Baltimore, April 15, 7:30 pm: Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse (30 W North Ave, Baltimore, MD 21201) Washington, DC, April 16, 3:00 pm: Sankofa Video Books & Cafe (2714 Georgia Ave NW, Washington, DC 20001) Monthly Review Press author Gerald Horne will discuss and sign his book, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic… | more…
I never knew is a common refrain New World Performance Laboratory theater artists are hearing from Akron audience members after open rehearsals of Death of a Man, a new play that brings to life the mutilations and massacres that occurred in the early 1900s during the mad search for rubber in the jungles of the Amazon.
The one-man show, which is still in development, is conceived and performed by Colombian actor Jairo Cuesta, co-artistic director of NWPL. It is the first part of the company’s The Devil’s Milk Trilogy, a long-term project funded by a $15,000 Knight Foundation grant that explores Akron’s relationship with rubber….… | more…
“In the introduction to his book, Confronting Black Jacobins, Gerald Horne writes that the 1804 Haitian Revolution ‛was so profound, so important, so stunning, that it may require an entire school of historians to take its true measure.’ Arguably, he adds, this revolution—an affront to both slavery and white supremacy, bolstering revolt throughout the slave South—changed the course of history….”… | more…
The Reawakening of the Arab World—an updated and expanded edition of Amin’s The People’s Spring, first published in 2012 by Pambazuka Press—examines the complex interplay of nations regarding the Arab Spring and its continuing, turbulent seasons.
Shoup tells us that the consequences of this ‛neoliberal geopolitical empire’ has been ‛the destruction of unions and working class communities, privatization, speculation, grotesque economic inequality, ecological destruction, and … war and conquest.’ This is quite an indictment; the book is a carefully documented effort, largely successful, to provide the evidence for that description.… | more…
Allen Ruff, host of “A Public Affair” on Community Radio’s WORT, talks with Henry Giroux about his latest Monthly Review Press book, America’s Addiction to Terrorism… | more…
Jeb Sprague examines how Haitian and transnational elite groups sponsored paramilitary violence during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in order to crush the democratic aspirations of Haiti’s popular classes and forestall democratic and redistributive reform…. As part of his research for the book, Sprague analyzed more than 11,000 documents accessed through Freedom of Information requests. He also conducted more than fifty interviews with various officials, victims, and death squad leaders, sometimes at considerable risk to his own safety as the introduction shows. In doing so, Sprague gives us a thorough account of how paramilitary forces have been developed in Haiti, and the networks that support them.… | more…
The world is in crisis. Capitalism, currently the only economic system in existence, is the cause of this crisis. It is a crisis that impoverishes millions more every year while enhancing the wealth of the rarefied few who conspire with politicians to make it so. It is a crisis that manifests itself in endless and meaningless wars. It is a crisis that dismantles schools, hospitals, roads, and other infrastructure in the name of private profit….This is the premise of John Smith’s newly-published work, titled Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. It is an important, even crucial, work.… | more…
BlockReportRadio.com interviews author and professor Dr. Gerald Horne about his new book, Confronting Black Jacobins. We discussed the Haitian Revolution, the origins of the Dominican Republic, and the doubling in size of the United States. We talk about Haiti’s role in abolishing slavery in the western world. We talked about the role that Washington, London, Paris, and Madrid played in warring with the abolitionist nation. We talked about how Haiti and the U.S. both had plans to relocate U.S. Negroes to the Dominican Republic, at different times for different reason. We also talked about the dilemma that the U.S. was in, when it dealt with Haiti, and much much more…”… | more…
“’The socialist imperative,’ according to Michael A. Lebowitz, is to ‘end capitalism and build a society of associated producers oriented to the full development of human potential.’ To move beyond capitalism, to understand how capitalism is failing and why it ought to be superseded today, as a matter of urgency, is the primary purpose of Lebowitz’s The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, a collection of essays based mostly on previous papers, books, and contributions. ‘The necessity to end the capitalist system and to replace it with that inverse situation oriented to the worker’s own need for development is undeniable’ insists Lebowitz. ‘Very simply,’ he concludes his first chapter, ‘if we are to have any dreams, we must end capitalism now, by all means possible.’… | more…
