Guerrillas of Desire Book Tour!
Following the release of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, and Walidah Imarisha’s Angels with Dirty Faces, which won the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Institute for Anarchist Studies is proud to announce the publication of Kevin Van Meter’s Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible, published in conjunction with AK Press. Join Kevin as he reads from and talks about his book on these upcoming dates!
Behind the smiling faces of cashiers, wait staff, and workers of all sorts, a war is going on, usually without the knowledge of official political and labor organizations. Guerrillas of Desire begins with a provocation: The Left is wrong. It’s historical and current strategies are too-often based on the assumption that working and poor people are unorganized, acquiescent to systems of domination, or simply uninterested in building a new world. The fact is, as C.L.R. James has noted, they “are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention.” Kevin Van Meter maps these undercurrents, documenting the history of everyday resistance under slavery, in peasant life, and throughout modern capitalism, while showing that it remains an important factor in revolution.
“Kevin Van Meter’s eloquent and provocative book Guerrillas of Desire gave me a whole new way to think about organizing,” says Alexandra Bradbury, editor of Labor Notes
Following dates in the Pacific Northwest in early August, including at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne in Portland, OR on August 10th, Kevin will be in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast on these dates:
Mid-Atlantic & Northeast Tour
- Washington, DC: August 29th @ 6:00pm ~ The Potters House (1658 Columbia Rd NW, Washington, District of Columbia 20009)
- Baltimore, MD: August 30th @ 7:30pm ~ Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse (30 W North Ave, Baltimore, Maryland 21201)
- Philadelphia, PA: August 31st @ 7:00pm ~ Wooden Shoe Books and Records (704 South St, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19147)
- Brooklyn / Queens, NY: September 6th @ 7:00pm ~ Topos Bookstore Cafe (788 Woodward Ave, Queens, New York 11385)
- New York, NY: September 8th @ 7:00pm ~ Bluestockings Bookstores, Cafe, and Activist Center (172 Allen St, New York, New York 10002)
Michael Reagan, of the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, reviews Guerrillas of Desire here.
For more on the tour, and about the book and Kevin’s collective, Team Colors, go here!
Kevin Van Meter is an activist-scholar based in the Pacific Northwest. He is coeditor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States and a contributor to Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency.
Guerrillas of Desire is available from AK Press
The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) is a twenty-year old non-profit organization that raises and distributes money to assist writers. The IAS provides writing grants so people can take time off work, hire child-care, pay for travel to do research, and other necessary things to assist the writing process. In addition to awarding annual writing grants, the IAS publishes a journal, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, organizes educational and fundraising events, and publishes two book series with AK Press. This is the ninth book published by the IAS in conjunction with AK Press.
