Keyword: Occupy Wall Street

Review of Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in US Political Culture by Dana Cloud (Ohio State University Press)

Courtesy of Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Department of Energy (CC BY NC-SA 2.0).
By Jason Hannan

Dana Cloud’s marvelous new book provides just the sort of deep understanding and practical guidance needed for thoughtful and effective political engagement in the Trump era. In three fascinating case studies, Cloud demonstrates the impotence of naked facts and the power of mediation. First, she compares the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, both of whom leaked classified information in acts of patriotic resistance. Second, in a chapter on the 2014 television series Cosmos, Cloud seeks to explain the show’s enormous rhetorical power. Third, Cloud compares the revolutionary rhetoric of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to that of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements. As we live through the devastation wrought by a Trump presidency, as we seek to make sense of it all in our scholarship and our classrooms, as we resist his attempt to reengineer of reality and search for ways to reassert our own reality, the reality of the people, Reality Bites comes not a moment too soon.

Review of Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street, edited by Tom Goyens (University of Illinois Press)

Si Griffiths, 2005
By Sofia Cutler

Radical Gotham tracks anarchist life and politics in New York City over the last hundred and fifty years, giving a vivid window into an anarchist New York buzzing with saloons, assembly halls, and publishing houses. This anthology asserts anarchism’s endurance as both an idea and a movement as it develops from the working-class, immigrant anarchist communities in the late 19th century into the New Left in the 1950s and 60s and finally the recent Occupy Wall Street protests.