Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The Nation On No Map uses Black anarchism as a tool of survival in an age of crisis. Picking up where his co-authored debut As Black As Resistance left off, Anderson rejects nationalism, the State, and citizenship as avenues to achieve liberation. He issues a bold case for prioritizing basic survival as social and environmental conditions grow worse and global disasters abound. In order to overcome oppression, he says, people will have to first overcome certain barriers to and ways of thinking about liberation that go beyond mere critique of the U.S. By broadening our understanding of what stands in our way to include things like celebrity, dogma, and the idea of nationhood itself (Black or otherwise), The Nation On No Map encourages readers to utilize, and then exceed, the ideals and strategies of Black anarchism, regardless of what term they use to describe the struggle for liberation.
Synopsis
The Nation on No Map examines state power, abolition, and ideological tensions within the struggle for Black liberation while centering the politics of Black autonomy and self-determination. Amid renewed interest in Black anarchism among the left, Anderson offers a principled rejection of reformism, nation building, and citizenship in the ongoing fight against capitalism and white supremacism. As a viable alternative amidst worsening social conditions, he calls for the urgent prioritization of community-based growth, arguing that in order to overcome oppression, people must build capacity beyond the state. The text interrogates how political actors tend to misuse and perpetuate historical myths in order to rehabilitate state power and governance in ways that threaten to derail revolutionary abolition. The Nation on No Map encourages readers to utilize the lens of various Black anarchist and autonomous politics to envision and enable radical social transformation.
Synopsis
A call for Black survival in the face of widespread crisis.
The Nation on No Map examines state power, abolition, and ideological tensions within the struggle for Black liberation while centering the politics of Black autonomy and self-determination. Amid renewed interest in Black anarchism among the left, Anderson offers a principled rejection of reformism, nation building, and citizenship in the ongoing fight against capitalism and white supremacism. As a viable alternative amidst worsening social conditions, he calls for the urgent prioritization of community-based growth, arguing that in order to overcome oppression, people must build capacity beyond the state. It interrogates how history and myth and leadership are used to rehabilitate governance instead of achieving a revolutionary abolition. By complicating our understanding of the predicaments we face, The Nation on No Map hopes to encourage readers to utilize a Black anarchic lens in favor of total transformation, no matter what it's called. Anderson's text examines reformism, orthodoxy, and the idea of the nation-state itself as problems that must be transcended and key sites for a liberatory re-envisioning of struggle.