9/1 Front Table Newsletter

On This Week's Front Table, we explore striking, bold, and imaginative texts that scrutinize personal and systemic histories under a microscope. These texts range from the disturbing yet profoundly poetic redaction of the Department of Justice's official report on Michael Brown's murder, to the cultural imperative of teaching disobedience as pedagogy in the classroom, to a deliciously rich novel that delves into the meaning of participating in the story of one's own death and the secrets that are revealed in the process. Discover all this and more at semcoop.com.

Thin Skin: Essays
(Pantheon Books)
Jenn Shapland 

Weaving together historical research, interviews, and her everyday life in New Mexico, Shapland probes the lines between self and work, human and animal, need and desire. She traces the legacies of nuclear weapons development on Native land, unable to let go of her search for contamination until it bleeds out into her own family's medical history. She questions the toxic myth of white womanhood and the fear of traveling alone that she's been made to feel since girlhood. And she explores her desire to build a creative life as a queer woman, asking whether such a thing as a meaningful life is possible under capitalism. As Katherine May writes, "a visceral exploration" of examining capitalism's toxic creep into the land, our bodies, and our thinking.

Marcel Proust
(USA Oxford University Press)
Michael Wood 

What would the world be like without this work, where would we be if it hadn't happened?  This short book explores the work of Marcel Proust as an event in the world, something that happened to literature and culture and our understanding of history. This event has more aspects than we can count, but this book offers detailed critical snapshots of seven of them: the birth of Proust as a novelist; what he teaches us about the mythology of beginnings; about metaphor as a kind of rebellion; about love as a permanent anxiety attack; about the Dreyfus Affair; about the concept of justice; about the mythology of endings.


Breaking and Entering
(Biblioasis)
Don Gillmor 

Forty-nine and sweating through the hottest summer on record, Beatrice Billings is rudderless: her marriage is stale, her son communicates solely through cryptic text messages, her mother has dementia, and she conducts endless arguments with her older sister in her head. Everything changes when she googles "escape" and discovers the world of amateur lock-picking. Breaking into houses is thrilling: she's subtle and discreet, never greedy, but as her curiosity about other people's lives becomes a dangerous compulsion and the entire city feels a few degrees from boiling over, she realizes she must turn her guilty analysis on herself. A searingly insightful rendering of midlife among the anxieties of the early twenty-first century, Breaking and Entering is an exacting look at the fragility of all the things we take on faith.


The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
(Knopf Publishing Group)
Nicole Sealey 

In August 2014, Michael Brown--a young, unarmed Black man--was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil, culminating in an extensive report that was filed by the Department of Justice detailing biased policing and court practices in the city. It is a document that exposes the racist policies and procedures that have become commonplace--from disproportionate arrest rates, to flagrant violence directed at the Black community. Now, award-winning poet Nicole Sealey revisits the investigation in a book that redacts the report, an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away. While the full document is visible in the background, it gives shape and disturbing context to what remains. Illuminating what it means to live in this frightening age, and what it means to bear witness, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure is an engrossing meditation on one of the most important texts of our time.


Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration
(New Press)
Jocelyn Simonson

From reading books on mass incarceration, one might conclude that the way out of our overly punitive, racially disparate criminal system is to put things in the hands of experts, technocrats able to think their way out of the problem. But, as Jocelyn Simonson points out in her groundbreaking new book, the problems posed by the American carceral state are not just technical puzzles; they present profound moral questions for our time. Radical Acts of Justice tells the stories of ordinary people joining together in collective acts of resistance: paying bail for a stranger, using social media to let the public know what everyday courtroom proceedings are like, making a video about someone's life for a criminal court judge, presenting a budget proposal to the city council. Through collective action, these groups live out new and more radical ideas of what justice can look like. In a book that will be essential reading for those who believe our current systems of policing, criminal law, and prisons are untenable, Jocelyn Simonson shows how to shift power away from the elite actors at the front of the courtroom and toward the swelling collective in the back.


Family Lore
(Ecco Press)
Elzabeth Acevedo 

Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake--a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she's led--her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else's? Does she have other motives? Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo's inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces--one family's journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.


Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies
(Pluto Press)
Amber Murrey 

This is a book about teaching with disobedient pedagogies from the heart of empire. The authors show how educators, activists and students are cultivating anti-racist decolonial practices, leading with a radical call to eradicate development studies, and counterbalancing this with new projects to decolonize development, particularly in African geographies. Building on the works of other decolonial trailblazers, the authors show how colonial legacies continue to shape the ways in which land, well-being, progress and development are conceived of and practiced. How do we, through our classroom and activist practices, work collaboratively to create the radical imaginaries and practical scaffolding we need for decolonizing development? Being intentionally disobedient in the classroom is central to decolonizing development studies.