Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a MovementAngela Y. Davis, edited by F. Barat. Chicago, IL.: Haymarket Books (2016) 158pp. $7.98pb ISBN 978‐1‐6‐8846‐564‐4

This new manifesto comprises an accessible and important collection of interview excerpts and political speeches dating between 2013 and 2015. In this book, Davis issues a profound challenge in appealing for an activist community and a sustained co-ordinated global movement of struggles for freedom. The collection, edited by Frank Barat, is marketed to activists to identify the interconnections between variously situated struggles against structural violence rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, state power, capitalist markets, and imperialism, in order to build co-ordinated struggles towards social change. In his introductory reflections, Barat notes that his personal imperative in producing this collection with Davis was to pre-empt reflection and discussion of the experience of struggle entailed in activist work. The opportunity to exchange with Davis on this front is vital, not only because she is an iconic source of knowledge and inspiration. It is because, in his words, ‘she is still every day living the struggle. She is an embodiment of resistance’ (p.xx). Furthermore, her presence is reflected in, and inspiring to, many of the collective liberation movements that we see today and it has been reflected through her vocal participation in anticolonial struggles all over the world, including Palestine (p.xxi). Much of what is presented in this short text is not necessarily new. Davis has, in recent years, been very vocal in promoting the view that local and global struggles against oppression are connected and should be seen in this way. In Freedom is a Constant Struggle the conversations and speeches reach across a variety of significant moments in historical and political struggles in the United States and in other global regions: the struggle for liberation and freedom from state violence in Gaza, Palestine; the abolition of slavery; the proliferation of racialised criminalisation and punishment through policing and mass imprisonment; the shooting of Michael Brown, the Ferguson riots and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movements in the United States and in other jurisdictions such as Canada and Australia. There is also an overriding concern about reform and navigating the extent of investment activists make in the state as an avenue for achieving short-term institutional change. For example, she problematises the contemporary resurgence of carceral feminism and the limitations and risks in investing in the state and criminal justice as a measure for responding to heteropatriarchal violence in the community (pp.138–9). The common thread in Davis's analysis is to learn from, and identify, the connections in campaigns and movements against injustice past and present but also transnationally. This is because, she argues, seeing these connections enables our struggles to mature, to produce new ideas and new terrains on which we can engage in the quest for freedom (p.11). the site of the jail or prison is not only material and objective … it's ideological and psychic as well. We internalize the notion of a place to put bad people. That's precisely one of the reasons we have to imagine the abolitionist movement as addressing those ideological and psychic issues as well. Not just the process of removing material institutions. (p.22) This observation takes us back to our position in seeing and responding to the struggles across continuums of oppression and harm that span the community to the prison and are rooted in white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalist violence. [while in Australia] we always go into the prison because a good portion of the leadership of the organisation is in prison. It's so easy to just forget, to think about the prison and its population abstractly. If you're serious about developing egalitarian relations, you will figure out how to make those connections. How to stay in touch with people behind bars. How to allow their voices to be heard. (p.27) This observation highlights another vital dimension of movement building that relies on meaningful and participatory solidarities developed with those communities who hold lived experience of injustice and oppression. what has kept me going has been the development of new modes of community. I don't know whether I would have survived, had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle. So whatever I am doing I always feel myself directly connected to those communities … It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of optimism. (p.49) This notion of a transnational activist community has been fostered by Davis's commitment to support abolitionist activist struggles and work outside the United States. My initial reaction was to disregard this work as a further collection of vignettes synthesising a life of activism. However, Angela Y. Davis should never be underestimated. What I value most about her work is its profundity and how her very simple observations have such broad transfer and relevance to struggles for freedom everywhere.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.