Book reviews can be a place where we build community by joining ongoing conversation, exchanging ideas, and formulating our own perspectives. Who doesn’t love collective study? My first content post with Creative Calabash is my newest book review for Against the Current, a magazine that pushes dialogue and analysis to move us together towards a sustainable socialist society.
In ATC #222, I review Elite Capture by Olúfémi O. Táíwò. This book makes critical, controversial, interventions into today’s progressive politics by challenging the role identity politics plays in dominating dialogue and activism.
“The book is not just a criticism of the mechanisms of assimilation or appropriation. Táíwò calls for a principled and “constructive politics” that can bring about change by intentionally working towards “redistributing social resources and power rather than pursuing intermediary goals cashed out in symbols.” (Táíwò 84)”
I love how Táíwò challenges progressives to look towards revolutionary histories to build their politics. Such confrontation is especially valuable to be discussed in intergenerational dialogue because identity, organizing, and notions of power have changed greatly as modes of technology, racial politics, and organizational formations rapidly shift.
Read the review– or better yet read the book– and let me know what you think!
https://againstthecurrent.org/atc222/movement-challenges/
Owólabi Aboyade
aka
Will See