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Imagining Revolutionary Futures: A Discussion of Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072
August 26, 2022 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm CDT
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Hybrid event—panelists at ESFL, conversation streamed to Zoom
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Mass movements offer us glimpses of radically alternative ways of organizing the world. From the call to abolish the police that surged with the 2020 uprising, to the demand for land back in indigenous sovereignty struggles, rebellions help us imagine revolutionary horizons. Join a panel to discuss a recent work of speculative fiction sketching one such future. Everything for Everyone offers the voices of fictional oral histories, tracing a global overthrow of capitalism, settler colonialism, and state power. The book weaves together accounts of popular insurrection, alternative ways of organizing day to day life, and the radical remaking of gender, nation, and community. This live in-person panel with one of the authors will be broadcast online.
Everything for Everyone is a speculative-fiction novel composed of imagined oral histories from participants in a global social revolution. Twelve characters speak back to us from a new world, one in which capitalism and its pathologies have been defeated and space has been made for new forms of human flourishing—but not without great cost. This book, which grows from one of the authors’ participation in the New York City Trans Oral History Project, focuses on how the imperative to care for one another in the midst of this collapse contains the seeds of a new society. The book has been featured in Buzzfeed’s “34 New Summer Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down” and has received a panoply of advance praise, including the following, from Dean Spade:
Everything for Everyone is the book we all need right now. It lets us imagine what can feel unimaginable in this moment—a total reorganization of social relations toward our mutual survival and the dismantling of the ruling death cult. This is a book we will all be obsessing over, arguing with, and talking about in the coming years as we try to conceive how collective action can get us through these harrowing times. I am grateful to Abdelhadi and O’Brien for making something we need so bad so compelling and readable.
About the authors:
M. E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. Everyone for Everyone is her first book. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. Her second book, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, will be out with Pluto Press in Spring 2023. You can support her writing through patreon.com/meobrien, and find her on twitter @genderhorizon.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist, and artist based in Chicago, IL. Her research as faculty at the University of Chicago focuses on gender differences in the community trajectories of Muslim Americans. Abdelhadi has also spent many years organizing. She has been involved in the movement for Palestinian liberation, Black Lives Matter, counter-surveillance and abolitionism, marxist feminist mobilization as well as workplace struggles. She currently co-coordinates the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, a national organization that provides support and builds community by and for Queer Muslims. Abdelhadi maintains an active creative practice that includes performance art and essay and poetry writing. Her writing has appeared in Jacobin, Muftah, and other publications.
E Ornelas (they/them) is a PhD candidate and Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota. As the descendant of a survivor of the Sherman Institute, a Native boarding school in Riverside, California—and therefore robbed of cultural, linguistic, and tribal identity—E’s research interests focus on the continued survivance and futurity of Indigenous peoples, particularly through the use of literature. E studies community-based, abolitionist-informed responses to gendered, racialized, and colonial violence that Black and Indigenous fiction authors write about.
Aren Aizura is a writer and scholar who works on transnational transgender studies, social reproduction, care work, and science studies. He is the author of Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment (Duke UP, 2018) and the co-editor of Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021) and the Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge, 2014). He teaches gender, women and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota. He is currently working on a book entitled Utopian Attachments, an investigation into the racial politics of queer and trans families told through theory and memoir.
Free and open to all