Revolution by the Book The AK Press Blog

About the panelists:

Andrea Smith (Cherokee) is a longtime anti-violence and Native American activist and scholar. She is co-founder of the Boarding School Healing Project and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a national grassroots organization that utilizes direct action and critical dialogue.  In addition to Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Smith authored Native Americans and The Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances and helped edit INCITE!’s two anthologies, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and Color Of Violence.

Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media and Cinema Studies Department and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the  Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000) and Race After the Internet (Routledge, forthcoming 2011).

Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance and author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

Fred Moten is the Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University, where he works at the intersection of black studies, performance studies, poetry and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books, 2007), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008) and B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010).

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, university professor, and writer. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles she has published a trilogy of historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997), Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (City Lights, 2002), and Blood on the Border: a Memoir of the Contra War (South End Press, 2005).

David Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at University of Illinois.  He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants.  His books include Our Own Time , The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, all from Verso, Colored White (California), and Working Towards Whiteness (Basic).  The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world’s oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.

Dylan Rodríguez is professor and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California Riverside. Rodríguez’s political and intellectual work addresses the social logics of racial genocide as they operate through the changing systems of racist state violence, global white supremacy, and other forms of institutionalized dehumanization. His scholarly and pedagogical practices move across the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, radical social thought, and cultural studies. He is a founding member of Critical Resistance, and has worked closely with numerous organizations and scholarly collectives.
Rodríguez is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Scott Kurashige is an associate professor of American culture and history, and director of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008), which received the American Historical Association’s 2008 Albert J. Beveridge Award “for the best book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present.” He is also co-author of Grace Lee Boggs’ The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011) He has over twenty years of experience as a grassroots activist and is a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership based in Detroit, Michigan.