Cover art by Mon M.
How do social movements use media to create and sustain solidarity?
From newsletters and zines to hashtags and social media posts, social movements frequently generate and circulate media to define political goals, build solidarity, and articulate theories of change. These acts of media-making play a crucial role in developing relationships rooted in collective political visions across racial differences. Yet, in past and present movements, building solidarity across uneven race, class, and gender differences has often been a tenuous pursuit.
Movement Media (Oxford University Press) assesses the possibilities and limitations of crafting solidarities across racialized differences through media-making processes and communications practices. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork, this book revisits key movements--Third World feminism, environmental justice, migrant justice, and police and prison abolition--to assess the mundane and less visible forms of movement building that help various groups navigate the politics of difference in theory and in practice. As contemporary movements organize and struggle against the challenges of NGO-ization, neoliberal identity politics, private technologies, and liberal carceral reform--all of which seek to subsume and manage the efficacy of political organizing--Movement Media tells the story of how communities build and sustain solidarity through media.
“This book offers an insightful and needed analysis of how progressive social movements are built under conditions of constant surveillance and instability. Kuo reminds us that our technologies and infrastructures have always been compromised—the same tech that supposedly protects freedom also undermines it—but that it’s from this compromised position that we can imagine something different. Brilliant. A must read.”
“Movement Media is a powerfully nuanced and accessible read that reveals the ways social justice solidarities solidify. Kuo’s grounded investigations of the material that move our movements ask us to reconsider the processes and products of our collective organizing, with attention toward the movement media that bring us together, as well as their complicity in our oppression. ”
“Movement Media is a monumental work that traces the last 50 years of social movement organizing in the United States and the theories and practices of solidarity through difference innovated by these movements. Kuo’s innovative and original methodology thus unearths a discontinuous genealogy of Third World and women of color feminist movement practices that would otherwise be impossible to trace.”
A major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.
A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation (Haymarket Books) envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.
Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.
