Joy James

Philosopher and organizer Joy James examines the lives of the 'Captive Maternals' - those racialized and 'feminized' into roles of caretaking and consumption, yet compelled to transform through care, protest and movement-making, towards building safe communities to resist war and fascism. Shaped by enslavement, colonialism, rape and resistance (whether female, male, trans or nonbinary), they are integral to the weaving of rebel tapestries. From domestic upheavals, through cultural revolution and police/military violence, James excavates hidden layers beneath seemingly ordinary narratives, including her biography as a 'military brat' radicalized by socialists, communists, feminists and Black Panther veterans. She deftly draws upon the literary writers on whose shoulders she stands - Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison, and the politics of Ella Baker, George Jackson and Assata Shakur, Mamie Till Mobley and Ida B. Wells. The Captive Maternal navigates a powerful terrain where Black/feminist/socialist and anti-carceral studies and organizing converge. Reshaping understandings of power, resilience, and enduring struggles for liberation and justice, James’s groundbreaking analytic meditates on revolutionary love, mutations of rebellion, and the fulcra that leverage opposition to violence.

Lessons for the antifascist fight now and to come rooted in well-learned lessons from Black liberation. Revolution In These Times delivers veteran Black Panther Party member, Black Liberation Army leader, and former political prisoner Dhoruba Bin Wahad direct in his own words to offer us an analysis of how today's resurgent right-wing agenda is an outgrowth of the ongoing and historical political struggle between the oppressed masses and settler-colonialism of America and Europe. Bin-Wahad not only explores how white supremacist politics have recaptured the American imagination but also prescribes a radical grassroots response to counter this ideology and supplant the violent state repression that keeps it in power. Bin Wahad pieces together fight-back strategies against the police and the state through a process of mobilizing in the streets, on the block, and in our communities, while gathering mass through antifascist coalition-building in a manner unrealized since the 1960s and 1970s. In this series of interviews, Bin Wahad grounds us in the now, seamlessly weaving together firsthand accounts of his own and other’s revolutionary past in the history of struggle, alongside lessons for today.

Angela Davis is iconic as an international figure but few recognize the educational, political and ideological contexts that formed the public persona. Excavating layers of networks, activists, academics, polemicists, and funders across the ideological spectrum, Joy James studies the paradigms and platforms that leveraged Angela Davis into recognition as an activist and radical intellectual. Beginning in Alabama in 1944 with Davis’s birthplace and ending in California in 1970 with a surrogate political family, James investigates context in order to better understand the agency and identity of Davis. Her chronology marks key events relevant to Davis, Black communities, and the US: AntiBlack repression under Jim Crow, Black bourgeois southern families, revolutionaries, elite education, communist parties, international travels, undergrad and graduate schooling—all interconnect and play a part in Davis's rise in stature from persecution as a UC graduate student to the UC Presidential chair some three decades later. Set against the backdrop of 21st-century US democracy and the rise of neofascists, James highlights of the centrality of those considered ancillary to US liberation movements. She unpacks the contradictions of iconography and revolutionary agency and shows how a triumphal figure from a symbolic era of struggle became the icon of the rare peoples’ victory.

Angela Davis is iconic as an international figure but few recognize the educational, political and ideological contexts that formed the public persona. Excavating layers of networks, activists, academics, polemicists, and funders across the ideological spectrum, Joy James studies the paradigms and platforms that leveraged Angela Davis into recognition as an activist and radical intellectual. Beginning in Alabama in 1944 with Davis’s birthplace and ending in California in 1970 with a surrogate political family, James investigates context in order to better understand the agency and identity of Davis. Her chronology marks key events relevant to Davis, Black communities, and the US: AntiBlack repression under Jim Crow, Black bourgeois southern families, revolutionaries, elite education, communist parties, international travels, undergrad and graduate schooling—all interconnect and play a part in Davis's rise in stature from persecution as a UC graduate student to the UC Presidential chair some three decades later. Set against the backdrop of 21st-century US democracy and the rise of neofascists, James highlights of the centrality of those considered ancillary to US liberation movements. She unpacks the contradictions of iconography and revolutionary agency and shows how a triumphal figure from a symbolic era of struggle became the icon of the rare peoples’ victory.

New Bones Abolition addresses “those of us broken enough to grow new bones” in order to stabilize our political traditions that renew freedom struggles. Reflecting on police violence, political movements, Black feminism, Erica Garner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, caretakers and compradors, Joy James analyzes the “Captive Maternal,” which emerges from legacies of colonialism, chattel slavery and predatory policing, to explore the stages of resistance and communal rebellion that manifest through war resistance. She recognizes a long line of gendered and ungendered freedom fighters, who, within a racialized and economically-stratified democracy, transform from coerced or conflicted caretakers into builders of movements, who realize the necessity of maroon spaces, and ultimately the inevitability of becoming war resisters that mobilize against genocide and state violence. New Bones Abolition weaves a narrative of a historically complex and engaged people seeking to quell state violence. James discusses the contributions of the mother Mamie Till-Mobley who held a 1955 open-casket funeral for her fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, murdered by white nationalists; the 1971 rebels at Attica prison; the resilience of political prisoners despite the surplus torture they endured; the emergence of Black feminists as political theorists; human rights advocates seeking abolition; and the radical intellectualism of Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner slain in 2014 by the NYPD. James positions the Captive Maternal within the evolution of contemporary abolition. Her meditation on, and theorizing of, Black radicals and revolutionaries works to honor Agape-driven communities and organizers that deter state/police predatory violence through love, caretaking, protest, movements, marronage, and war resistance.

