⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ 4/5
Thank you University of Minnesota Press for providing an ARC for review consideration via NetGalley! All opinions are my own.
In Liberation Is Other People, Alexis Shotwell delivers a well-researched argument for enacting change through collectivism rather than individual purity. She explores the importance of cultivating the appropriate feelings for a forum for this collective struggle, moving away from theft and extractavism without perfectionism, how white settlers can practice relationality, and imagining and practicing a world where people can be themselves and not be made commodified and exchangeable.
“…caring for our fellow beings is possible on a sustained basis only in collectivity; while we can individually be decent people, to the extent available to us, if we are to care in a sustained way, it cannot be limited to individuals being nice to people they like or donating to support the habitat of some charismatic megafauna. Instead, I think we want a world in which even boring and irritating people have everything they need to have a good life and in which the humblest of weird bugs we’ve never heard of has a delicious leaf to eat and good water to drink.” This discussion on trying collectively work towards a future where “social ecologies default to neither individual lifestylism nor bounded ethnonationalism can open the way to depropertied, decommodified, decarceral, decolonial, and democratic relations” was the most impactful to me out of all the arguments. Shotwell admits “this is all very lofty. But it’s hard to change the world; it’s hard to figure out where to start.” So, while this book does not provide a black and white clear path forward, nor did I expect it would, it provides deep, insightful ways we can get our mindset to march forward, taking action even when we may be quite sure things are too far gone or sure no change will come. After all, as Ursula K. Le Guin argued, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” Shotwell goes on to say, ”This politics is against capitalism and colonialism; it is for Land Back and collective care. We won’t get to a world without borders tomorrow, and likely not the day after that either. But we can begin to practice taking something that was property and making it life — building a place where no human is illegal and where all beings can flourish.” Reading these goals was powerful. “We want something new, something that would surprise all the doomsayers, we might become something we ourselves could not have imagined, through collective work…”
Another component of the book I found very interesting was about what feelings are crucial in order to sustain the sense of purpose needed to make change and to do successful work together. I jotted down a number of works that I’d like to read more of after seeing excerpts here. On this topic of feelings in particular, I’d like to read Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings by Sue Campbell. Throughout the book, Shotwell used not only other research and books, but plays and movies as well to illustrate her points. This injected a little lightness into a heavy topic.
My only critiques lie in the book’s structural pacing and framing. Both the introduction and the conclusion feel overly lengthy. While the information in these sections adds to the author’s overarching argument, the book would have had higher impact if this content had been integrated into the respective chapters allowing the beginning and end to focus strictly on high-level takeaways. Additionally, for a relatively short book, there were frequent and unnecessary reminders about what had already been discussed and what was coming next. Finally, I struggled with the linguistic framing of “wicked problems.” I understand this is a technical term that has been widely used for decades. Yet, this feels exclusionary and may have the end result of turning people away from collective action if used outside of a scholary work such as this.
Academics will likely get the most out of this book, as it is formatted and delivered much like a research paper. However, even as someone reading it through a slightly lighter, non-academic lens, it provided me with immense value and many powerful takeaways.
