The Signal Series
I come from a long line of activists, agitators and organizers, and over the generations, the pamphlet as a form of political writing has been part of our culture. Palabrera Press is reviving that tradition. The Signal Series brings back the substantive political pamphlet, with single essays on a range of topics, but all of them offering sharp, original thinking, in accessible language.
The first pamphlets in the pipeline are reprints of key writings by my parents. My mother’s essay “The Origins of Racism” was the opening piece for a special issue of the feminist journal Heresies, called “Racism is the Issue,” which appeared in 1982. We will reproduce it complete with her original drawings.
“De rebelde a revolucionario/From Rebel to Revolutionary” will be a bilingual edition of an article my father wrote in 1965 for the Puerto Rican independence movement journal La Escalera, of which he was an editor. The essay was an influential piece of political thinking for several generations of Puerto Rican leftists, and the distinctions it makes between reactive and strategic political activism are just as relevant today.
I’ve selected three of my own essays, The Historian As Curandera, Certified Organic Intellectual and Art and Science. The first two appeared originally in Medicine Stories (South End Press, 1998) and the last was written for a symposium at Tulane University when I was artist in residence at A Studio in the Woods, on the West Bank of the Mississippi River, in the Outer Algiers district of New Orleans, just four months before Katrina.
Telling the Truth, Five Difficulties was written by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s, during the rise of fascism in his native Germany, and has been an important point of reference for me since my early twenties. This edition includes my introductory essay.
This is just the beginning of what I hope will be a provocative and useful collection of pamphlets, to be argued over in cafés, studied in collectives, handed out in classes and on buses, and forwarded in electronic form into the hands of activists of many stripes.
The first pamphlets in the pipeline are reprints of key writings by my parents. My mother’s essay “The Origins of Racism” was the opening piece for a special issue of the feminist journal Heresies, called “Racism is the Issue,” which appeared in 1982. We will reproduce it complete with her original drawings.
“De rebelde a revolucionario/From Rebel to Revolutionary” will be a bilingual edition of an article my father wrote in 1965 for the Puerto Rican independence movement journal La Escalera, of which he was an editor. The essay was an influential piece of political thinking for several generations of Puerto Rican leftists, and the distinctions it makes between reactive and strategic political activism are just as relevant today.
I’ve selected three of my own essays, The Historian As Curandera, Certified Organic Intellectual and Art and Science. The first two appeared originally in Medicine Stories (South End Press, 1998) and the last was written for a symposium at Tulane University when I was artist in residence at A Studio in the Woods, on the West Bank of the Mississippi River, in the Outer Algiers district of New Orleans, just four months before Katrina.
Telling the Truth, Five Difficulties was written by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s, during the rise of fascism in his native Germany, and has been an important point of reference for me since my early twenties. This edition includes my introductory essay.
This is just the beginning of what I hope will be a provocative and useful collection of pamphlets, to be argued over in cafés, studied in collectives, handed out in classes and on buses, and forwarded in electronic form into the hands of activists of many stripes.
The Signal Series
#1 De rebelde a revolucionari@/ From Rebel to Revolutionary by Richard Levins
#2 The Historian As Curandera// La historiadora como curandera by Aurora Levins Morales
#3 Art and Science//El arte y la ciencia by Aurora Levins Morales
#4 The Origins of Racism by Rosario Morales
#5 Certified Organic Intellectual by Aurora Levins Morales
#6 Telling the Truth, Five Difficulties by Bertolt Brecht, with an introduction by Aurora Levins Morales
#2 The Historian As Curandera// La historiadora como curandera by Aurora Levins Morales
#3 Art and Science//El arte y la ciencia by Aurora Levins Morales
#4 The Origins of Racism by Rosario Morales
#5 Certified Organic Intellectual by Aurora Levins Morales
#6 Telling the Truth, Five Difficulties by Bertolt Brecht, with an introduction by Aurora Levins Morales