Come and meet sixteen MARVELLOUS Black inventors and find out about their inventions This book is a great introduction for very young children to discover the wonderful world of invention and creativity, with fantastic role models and exciting stories to pique their interest. Beautifully and imaginatively illustrated throughout to help inform and inspire young minds.

Come and meet sixteen Amazing Black Inventors and find out about their inventions This book is a great introduction for very young children to discover the wonderful world of invention and creativity, with marvellous role models and exciting stories to pique their interest. Beautifully and imaginatively illustrated throughout to help inform and inspire young minds.

'A powerful – even startling – book that challenges the shibboleths of 'white' anarchism'. Its analysis of police violence and the threat of fascism are as important now as they were at the end of the 1970s. Perhaps more so' - Peter James Hudson, Black Agenda Report Anarchism and the Black Revolution first connected Black radical thought to anarchist theory in 1979. Now amidst a rising tide of Black political organizing, this foundational classic written by a key figure of the Civil Rights movement is republished with a wealth of original material for a new generation. Anarchist theory has long suffered from a whiteness problem. This book places its critique of both capitalism and racism firmly at the centre of the text. Making a powerful case for the building of a Black revolutionary movement that rejects sexism, homophobia, militarism and racism, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin counters the lies and distortions about anarchism spread by its left- and right-wing opponents alike. New material includes an interview with writer and activist William C. Anderson, as well as new essays, and a contextualizing biography of the author’s inspiring life.

'A powerful – even startling – book that challenges the shibboleths of 'white' anarchism'. Its analysis of police violence and the threat of fascism are as important now as they were at the end of the 1970s. Perhaps more so' - Peter James Hudson, Black Agenda Report Anarchism and the Black Revolution first connected Black radical thought to anarchist theory in 1979. Now amidst a rising tide of Black political organizing, this foundational classic written by a key figure of the Civil Rights movement is republished with a wealth of original material for a new generation. Anarchist theory has long suffered from a whiteness problem. This book places its critique of both capitalism and racism firmly at the centre of the text. Making a powerful case for the building of a Black revolutionary movement that rejects sexism, homophobia, militarism and racism, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin counters the lies and distortions about anarchism spread by its left- and right-wing opponents alike. New material includes an interview with writer and activist William C. Anderson, as well as new essays, and a contextualizing biography of the author’s inspiring life.

Come and meet sixteen Brilliant Black Inventors and find out about their inventions This book is a great introduction for very young children to discover the wonderful world of invention and creativity, with amazing role models and exciting stories to pique their interest. Beautifully and imaginatively illustrated throughout to help inform and inspire young minds, whether this book is read to them or by early readers themselves.

Selected essays on radical social change. Written over the course of twenty years, the essays brought together here highlight and analyze tensions confronted by writers, scholars, activists, politicians, and political prisoners fighting racism and sexism. Focusing on the experiences of black women calling attention to and resisting social injustice, the astonishing scale of mass and politically driven imprisonment in the United States, and issues relating to government and civic powers in American democracy, Joy James gives voice to people and ideas persistently left outside mainstream progressive discourse-those advocating for the radical steps necessary to acknowledge and remedy structural injustice and violence, rather than merely reforming those existing structures.

In Transcending the Talented Tenth, Joy James provocatively examines African American intellectual responses to racism and the role of elitism, sexism and anti-radicalism in black leadership politics throughout history. She begins with Du Bois' construction of "the Talented Tenth" as an elite leadership of race managers and takes us through the lives and work of radical women in the anti-lynching crusades, the civil rights and black liberation movements, as well as explores the contemporary struggles among black elites in academe.

An incendiary critique of contemporary American society that also offers concrete solutions for the dilemmas facing progressive politics. As the political climate of the United States moves rightward, effective and visionary voices from the left become both rarer and more essential. In Resisting State Violence, African American scholar-activist Joy James provides such a voice. Taking the convergence of race, gender, and class as fundamental trajectories, James offers a stimulating and iconoclastic account of a world in which the United States functions as the political-police center. At its core, Resisting State Violence is about the many ways the current structure of American government and society is inimical to human rights. James examines the prevalence of racist violence in U. S. policies, making provocative connections between seemingly disparate themes and events, and always, insistently, linking global and U. S. domestic politics. She creates a picture of a nation that consistently uses dehumanization to normalize and rationalize violence in foreign policy, all the while creating a domestic climate that pathologizes blackness and sexuality, portraying those most vulnerable to violence as its carriers. In the systematic and ubiquitous nature of state violence, however, James sees a possibility of hope in the building of coalitions across race, class, gender, and national divides. She argues that the very commonality that makes the system seem so overpowering can serve as the basis for resistance-that the elements that hold together a web of oppression and misuse of power also mark its vulnerabilities, especially when confronted with an equally systematic resistance. James offers concrete solutions for the dilemmas facing progressive politics and the individuals who work to achieve social justice. Resisting State Violence is a clear-sighted and uncompromising guidebook for those who want to understand the forces that hinder social change, and to effectively move beyond them.