US Launch 11 Dec: Andaiye and Selma James, The Point is to Change the World & Our Time Is Now
Saturday, Dec 11, 2021 9am PST / Noon EST / 5pm GMT
Between the Lines Books in Toronto, City Lights Books in San Francisco, Eso Won Bookstore in Los Angeles, the Howard Zinn Book Fair, Marcus Books in Oakland, Pacifica Radio’s “Sojourner Truth”, Pacifica station WPFW in Washington DC, PM Press in Oakland, and Pluto Press in London join with the Global Women’s Strike in sponsoring the US launch of two pathbreaking books!
Online event will feature Selma James, author, and Alissa Trotz, editor of Andaiye’s book and Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Caribbean Studies at New College, University of Toronto. Margaret Prescod who introduced Selma’s book will be a facilitator.
The Point is to Change the World
by the late Andaiye, Guyanese author, founder member of Red Thread and member of Women of Color Global Women’s Strike, close colleague of Dr Walter Rodney and a key figure in the Caribbean. With an introduction by African American historian and author Dr Robin Kelley. Published by Pluto Press.
Andaiyewas one of the Caribbean’s most important political voices. For the first time, her writings are published in one collection.
Through essays, speeches, letters and journal entries, Andaiye’s thinking on the intersections of gender, race, class and power are profoundly articulated, Caribbean histories emerge, and stories from a life lived at the barricades are revealed.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this volume will occupy a vaunted place alongside the writings of C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Sylvia Wynter, Edouard Glissant, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, Stuart Hall, and certainly Walter Rodney. And like her distinguished predecessors, Andaiye and her brilliant collaborator, Alissa Trotz, did not put this book together in order to gather dust in a library. The title says it all: The Point is to Change the World – Robin D.G. Kelley, author of ‘Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination’
This collection is a benchmark for the study of the Caribbean radical imagination – Clem Seecharan, Emeritus Professor of History at London Metropolitan University and author of ‘Sweetening “Bitter Sugar”: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-66’
A comprehensive assessment of Andaiye’s journey of personal, political and professional growth. Notwithstanding her privileged position, she was a resolute advocate for working-class women. Her legacy as a Caribbean activist and strategist is formidable – Patricia Rodney, Chair of the Walter Rodney Foundation
Andaiye was the most important Caribbean woman intellectual-activist of the generation of Walter Rodney. Her subtle, river-clear, loving and angry intelligence is rescued here, and with it the memory of the political struggles of the 1970s and 80s in which a critical feminism emerged from the ruins of the Black Power moment – Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London
Our Time is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet
by internationally renowned author and campaigner Selma James, founder of the Wages for Housework Campaign, and colleague and widow of CLR James. With an introduction by Margaret Prescod. Published by PM Press.
This much-anticipated follow-up to her first anthology, Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning, compiles several decades of James’s work with a focus on more recent writings. Read more about the book here.
For over sixty years, Selma James has been organizing from the perspective of unwaged women who, with their biological and caring work, reproduce the whole human race—whatever else they do. This work goes on almost unnoticed everywhere, in every culture. It is not prioritized economically, politically, or socially, and women are discriminated against and impoverished for doing it.
‘Selma James is a treasure…one of the key political thinkers and activists of our times.’ – Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship (Penguin Books, 2008)
This much-anticipated follow-up to her first anthology, Sex, Race, and Class, compiles several decades of James’s work with a focus on her more recent writings, including a groundbreaking analysis of C.L.R. James’s two masterpieces, The Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary, and an account of her formative partnership with him over three decades. Her experience with the Caribbean movement for independence and federation is reflected in her introduction to Ujamaa, the extraordinary work of Tanzanians to bypass capitalism, and much more.
Steeped in the tradition of Marx, James draws on half a century of organizing across sectors, struggles and national boundaries with others in the Wages for Housework Campaign and the Global Women’s Strike, an autonomous network of women, men, and other genders that agree with their perspective.
There is one continuum between the care and protection of people and of the planet: both must be a priority, beginning with a care income for everyone doing this vital work. James makes the powerful argument that the climate justice movement can draw on all the movements’ people have formed to refuse their particular exploitation, to destroy the capitalist hierarchy that is destroying the world. Our time is now.