Arise!: Global Radicalism
"It is not by moral outrage alone that people have lent their lives to the struggle for better worlds. Neither is it by the purity of instruction from theory. There is certainly no royal road, only the one made by walking. Many have walked, many have been forced to move, many have found roads while walking with others. This book has attempted to map some of that movement in hope of making future roads possible. History is not a guide but a map drawn in the stars of past lights. Out of the prison of the present is a recognition: We have been warmed by other fires that we have not yet built. What warmth and light shall we leave behind?"
This is the final paragraph of Arise!: Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution. This hot-of-the-press book is as much a history of the present as the stories and struggles presented in this book continues to remind us of the presence of history. The clarity and eloquence of the prose make intimately real the expansive capacious imagination of the people whose stories are narrated in Arise!
"The Mexican Revolution was a global event that catalyzed international radicals in unexpected sites and struggles. Tracing the paths of figures like Black American artist Elizabeth Catlett, Indian anti-colonial activist M.N. Roy, Mexican revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magón, Okinawan migrant organizer Paul Shinsei Kōchi, and Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai, Arise! reveals how activists around the world found inspiration and solidarity in revolutionary Mexico.
From art collectives and farm worker strikes to prison "universities," Arise! reconstructs how this era's radical organizers found new ways to fight global capitalism. Drawing on prison records, surveillance data, memoirs, oral histories, visual art, and a rich trove of untapped sources, Christina Heatherton considers how disparate revolutionary traditions merged in unanticipated alliances. From her unique vantage point, she charts the remarkable impact of the Mexican Revolution as radicals in this critical era forged an anti-racist internationalism from below.
This is a book about now and tomorrow. This book makes connections between fighting global capitalism, localized planetary revolution, and the radical imagination that inspired the impossible. It is about how people organized, loved, and made life to make a better world for themselves, others, and those who came after them. It is about solidarity created through circulating struggles across borders, languages, time zones, and imaginaries for a different tomorrow. It is about art, commodity fetish, maps, and prison universities. The book is the fire that makes warmth. It is a story of global proportions, narrations alive in the local, living in the daily, in the people that worked, imagined, and made different worlds.
Arise! will be awarded book prizes from influential magazines, newspapers, and scholarly organizations. It will be translated into multiple languages and made into a multi-episode documentary series. While you wait for its arrival or publication in paperback or e-book, check out this interview on the web series and podcast, Conjunctures.
