Freedom Is A Constant Struggle is an extremely urgent and timely text and one that I would highly recommend to seasoned and new readers. Du Bois, whom Davis recognizes throughout this work as a central intellectual forebear, once described colonies as “the slums of the world,” that is, places populated by peoples, upon which extractive economies backed by extreme police measures could be given the greatest latitude.

When talking about the Middle East, why is Palestine held more accountable and liable for violence than Israel? Reflecting on the importance of Black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles—from the Black freedom movement to the South African antiapartheid movement. It's wild that this was published in 2015 because so many things she talks about feel even more relevant now. This is vintage Angela: insightful, curious, observant, and brilliant, asking and answering questions about events in this new century that look surprisingly similar to the last century. Angela Davis is one of the most consistent and visionary intellectual activists working to enlarge our understanding of what she terms the “geographies and temporalities” of black freedom struggles.As someone who has known about Angela Davis but never read anything by her before, this was a great introduction to her. I didn't realize how fairly stream of consciousness her speeches tend to be, and how much she deviates in the middle of a speech to draw in a connection between what she's talking about and whatever comes to mind. Davis speaks of a broad framework: pro feminism, queer rights, immigration rights, Palestinian rights, anti- racism and capitalism.

The pieces in this collection are brief so folks may want to read additional texts to gain a more in-depth perspective on the issues Davis raises.To open up the discursive terrain, Angela Davis develops a vocabulary that permits her audience to have insightful conversations about social issues. In practice, my impression is that Palestinians (much like Israelis) don't really get American race issues nor are they very intersectional. These essays take us back in history to the founders of revolutionary and anti-racist struggle, but they also take us toward the possibility of ongoing intersectional solidarity and struggle. The first three chapters are interviews with Angela Davis in regards to her views on how we can continue to advance social movements in a effective way.

Over the last two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the fault lines of inequality that run deep throughout the world. It could do with a newer edition were she can share lectures or essays on the hellish panorama of the past couple of years.He was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and is now the president of the Palestine Legal Action Network. A Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza like the one that was offered several times and was turned down? I think that, as far as content, the ideas and concepts and arguments and connections she presented on the various topics in these talks, it was brilliant.

It's enough to know that the content of the essay was originally written as a speech, but that doesn't mean that it should not be edited for relevance to the new format. I guess I've admittedly been a little star struck every time I've seen her speak live, so it was interesting to read her speeches and delve into the syntactical realms of her rhetoric and psycho-linguistic processes. But this book really enables readers to apply the arguments as they are presented to their everyday lives.An important point here is that racism and colonialism are not only interwoven as constitutive dimensions within the international development of modern capitalist social formations, but have been reworked and updated under globalizing conditions.