Books published by Common Notions

A love letter to over 750 record labels which produced political music as a medium for improving our communities and world.

In Stepford Daughters, Johanna Isaacson explores an emerging wave of horror films that get why class horror and gender horror must be understood together.In doing so, Isaacson makes the case that this often-maligned genre is in fact a place where oppressed people can understand, navigate and confront an increasingly ugly and horrifying world.Films like Hereditary and The Babadook show women coming apart at the seams as the promises of both the family and waged work fail them. In Get Out, we see how poor women and women of color perform the invisible labor that holds up our society, experiencing domestic work as a kind of possession. In coming of rage films such as Assassination Nation and Teeth, we see the ways social reproduction leads to a futureless horizon. Robbed of their dreams but not their power to resist, these heroines emerge as the monsters and avengers we need.

Hope Against Hope investigates the critical relation between climate change and capitalism characterized by deepening inequality, rising far-right movements, and–relatedly–more frequent and devastating disasters.Out of the Woods Collective charts a revolutionary course in and beyond our perilous times. The journey, they argue, requires an abolitionist approach to border imperialism, reactionary ecology, and state violence that underpin many green solutions to climate change as well as dominant modes of understanding nature. Crucially, they remind us of the frequent moments and movements of solidarity emerging from the ruins that surround us. Their daring response to the disarray of politics in our seemingly end times is the urgent and hopeful project of “disaster communism”–the collective power to transform our political horizons and establish a climate future based in common life.Hope Against Hope is a devastating critique of the current environmentalist and leftist discourses on climate change that rely upon and renew racist, anti-migrant, nationalist, and capitalist assumptions. It is also a visionary call for the critical expansion of our conceptual toolbox to organize solidarity within and against ecological crisis.

Joining a long line of speculative writing that helps us to understand worlds not yet existing An Oral History of the New York Commune will appeal to readers of Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ian M. Banks, Samuel Delaney, and China Mieville among others.

Drawing on the conceptual anchors of the Black Radical Tradition, How We Stay Free produces a Philly-driven literary mixtape/anthology-in-action

Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions. To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.By highlighting the misogyny at fascisms core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a micro-antifascism grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.

The global struggles against racism, capitalism, and patriarchy revealed by the Black and Indigneous women and trans communities leading its resistance.

A powerful guide to Indigenous liberation and the fight to save the planet. The Red Deal is both a manifesto for Indigenous liberation and a plan for the future of our planet. Part movement document and part activist handbook, its ultimate goal is not to heal the existing structures, but to present a way forward following the abolition of them.

Take care of yourself. How many times a week do we hear or say these words? If we all took the time to care for ourselves, how much stronger will we be? More importantly how much stronger will our communities be? In Take Care of Your Self, Iraqi artist and curator Sundus Abdul Hadi turns a critical and inventive eye on the notion of self-care, rejecting the idea that self-care means buying stuff and recasting it as a collective practice rooted in the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Throughout, Abdul Hadi explores the role of art in fostering healing for those affected by racism, war, and displacement, weaving in the artwork of twenty-seven artists of color from diverse backgrounds to identify the points where these struggles intersect. In centering the voices of those often relegated to the margins of the art world and emphasizing the imperative to create safe spaces for artists of color to explore their complicated reactions to oppression, Abdul Hadi casts self-care as a political act rooted in the impulse toward self-determination, empowerment, and healing that animates the work of artists of color across the world.