From newsletters and zines to hashtags and social media posts, social movements frequently generate and circulate media to define political goals, build solidarity, and articulate theories of change. These acts of media-making play a crucial role in developing relationships rooted in collective political visions across racial differences. Yet, in past and present movements, building solidarity across uneven race, class, and gender differences has often been a tenuous pursuit. How do social movements use media to create and sustain solidarity? In Movement Media, Rachel Kuo assesses the possibilities and limitations of crafting solidarities across racialized differences through media-making processes and communications practices. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork, Kuo revisits key movements--Third World feminism, environmental justice, migrant justice, and police and prison abolition--to assess the mundane and less visible forms of movement building that help various groups navigate the politics of difference in theory and in practice. Kuo situates these movements alongside shifts in technological developments and the communication landscape, making the case that building and sustaining solidarity requires time and work to develop shared political analysis and practices. As contemporary movements organize and struggle against the challenges of NGO-ization, neoliberal identity politics, private technologies, and liberal carceral reform--all of which seek to subsume and manage the efficacy of political organizing--Movement Media tells the important story of how communities build and sustain solidarity through media.
Industry Reviews
"IMovement Media is a powerfully nuanced and accessible read that reveals the ways social justice solidarities solidify. Rachel Kuo's grounded investigations of the material that move our movements ask us to reconsider the processes and products of our collective organizing, with attention toward the movement media that bring us together, as well as their complicity in our oppression. Kuo centers Asian and Black women organizers and the different banners under
which they forged often tenuous solidarities, showing both the strength and weaknesses of these bonds across time and technologies, while simultaneously leaving open the door to new possibilities for
Movement Media magic." -- Moya Bailey, Author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance
"This book offers an insightful and badly needed analysis of how progressive social movements are built under conditions of constant surveillance and instability. Kuo reminds us that our technologies and infrastructures have always been compromised-the same tech that supposedly protects freedom also undermines it-but that it's from this compromised position that we can imagine something different. At a time when things seem overwhelming, she reminds us that by
reflecting and analyzing movement media, we can build collectives and open future possibilities. Brilliant. A must read." -- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Author of Discriminating Data: Correlation,
Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition
"Movement Media is a monumental work that traces the last fifty years of social movement organizing in the United States and the theories and practices of solidarity through difference innovated by these movements. Mobilizing a stunning array of archival, ethnographic, and cultural 'media' sources, Kuo tracks the largely unappreciated technical, administrative, and reproductive labor that makes movements possible in the face of both repressive and
co-optive state violence. Kuo's innovative and original methodology thus unearths a discontinuous genealogy of Third World and women of color feminist movement practices that would otherwise be impossible to
trace." -- Grace Kyungwon Hong, Author of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference
