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You can search our online inventory for books currently in stock, or read some of our reviews of the books we carry below. If you have questions or suggestions, please email books@redemmas.org. If you need to order books for a reading group, let us know - we like to support people getting together to read books by offering discounts on special orders.
Reviews
Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore
by Marisela Gomez
This review originally appeared on indyreader.org.
Memory Against Forgetting: Marisela Gomez's book illuminates the history of the fight against displacement and dispossession in East Baltimore
Let's start with a website. Visit ebdi.org and you'll find a glowing description of responsible urban development, of a large institution acting benevolently, even munificently, to lift up a troubled neighborhood, mired in generations of poverty, and bringing prosperity back to a decaying city. This is a good story, and one that postindustrial cities, clinging to their “anchor institutions,” are increasingly vocal in telling.
In Baltimore, however, this website and its reassuring story leaves something out: the real history of struggle, led by the residents of the Middle East neighborhood who have been fighting the East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI) for over a decade. These were the residents who learned that the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI), through its quasi-public proxy EBDI, would be taking their homes through eminent domain: one morning when they woke up to the story in the Baltimore Sun. These were the residents who refused to go quietly and agree that the public good would be served at the cost of uprooting their community, and who dared to fight back against the very powerful institutions who wanted to decide the future of the Middle East. And these are the residents whose story is told in Dr. Marisela Gomez's new book, Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore.
more >>Supernatural Strategies for making a Rock 'n' Roll Group
by Ian F. Svenonius
This newest volume by contemporary art and music's favorite quasi-anti-hero pundit Ian Svenonius is a programmatic for, as the title suggests, forming a rock 'n' roll group.
more >>Help us raise money to distribute Marisela Gomez's long-awaited book on anti-displacement organizing in East Baltimore!
by Red Emma's
Audio: "Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives" w/Breanne Fahs
by Breanne Fahs
On May 16th, 2012, feminist, professor, and scholar of Women and Gender Studies, Breanne Fahs, came to Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse to discuss her new book Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives. To an engaged packed house, Fahs lively and candidly discussed her research, work, and critique. In Performing Sex, Fahs does immense research into "women's erotic lives", as well as interviews forty women about their relationships to their own sexual subjectivites.
Fahs findings are at once surprising, but only due to the resonance of their frank revelations. As is highly detailed in her book, and seen through the active discussion at the event, a large portion of women can relate on various levels to Fahs's portrayals.
We have undergone numerous "waves" of feminism and, in many ways, women have more sexual autonomy and freedom than ever before. However, oppression always finds a means in which to sequester liberation. Fahs details that women today are caught in a perilous period "between postsexual revolution celebrations of progress and alarmingly regressive new modes of disempowerment." (Performing Sex)
Her account reveals: women's immensity and frequency of faking orgams, habitual inability to orgasm but pressure to do so, fantasies that downplay or eliminate their own agency, regular distaste for sex, and alarming ways in which they approach/perform sex not for their own - or collective - pleasure but purely for their partner's.
In this discussion, Fahs asks us to critique the world we've inherited from prior feminist movements, oppression's backlash results that we must grapple with today, and the long road we still must travel down in order to find, meet, know, embrace, unabashedly pursue our own female needs and desires. A key point that Fahs stressed was that not only do we need to work for the freedom to but also the freedom from. Sexual liberation does not only lie in the ability to desire sex but also in the ability/acceptance for lack of desire. She asks to analyze and acknowledge the complexities in our sexual selves and in ourselves.
The female-lead collaborative discussion weaved through topics as diverse as the regulation of female body hair, to traversing these territories in LGBTQ relationships, to engaging on these issues with male partners (and males in general), and to a plethora of other terrains.
Here is audio from this event:
more >>Audio: "The People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan"
by Eric Laursen
On Friday, May 11th, 2012, Eric Laursen spoke about his groundbreaking historical account and analysis of the three decade struggle over Social Security, entitled: People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan. Social Security is arguably the most successful anti-poverty social program that the US has ever institutionalized and upkept, Laursen details how Social Security is the "glue" that binds Americans together as a community; as well as unveils in-depth research on revelations from: the Clinton Administration's plan to radically restructure Social Security, the retirement crisis, the personalities that have driven the three-decade long struggle to restructure/eliminate/defend Social Security, and the newest challenges we face in this recent financial crisis. In the aftermath of the debt reduction deal between Barack Obama and congressional Republicans, the 2012 election promises to be a kind of referendum on the size and role of government—including economic support programs like Social Security.In one of the most important books of the year, questions asked include: Why is the most popular and successful social program in American history, responsible for lifting generations out of poverty, now under continual assault by elements of the U.S. political elite? And, what has changed in American politics, society, and economics to make this possible? In the end, Laursen suggests that the only solution is taking Social Security out of the government's hands altogether. Here is the audio from this important discussion.
more >>Asia's Unknown Uprisings Volume 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century
by George Katsiaficas
One of the things that surprised me about the wave of radical theory that accompanied the arc of popular struggle running from Tunis through Cairo and on to Madison and NYC was that no one seemed to be mentioning George Katsiaficas, and his concept of the Eros Effect: for years, he has consistently and creatively excavated the history of revolutions from below, naming by Eros---in a nod to his mentor Herbert Marcuse---that contagious logic of popular power that overturns decades of repression in hours, spontaneously builds new socieities founded in love and mutual aid, and jumps like a wildfire across the global and historical imagination.
For the past decade or so, Katsiaficas has been at work on what's likely to be his most important work: a recovery, for the English speaking world, of the tremendous social movements that have been sweeping East Asia: this is a necessary corrective, since few people have even heard of the most famous moments of this recent history: there's so much talk about North Korean dictatorship---but our abysmally complicit media frames rarely acknowledge the long and sordid history of authoritarian rule in South Korea propped up by the United States.
The resistance in South Korea deserves to be legendary (and making it so is the task of Katsiaficas' first volume): do you know about Gwangju for instance? A commune in 1980 South Korea's sixth largest society, taken over by its citizens---who when faced with state repression built from scratch in a few days a popular army, and who were brutally supressed with hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of casualties when the state retook the city at gunpoint?
We've been waiting for this book for years---not to mention the still forthcoming the second volume, which expands the focus from the Korean pennisula to study popular revolts across the region, promises even more gamechanging revolutionary history.
more >>
A Review: "Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS"
by Deborah Gould
more >>
Our annual holiday window display ...
by Red Emma's
Photos of our beautiful red & black holiday window display, featuring some of our favorite picks for this year's non-denominational anarchist gift-giving season!
more >>
Audio: Carl Davidson on Mondragon and the Solidarity Economy
by Carl Davidson
The presentation explored the genesis and trajectory of the Mondragon experiment, with an eye towards understanding how this model might be deployed to build a green economy in the US.
more >>Audio: Race in 21st Century America Panel
by ...
A panel discussion with:
Questions and Answer
Cosponsored by Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and moderated by Lawrence Grandpre. Donations from the door went to fund the struggle against the Youth Jail.
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