Wynter's Queer Revolution Community Organizing and the Future of the Humanities

Foreword

Benediction

Preface

Part I: Theory—The Hopefulness of Dreaming Otherwise

Introduction: Scapegoats, Spectacle, Superheroes, Sylvia, and My Familia

Chapter 1. All Together Now—Communitarian Revolutionary Subjects

Chapter 2. Disciplines Talking

Chapter 3. Drown This Subject—The Inhumanities

Chapter 4. Afropessimism, Decolonial Studies, and Refusing to Be Single, But Loving the Swarm

Chapter 5. A Queerness of Cultural Studies: Showing Our Ruins in Public

Part II: Pedagogical Experiments

Chapter 6. Toward a Community Organizing Humanities

Chapter 7. How We Struggle—Teaching Action as Initiation into Loving Conflict and Abolishing Civilization

Chapter 8. What We Struggle Toward—Teaching Vision as Initiation into Loving Rupture and Abolishing Progress

Chapter 9. When We Struggle—Teaching Connection as Initiation into Loving Ordinary and Abolishing Exceptionalism

Chapter 10. Who We Struggle With—Teaching Investment as Initiation into Loving Solidarity and Abolishing Freedom

Conclusion: Why We Struggle—Teaching Autopoiesis as Initiation into Loving the Trans and Abolishing Maturity

Afterword

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Biography

Hannah Ashley is a community-engaged teacher-scholar and Professor at West Chester University, USA, a former community-based Philadelphia literacy educator, and proudly publicly educated, from elementary school through PhD.  She is also a mother, partner, friend, and jujitsu fanatic.

William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA (retired), has written extensively about social justice and democracy, education and the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. His latest book is When Freedom Is the Question Abolition Is the Answer (2024).

Michael Sterling Burns is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University, USA. His teaching and scholarship evidence a continued interest in the connections between language practices and liberation, especially in relation to African heritage people in the Americas. Michael serves as the English Department Chair and teaches courses in Black American rhetorics, literatures, and critical theory.

Wynter’s Queer Revolution is a passion project responding to the crises of our time. Written with the urgency that the current state of the world demands, Hannah Ashley is thoroughly engaged with the most pressing question we face today: how do we change this world? Drawing on debates and controversies within the humanities, WQR brings together political insights and arguments intended to equip organizers to intervene in the current political debates about how to move forward in the quest for changes. An important and timely contribution. --Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

 

In a moment when liberal academia is struggling to defend its worth to the American public, Wynter's Queer Revolution invites us to imagine how the humanities can foster radical subjectivity and community action. This book brings together the best of two worlds that have been forced apart by capital: organizing and academia. It is timely and necessary!— Eman Abdelhadi, co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072

 

Hannah Ashley’s Wynter’s Queer Revolution is a courageous intervention, insisting that collapse can also mean possibility. Blending Black, queer, and decolonial thought with on-the-ground pedagogical experiments, this bold manifesto for a “Community Organizing Humanities” resists the accommodation and paralysis so common in the university. It speaks directly to scholars, educators, organizers, and practitioners who refuse to linger in critique alone and instead want to transform our realities by cultivating new, collective, revolutionary subjectivities.  --Nara Roberta Silva, Core Faculty & Praxis Program Head, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Author, Contradições da Horizontalidade

 

Against cynics and pessimists, this exciting book gives us a much-needed guide to building and fixing things for a better but as yet unknowable future. Ashley draws on scholarship in queer, Black, feminist, and Marxist studies to show how excluded and oppressed perspectives can actively forge the tools and the know-how to create new subjectivities that can care for each other rather than tearing us apart.  

--Caroline Levine, Author, The Activist Humanist