Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsió

400 pp
6 x 9 in, 25 color illus.
14 b&w photos
Paperback

How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence.

“Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.

“We must remain enthralled by the general strike's unflashy immersion of perception. [...] Politically Red is a new, beautiful, revolutionary curriculum.” Fred Moten

“Cadava and Nadal-Melsió open a completely new field of literacy research that from now on nobody will be unaware of.” Paul Preciado

"More than simply original, Politically Red creates its own new genre of theoretical intervention into the ongoing struggle.” Slavoj Žižek