U.S./Canada

How do social movements die? Some explanations highlight internal factors like factionalization, whereas others stress external factors like repression. Christian Davenport offers an alternative explanation where both factors interact.

Genealogies of Citizenship is a remarkable rethinking of human rights and social justice. As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counterbalanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a relationally-sturdy civil society.

Robert Justin Goldstein’s Political Repression in Modern America provides the only comprehensive narrative account ever published of significant civil liberties violations concerning political dissidents since the rise of the post-Civil War modern American industrial state.

This book provides an analysis, from a psychological perspective, of the legacy that has been left to mankind by colonialism, starting with the relationship between blacks and whites. Fanon uses psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory to explain feelings of dependence and alienation experienced by blacks in the “world of whites.” Although it is still considered to be influential and of great contemporary relevance—cited, for example, by Palestinians and Afro-Americans—it was relatively unknown for several decades after its publication.

A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history. Fanon’s masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said’s Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers. The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation.

On the heels of Woodstock, a group of teen campers are inspired to join the fight for disability civil rights. A spirited look at grassroots activism.

Herman Wallace spent more than 40 years in a 6-by-9-foot cell in Louisiana. Imprisoned in 1967 for a robbery he admits, he was subsequently sentenced to life for a killing he vehemently denies. Herman’s House is a moving account of the expression his struggle found in an unusual project proposed by artist Jackie Sumell. Imagining Wallace’s “dream home” began as a game and became an interrogation of justice and punishment in America. The film takes us inside the duo’s unlikely 12-year friendship, revealing the transformative power of art.