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Book launch: Lester Spence presents "Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics"

This event has already happened.

Thursday, January 14th 2016

7:30 pm

Red Emma's

We've been excited for this one for a while, and are exceptionally excited it's finally out. In Knocking the Hustle, JHU political scientist and Baltimore rabble-rouser Lester Spence takes on the turn to neoliberalism in black politics. As he notes, while both race and economic inequality seem to be on everyone's mind, we too often are presented with "an approach to politics that doesn’t take either politics or political economy seriously [or] an approach to neoliberalism that doesn’t really take racism seriously." Knocking the Hustle is a call to think about human potential in terms other than as "human capital," to think about the deep structural problems facing urban Black communities as something other than market opportunities, and to understand why "we’ve been forced to hustle and grind our way out of the post-civil rights era" and how "it is this hustle and grind in all of its institutional manifestations that’s resulted in our current condition."

It's also cool to see this coming out with our friends at Punctum Books. As Lester explains:

I probably could’ve published this book with a standard academic press, or with a standard trade press, but I decided I did not want to do so.

In part because of the political economy of publishing. In some ways the nature of publishing is changing underneath our feet–while I was probably one of the first black folk to have my own website (within two years of Race Matters’ publication I had a University of Michigan hosted website I think), I couldn’t have possibly imagined that writing something in a space like this could potentially reach over a thousand readers. However at the same time the publishing world, just like the rest of mass media, is dominated by only a few corporations.

What does that mean for the type of work we do? It means we have to be more attentive to these dynamics when we make decisions about publication, as publishing with radical presses increases the potential audiences these presses have, increases the resources they have.

It also means that we should think a bit about digital rights management and the possibilities different DRM models present us....Card-carrying academics with tenure like myself who tend to write books, have to find ways to get our ideas out that don’t solely rely on academic presses and the institutions connected to them, because they tend to be hostage to some of the same forces driving the consolidation of the mass media. And also to create more space for intellectual production that isn’t tied as much to professional advancement.

So I published with Punctum books. They are going to publish a regular book (which should be out early Fall 2015). But they’re also going to release an electronic version that’ll be free or close to it. I might be the first black intellectual to attempt something like this, and I’m not sure how it’ll work out. But I believe in the folks at Punctum, and I really want the ideas to travel.

And here's a few previews, courtesy of a few talks we've invited Lester to give, one at Occupy Baltimore and one at the Mobilizing and Organizing from Below conference we organized a few years ago:

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