Joyful Militancy. Carla Bergman
Montgomery note, “The self-enclosed individual is a fiction of Empire, just like the State. ‘I’ am already a crowd, enmeshed in others.”
More widely, in conversation and collaboration with friends, with folks of divergent yet in-solidarity movements, they offer invocations instead of correctives. The authors accurately declare that ancient ways of growing more powerful together are always alive in the experiments of our activisms and our lives. bergman and Montgomery have at the same time a deep sense of how differences are necessary—of how specific oppressions we have faced position us to question, to offer that which other positions cannot—and of how our movements have built and can build from the small overlaps and resonances, not just because we all carry multiple identities but because certain common notions as well as differences we hold can bring us to have each others’ backs.
bergman and Montgomery move by questions and attempts at response, noting how “common notions can only be held gently, as flexible, living ideas that are powerful in and through the relationships and processes they sustain.” They converse with Black liberation, anti-violence, queer, youth, anarchist, and Indigenous resurgence movements. Theirs is something of a poetics: reminders and troublings of that which is always already present, whether in terms of the rigid radicalism that so often decays relationships within and between movements or in terms of identifying, supporting, and learning from moments and movements of empowered and empowering resistance. They offer a reading and imagining of empowerment that is Spinoza-inflected, anarchist-inflected, solidarity-inflected joy. Noting their own process, they acknowledge, “Neither of us could have written this book, or anything like it, alone. And the collaboration has made us each more capable, in different ways, together.”
As I write this, my love—after a morning drawing fists on butcher paper to paste to placards—has gotten to her sister’s to help their mom with caregiving for the babies. Her militancy, while divergent from the politics of some of her family, is steeped in an ethic of invitation and sharing that she learned from them, and right now our niece is coloring in a cutout of a brown fist almost as large as her. This is another version of the troubled and beautiful messiness that bergman and Montgomery remind me of in Joyful Militancy. I am thankful for it even as I sit with my grief at the present political moment and my urge to activate and be activated by those I love and those I’ve never met who, though far, are never quite distant.
Dear Gil,
Lolo, thank you for offering me moments of militant experimentation and troubled joy. For your work’s anticipation of the growth of anti-apartheid solidarity with the people of South Africa. For when, decades later, many took to social media to reach out to you and, still willing in your final year of life, you heard their call and took up anti-apartheid solidarity with the people of Palestine. For so many moments that preceded them, moved between them, and followed them—moments of insight, moments of despair, moments of joy. At times, my most urgent desire is to feel untroubled. Thank you for divesting me from it over and over. Here, Gil, are some words that trouble me and offer me hope, some words that, like your words below, in shifting from individual to collective, in invoking the work and joy of generations, move me to tears: “For us at least, there is no cure, no gas mask, no unitary solution: there are only openings, searchings, and the collective discovery of new and old ways of moving that let in fresh air. For the same reason that no one is immune, anyone can participate in its undoing.”
Love,
Hari Alluri, on Kumeyaay land, January 20, 2017
“What my life really means is that the songs that I sing
Are just pieces of a dream that I’ve been building
And we can make a stand and hey, I’m reachin’ out my hand
’Cause I know damn well we can if we are willing
But we gotta be …”
(“Willing,” from the album 1980)
Acknowledgments
We want to begin by thanking Richard Day for his ongoing guidance, friendship, and concrete support as our first editor, who waded through the manuscript (twice!) at its roughest and for working with us both with incredible openness, rigor, patience, care, and love throughout our entire process. And for his introduction to the very concept of joyful militancy—much gratitude for that because we wouldn’t have written this book without him.
Thank you to Hari Alluri, poet, friend, militant about joy, joyfully militant kin! Deep gratitude for his careful and deeply generous edits to our book; his delight in the ideas, and his keen eye and brilliance all created the space for us both to take risks, to go toward our fear and speak more fiercely. We also want to celebrate his beautifully poignant foreword, thank you—words fail us on how to express our gratitude to him; we are honored and deeply indebted to him for all he has given to us and to this book.
Thank you to our editors at the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) and Paul Messersmith-Glavin for supporting us through the first steps; thank you to Maia Ramnath for taking the final steps of shepherding the book into its final form with incredible generosity and incisiveness as our editor. Thanks to the 2013 IAS collective board for giving us the grant that got us going, and thanks to Cindy Milstein for encouraging us early on. Much gratitude to current IAS folks for continuing to support this project as it shifted and changed and emerged—special thanks to Kristian Williams, Chris Dixon, and Tamara Myers.
Thank you to Josh MacPhee, our generous and talented book designer who chose the perfect cover art. The cover illustration and art throughout the book is by the incredible Pete Railand: thanks to him for sharing his radical and relevant works with us. Thank you to AK Press, specifically Zach Blue and Charles Weigl, for helping us get here and turning our book into a thing made of paper!
Thanks to our incredibly generous interviewees, whose ideas shaped and morphed our book immeasurably. Immense gratitude goes out to Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Kelsey Cham C., Zainab Amadahy, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Melanie Matining, Sebastian Touza, Walidah Imarisha, Mik Turje, Margaret Killjoy, Tasnim Nathoo, Glen Coulthard, and Richard Day.
And many thanks to all the folks who had informal conversations with us about our book, in particular thank you to Kim Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Klee Benally, and Astra Taylor.
Thank you to Dana Putnam for generously offering up her home for a writing retreat.
Thank you to the Zapatistas for changing the narrative and busting the hegemonic hold on our Western imaginations of what new worlds could look like. Thanks to Gustavo Esteva for making connections long ago and shining a bright light on the road as we try to write about similar ideas.
bell hooks, for busting it all up and offering love. Ivan Illich for providing language to write about concepts one mostly feels. Baruch Spinoza, for asking what a body can do. Gilles Deleuze for offering new ways to believe in the world. Marina Sitrin, horizontal trailblazer and speaker of love and generous spirit, thank you! Audre Lorde for foregrounding the subversive power of desire and feeling. John Holloway for helping us to imagine the possibility of an active, radical (sometimes raging) hope. And thanks to Sebastian Touza for engaging with us about common notions in his work and offering us incredible feedback.
Thanks to everyone building worlds, making and defending kin, supporting flourishing, walking with questions, staying with the trouble.
Nick’s acknowledgments:
Collaborating on this book has been a transformative experience and also a difficult one. Writing is hard for me unless I am doing little else, so writing a whole book meant withdrawing from a lot of the conversations, activities, and currents that have inspired this work. It has meant becoming disconnected, at least partially, from a lot of the things that challenge, fuel, and undo me in enabling ways. It sometimes felt weird to write about the importance of friendship, trust, and collective transformation as I became more isolated from many of the relationships that have taught me about all this.
For that reason, among many others, I want to express deep gratitude to my friends, housemates, my partner, my family, and everyone close to me who has continued to reach