Thank you CIIS community for capturing Palestine 1492‘s book launch in Occupied Ohlone lands with these photos.
Also big thanks to Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Gallery for the invitation and for the recording, available here.
Fue un gran honor dar palabra con Sylvia Marcos y Layla Sanchez Kuri en la nueva serie de conferencias virtuales en el marco del Seminario de Feminismos Descoloniales:
“Re-existencia de las mujeres en Palestina contra el genocidio”
El miércoles 25 de septiembre de 2024 12:30 pm (hora centro de México)
Ver la grabación aquí con modera Margara Millán
It’s thrilling to see released the English translation of Jérôme Baschet’s ¡Rebeldía, resistencia y autonomía! La experiencia Zapatista, out now with AK Press as The Zapatista Experience: Rebellion, Resistance, and Autonomy.
The English translation includes some of my efforts, but big shout outs are due to Margaret Cerullo and Stuart Schussler for carrying the entire project through.
Check out Jérôme Baschet’s The Zapatista Experience from AK Press.
Accompanying the maps throughout Palestine 1492 is a compass inspired by Maya ceremonial altars.
It is better appreciated on the book cover for its colors where red is east, black is west, yellow is south, white is north.
Also present is the all-important green-blue at the center to represent the earth-sky, and the implication that between earth-sky there is you.
Seven cardinal directions rather than four reminds us we are not above the land, not owners of the land, never separate from the land.
The front cover of Palestine 1492 is a map of the Maya world oriented east, an homage to Chiapas, where in summer 2006 I lived my first heart break over Palestine.
East, where the sun rises, is also the direction we face when we begin prayer. Like many Indigenous geographies, Maya geography is oriented east, to the sunrise.
It was a generative time working with Haley Roeser, Dani Knoll, and Eleanor Finley on this critical assessment on the municipalist moment, from Los Angeles to Vermont to Rojava.
Here is the abstract:
In recent years, a growing number of popular movements demanding the “right to the city” have come to describe themselves as municipalist or democratic confederalist, lineages that are closely related to 20th century philosopher Murray Bookchin’s ideas of libertarian municipalism or communalism.
Municipalists, as their name suggests, organize at the unit of the municipality. That is to say, they organize “locally,” but with the additional goal of bringing about governance by popular assembly and by confederating with other assemblies.
Although there is a diversity of positions within municipalism, we can generally say that it seeks to intensify decentralization over centralization; the networked over the isolated; the diverse over the monolithic.
This critical review focuses on movements and organizations that today call themselves municipalist, or have been referred to as such in the literature on municipalism. We describe some of its important thinkers, movements, themes, and concepts. We reflect on some of the movement’s trends and patterns to see where it might be headed. We then share some of their debates and contradictions, gaps, and weaknesses.
Honored to share a special issue with Sarah Ihmoud on “Women and Peace Building” in Peace Policy: Solutions to Violent Conflict from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame University.
Sarah contributed an essay entitled, “Decolonizing ‘Peace’: Notes Towards a Palestinian Feminist Critique”.
My contribution is called “We Are Equal Because We Are Different: A Zapatista Women’s Proposal”.
We appear on a podcast with the other contributors about this special issue, which can be listened to here.
