Politically Red

by Cadava, Eduardo; Nadal-Melsio, Sara

• ISBN13: 9780262047807
• ISBN10: 0262047802
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780262376174
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-12-05
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• More Book Details
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Summary

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, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 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.

Author Biography

Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University. His books include Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, and Paper Graveyards. Sara Nadal-Melsió is a New York City-based Catalan writer, curator, and teacher. She is presently finishing a book entitled Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Concept.

Table of Contents

Introduction: "The Red what reading did ..." 9
I. Politically Read 29
II. Multiplicity 43
III. Massification 51
IV. General Strike 59
V. Rosa's Casket 71
VI. Panoramas of Violence 89
VII. Depositions 97
VIII. Theological Figurations 117
IX. Messianic Promises 125
X. Benjamin's Boxes 133
XI. An Unusual Pedagogy 145
XII. A Ship of Fools 151
XIII. Communal grief 169
XIV. A Red Ray; or, Sociology's Supplement 177
XV. The Shibboleth of Race 195
XVI. The Hammer of Social Revolution 221
XVII. The Leviathanism of the Vanquished 227
XVIII. Angelus Novus: A Militant Emblem 233
XIX. The Second Comet 247
XX. To the Planetarium 263
XXI. A Red Common-Wealth 285
Acknowledgments 335
Notes 338
List of Illustrations 386
Index 388