How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence.“Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.
"Taking its point of departure from the writings of Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Fredric Jameson, this book is a kind of training manual for understanding the role and place of reading and writing within the political domain, and for imagining-across time but without losing the specificity of particular historical moments-the grounds for a collective political imagination able to extract hope from what Cadava and Melsio call the archives of communal grief"--
