Alix Olson - Böcker

Since the rise of Donald Trump and other right-wing authoritarians worldwide, we have been told to “resist.” But this kind of opposition looks surprisingly like restoring the status quo. Under the banner of resistance, liberals and progressives have encouraged voting for Democrats, reading the mainstream media, trusting the science, putting up yard signs, buying the right products, and celebrating a “return to normal.” How was “resistance” diluted, and where can we find alternative forms of resistance for present and future struggles?Alix Olson and Alex Zamalin offer a clear-eyed critical account of how neoliberalism has redefined resistance to thwart social movements and consolidate power. Elites have domesticated and coopted some once-radical concepts and practices into “restorative resistance” that bolsters support for an unjust social order while marginalizing, racializing, and criminalizing many others. Olson and Zamalin argue that true resistance to racial neoliberalism must instead be deeply antirestorative: collective, horizontal, counterhegemonic, radically democratic insurrectionary movements that cannot be redirected into shoring up the existing order. This “unruly world-building”—exemplified by Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous activism at Standing Rock, and more—pushes us to live, think, and dream beyond profit maximization, democratic civility, and individual freedom. Powerfully and accessibly written with manifesto-like urgency, The Ends of Resistance shows how marginalized voices and social movements deepen our thinking for confronting power.

Since the rise of Donald Trump and other right-wing authoritarians worldwide, we have been told to “resist.” But this kind of opposition looks surprisingly like restoring the status quo. Under the banner of resistance, liberals and progressives have encouraged voting for Democrats, reading the mainstream media, trusting the science, putting up yard signs, buying the right products, and celebrating a “return to normal.” How was “resistance” diluted, and where can we find alternative forms of resistance for present and future struggles?Alix Olson and Alex Zamalin offer a clear-eyed critical account of how neoliberalism has redefined resistance to thwart social movements and consolidate power. Elites have domesticated and coopted some once-radical concepts and practices into “restorative resistance” that bolsters support for an unjust social order while marginalizing, racializing, and criminalizing many others. Olson and Zamalin argue that true resistance to racial neoliberalism must instead be deeply antirestorative: collective, horizontal, counterhegemonic, radically democratic insurrectionary movements that cannot be redirected into shoring up the existing order. This “unruly world-building”—exemplified by Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous activism at Standing Rock, and more—pushes us to live, think, and dream beyond profit maximization, democratic civility, and individual freedom. Powerfully and accessibly written with manifesto-like urgency, The Ends of Resistance shows how marginalized voices and social movements deepen our thinking for confronting power.

Female spoken word artists have become the spokeswomen for a new generation. This demanding oral poetry of the early 21st century has defined a vanguard of lithely muscled voices women who think and act decisively to create their distinctive and desperately earned realities. The combination of the eminent slam movement and the upsurge of bold underground feminism has created a unique pool of women who verbally challenge society on all fronts.Editor Alix Olson (internationally touring spoken word artist-activist) brought together a variety of astounding spoken word artists for Word Warriors . Included in this collection are Patricia Smith and Eileen Myles, two of our most formidable spoken-word foremothers, Tony-award winners Sarah Jones, Suheir Hammad and Staceyann Chin, recording artists Bitch and Lynn Breedlove from the dyke-punk band Tribe 8, award-winning writer Michelle Tea, and many more. These women join other amazing artists from many different backgrounds to create Word Warriors , a powerful and comprehensive collection of work from the best and brightest female spoken word artists today.

A minute-by-minute analysis of George Miller's film, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits.Mad Max: Fury Road: Movies Minute by Minute is the first book-length analysis of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which reads the film as an anti-capitalist, feminist manifesto. In this interdisciplinary text, Alix Olson mobilizes an unconventional and eclectic archive of radical democratic, ecofeminist and queer theory, feminist poetry, and Afro-futurist literature in order to elicit the film’s relevance as a guide for radical political struggle. The book is particularly attuned to Mad Max’s depiction of “another world as possible,” a slogan which serves as an aspirational impetus for activism, and to the nature of radical social change more broadly. Through a minute-by-minute analysis, the book weaves together “thought-bites” in order to track pressing questions about power relations within neoliberal capitalism: How might reading the film through contemporary queer and feminist thinkers and activist movements teach us about the possibilities and limitations of resistance? How do utopia and dystopia (pre)figure and interact as post-capitalist horizons? Should we understand ecofeminism as a liberatory or essentializing force? What might the temporality of “slow critique,” performed by a minute-by-minute textual reading, expose about our approach to political life more generally? How can popular art uproot the common-sensical of everyday life under neoliberal capitalism and render taken-for-granted logics irrational or dystopian?