The Ends of Resistance

The Ends of Resistance is written in highly accessible, largely jargon-free prose...For readers, the book offers an invitation to consider what might be required to have a greater impact and what a transformation of contemporary politics beyond its current neoliberal confines might entail. * New Political Science * Resistance is a word that has lost its critical edge, as this book demonstrates. Olson and Zamalin name 'restorative resistance' the idea that a return to a pre-Trump era is sufficient. Their critique challenges our coalitions, but this is a challenge that must be taken up to make the change the world needs. Essential reading. -- Linda Martín Alcoff, City University of New York How did suburban lawn signs, social media photo frames, and voter mobilization campaigns for moderate Democrats become 'resistance'? Soberly diagnosing the rise of 'restorative resistance' as the outcome of a decades-long deliberate neoliberal narrowing of the political life of democracy, Olson and Zamalin echo Michel Foucault's fundamental insight that what is called 'resistance' illuminates how power is exercised. Rightfully alarming readers about a hegemonic horizon of reform that prizes channeling people's capacities to endure economic and social injustices they should resoundingly reject, the authors offer compelling guides to reigniting radical imagination and praxis by joining deeply democratic struggles through which we work to reawaken demands for liberation, actual popular sovereignty, and the state itself as ours—in solidarity with each other and the planet—to reimagine. -- Jane Anna Gordon, author of <i>Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement</i> The Ends of Resistance sheds an illuminating light on the shocking ways elite media and politicians have appropriated Black political resistance and the #MeToo movement for corporate and individualistic ends. Olson and Zamalin challenge the ways 'anti-racist' tactics have been appropriated to reinforce racial capitalism in a powerful indictment of the nation’s lackluster political will, even among so-called radicals. -- Terrence L. Johnson, author of <i>We Testify with Our Lives: How Religion Transformed Radical Thought from Black Power to Black Lives Matter</i>