about social policy, social movements, and inequality in recent United States history for both academic and public audiences.
 
Jih-Fei Cheng is an assistant professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Scripps College. He has been involved in HIV/AIDS social services, media production and curation, and queer of color grassroots organizations. His current book project examines the science, media, and activism of AIDS in relation to the colonial history of virology and the historical transformations of global capitalism.
 
Norma Stoltz Chinchilla is a professor emeritus from the Department of Sociology and the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University Long Beach. She was an activist in the Central American solidarity and sanctuary movements of the 1980s.
 
Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis was the founding executive director of Queers for Economic Justice and the former director of SAGE/Queens. He is currently an assistant professor of social work at Seattle University. He is the co-editor of the three-volume book series After Marriage Equality.
 
Chris Dixon is a longtime anarchist organizer, writer, and educator. Originally from Alaska, he lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin territory, where he is a member of Punch Up Collective. His most recent book is Another Politics: Talking across Today's Transformative Movements. Find him at writingwithmovements.com.
 
Alexander Dwinell is a Brooklyn-based artist, publisher, and editor. As part of the South End Press collective he published such authors as Vandana Shiva, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Oscar Olivera. Exhibitions include Smack Mellon, Temporary Agency, and Carriage Trade and publications include Latin American Perspectives, Emergency Index, and Stencil Pirates.
 
Keona K. Ervin is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the author of Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis.
 
Sekou M. Franklin is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University and is the author of After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movements Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation.
 
Bob Fulkerson has been an organizer for social and environmental justice issues in Nevada since 1984. He lives in Reno with his husband, Mike Perrier, a public school counselor.
 
Craig Gilmore is one of the founders of California Prison Moratorium Project and former coeditor of Prison Focus.
 
Amanda Joyce Hall is a PhD candidate in history and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing a dissertation on the global grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s.
 
Grace Handy is an anarchist scholar and creator interested in critical theory, queer potentialities, and poetics. Handy graduated from Wesleyan University in 2018 and has been involved with Palestine liberation and prison abolitionist organizing as well as soundscape and bookmaking projects.

Vernon Damani Johnson has been a professor of political science at Western Washington University since 1986. He is currently also the director of the Ralph Munro Institute for Civic Education there. He was a founding member of the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force (state of Washington) in 1994 and the president of the Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity from 2000-2003.

Joo-Hyun Kang is a long-time queer organizer and currently director of Communities United for Police Reform, a New York City campaign fighting to end police violence and decrease reliance on/power of policing in daily life.

Stacy Kono was inspired to work on garment worker organizing because her grandma was a seamstress for many years and taught her that workers, especially immigrant and women of color workers, deserve respect for their labor. Kono lives in Berkeley, California.

Brooke Lober is a feminist scholar, teacher, and activist. In collaboration with the Freedom Archives, Lober is the director of the Women Against Imperialism Oral History Project, and is documenting the work of several collectives that reshaped the meaning of feminist and queer activism through their years of Bay Area-based transnational feminist organizing. Lober is a member of the Abolition Editorial Collective, for which she is co-editing a special issue on Abolitionist Feminisms.

Scholar-activist Paul K. Longmore was professor of history at San Francisco State University until his untimely death in 2010. His wide-ranging work included The Invention of George Washington, The New Disability History: American Perspectives (coedited with Lauri Umansky), Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, and the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity.

Simmy Makhijani teaches in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Makhijani is also cofounder and former codirector of United Roots, a green youth arts and media center in Oakland, California, and continues to be active in multiple activist/organizing spaces.

Matt Meyer is Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association and senior research scholar for the Resistance Studies Initiative at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The author or editor of numerous books, most recently White Lives Matter Most: And Other "Little" White Lies, Meyer writes extensively on issues of decolonization, revolutionary nonviolence, political prisoners, and Pan-Africanism.

Luis Alejandro Molina has organized for over thirty years in the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, Hartford, San Francisco, and Chicago around issues including Puerto Rican political prisoners and Puerto Rican self-determination. He currently sits on the coordinating committee of the National Boricua Human Rights Network.

Isabell Moore is a community organizer, teacher, and supporter of Siembra NC living in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is a PhD candidate in history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs researches and writes on mass incarceration, racial capitalism, and freedom movements in Louisiana. She has long been involved in anti-prison and anti-policing activism and was a co-founder of AORTA (Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance). She is currently an assistant professor of geography and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. 
​
Jessi Quizar researches race and urban land struggles in the United States, particularly urban agriculture movements and Black self-determination. She has been a community organizer, is a parent of four, and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Northern Arizona University.

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is an assistant professor of sociology and Latina/o studies at Northwestern University. Over the past twenty years, he has been deeply involved in the work of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago. Most recently, he helped found the Puerto Rican Chicago Archive Project.

Loretta J. Ross is a scholar, organizer, and one of the principal creators of the concept of reproductive justice. She is a cofounder of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and from 2005 to 2012 was the organization's national coordinator.

Tamara Lea Spira is an associate professor of queer studies at Fairhaven College and in the American Cultural Studies Department at Western Washington University. Her forthcoming book, Movements of Feeling, examines the vibrant call to remember the interlinked traumas of slavery, colonization, sexual violence, and state violence that came to preoccupy feminist and queer of color writers in the United States and Chile between 1975 and the end of the Cold War.

Suzy Subways coordinates the SLAM! Herstory Project, an oral history of the Student Liberation Action Movement. A member of SLAM! and Love and Rage in the 1990s, she is currently an editor of Prison Health News and the Philadelphia Partisan, an anarchist member of Philly Socialists, and a sometimes fiction writer.

Julie Sze is a professor of American studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis's John Muir Institute for the Environment. Sze's research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender, and power; and urban/community health and activism.

ethan ucker is a prison abolitionist organizer, researcher, and educator. He has worked in youth prisons, high schools, and group homes across Chicago to address harm through community-controlled practices of healing and accountability. He is the co-founder of Circles & Ciphers, a hip-hop infused restorative justice organization led by and for young people of color who are impacted by violence.

Lesley Wood is an associate professor and chair of sociology at York University. She is active in antipoverty and various other movements in Toronto. She is trying to understand how ordinary people change the world.
​
Elizabeth Yeampieere is an internationally recognized Puerto Rican attorney and environmental and climate justice leader of African and indigenous ancestry born and raised in New York City. A national leader in climate justice movement, Elizabeth is the cochair of the Climate Justice Alliance and director of UPROSE.

Patricia Zavella is a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her most recent publication is The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism (New York University Press, 2020).