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Slug & Lettuce, Pathetic Life, I Hate Brenda, Dishwasher, Punk and Destroy, Sweet Jesus, Scrambled Eggs, Maximunrocknroll—these are among the thousands of publications which circulate in a subterranean world rarely illuminated by the searchlights of mainstream media commentary. In this multifarious underground, Pynchonesque misfits rant and rave, fans eulogize, hobbyists obsess. Together they form a low-tech publishing network of extraordinary richness and variety. Welcome to the realm of zines. In this, the first comprehensive study of zine publishing, Stephen Duncombe describes their origins in early-twentieth-century science fiction cults, their more proximate roots in 60s counter-culture and their rapid proliferation in the wake of punk rock. While Notes from Underground pays full due to the political importance of zines as a vital web of popular culture, it also notes the shortcomings of their utopian and escapist outlook in achieving fundamental social change. Duncombe's book raises the larger questionof whether it is possible to rebel culturally within a consumer society that eats up cultural rebellion. Packed with extracts and illustrations from a wide array of publications, past and present, Notes from Underground is the first book to explore the full range of zine culture and provides a definitive portrait of the contemporary underground in all its splendor and misery.

A lifelong activist, Stephen Duncombe has organized community groups, mobilized marches, staged direct actions, walked picket lines, and been arrested for civil disobedience more times than he can remember. Over the past decade, he has traveled the globe training activists to create more like artists and artists to strategize more like activists. An avid fisherman in his youth, he put down his rod and reel for over forty years. Looking for a physical retreat and mental break during the pandemic of 2020 he took them up again. After forty years, he had to re-teach himself how to fish and approached the practice with what Zen masters call Beginner's Mind. With no habits or tradition to fall back upon, every fish successfully caught or line hopelessly snarled provided a clear lesson. With hours spent doing little more than casting and retrieving -- actually catching fish being a fraction of the time spent fishing -- he had a lot of time to think about these lessons he was learning. One of the things he thought a lot about was activism. Fishing, he discovered, has a lot to teach about the art of activism. Fishing and the Art of Activism is a collection of these lessons. The format is simple: one paragraph on fishing followed by another on what might be learned and applied to activism. Each mini-essay is accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration. Topics range from telling fish stories and the trap of activist nostalgia, to the impossibility of thinking like a fish yet the necessity of understanding one's audience, with detours through snarled fishing lines, meditations on self-care, catch-and-release, and taking responsibility for the human cost of one's political actions. Fishing and activism may be the ostensible topics of Fishing and the Art of Activism, but they're really just subjects to reflect upon to address bigger questions: How do I live in the moment? How do I understand the past? How do I spend time with myself? Where do I find community? How can I connect to those who are different from me? Where do I find excitement? How do I find peace? Fishing and the Art of Activism is a small and simple book, but its concerns are large.

What practical lessons can we learn from corporate theme parks, ad campaigns, video games, celebrity culture and Las Vegas? Can such examples of popular fantasy help us define and make possible a new political future? This is the case for a progressive political strategy that embraces a new set of tools. Although fantasy and spectacle have become the lingua franca of our time, Duncombe points out that liberals continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them. Instead, they need to learn how to communicate in today's spectacular vernacular.

The first book to seriously identify how artistic activism works and how to make it work better The past decade has seen an explosion in the hybrid practice of “artistic activism,” as artists have turned toward activism to make their work more socially impactful and activists have adopted techniques and perspectives from the arts to make their interventions more creative. Yet questions haunt the practice: Does artistic activism work aesthetically? Does it work politically? And what does “working” even mean when one combines art and activism? In Æffect, author Stephen Duncombe sets out to address these questions at the heart of the field of artistic activism. Written by the co-founder and current Research Director of the internationally recognized Center for Artistic Activism, Æffect draws on Duncombe’s more than twenty-five years of experience in the field and one hundred in-depth interviews with artistic activists worldwide. More than a mere academic exercise, the theory, research, and tools in this book lay the groundwork for artistic activists to evaluate and strengthen their practice and to create better projects. The exploration of good artistic activism is grounded in three sets of concerns. 1) Change: Upon what theories of change is artistic activism based? 2) Intention: What do we hope and expect artistic activism to do, and how does it do this? 3) Evaluation: What actually happens as the result of an artistic activist intervention? Can it be measured? Æffect is rich with examples that demonstrate successful artistic activism, including Undocubus, an old bus painted “No Fear” across its side that was driven cross-country by a group of undocumented immigrant activists; Journal Rappé, a video show created by Senegalese rappers who created long-form investigative reports by rapping the current news in French and Wolof; and War on Smog, a staged a public performance piece by artistic activists in the city of Chongqing in Southwest China. Scannable QR codes are included to provide tools that help readers assess the æffect of their artistic activism.

"Opinion polls, volatile voting patterns, and street protests demonstrate widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, yet the popular response so far has largely been limited to the angry outcry of No! But negation, by itself, affects nothing. The dominant system doesn't dominate because people agree with it; it rules because we're convinced there is no alternative. We need to be able to imagine a radical alternative - a Utopia - yet we are haunted by the disasters of "actually existing" Utopias of the past century, from fascism to authoritarian socialism. In this re-issue of Thomas More's generative volume, scholar and activist Stephen Duncombe re-imagines Utopia as an open text, one designed by More as an imaginal machine freeing us from the tyranny of the present while undermining master plans for the future. Open Utopia is the first complete English language edition of Thomas More's Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself: that all property is common property. Open Utopia, licensed under Creative Commons, is free to copy, to share, to use. But Utopia is more than the story of a far-off land with no private property. It is a text that instructs us how to approach texts, be they literary or political, in an open manner: open to criticism, open to participation, and open to re-creation. Utopia is no-place, and therefore it is up to all of us to imagine it. In this volume ... Utopia is re-imagined and brought into the digital age as a participatory technology for undermining authority and facilitating new imagination"--Publisher's description

Dream or Nightmare is a book of left wing strategy like no other: It proposes that, to compete with the right, progressives cannot depend on reason and hard fact. They must also deploy drama in the battle of ideas. Donald Trump’s presidency has shown how this is done, albeit to ends that are deplorable. Abandoning logic and truth, the Fabulist in Chief conjures up spectacle to energize his base. Troops are dispatched to counter a fictional threat from convoys of helpless refugees. A powerful Supreme Court nominee is reduced to tears by accusations from a woman who has been sexually assaulted. Open fascists are described as “good people,” physical attacks on journalists are lauded in front of cheering crowds. If they are to engage with this Barnum-like politics, leftists must learn how to communicate in today’s “vernacular of the spectacular,” invoking symbol and emotion themselves, as well as truth. Matching the right in this fashion does not mean adopting its values. Rather Duncombe sets out what he calls a politics of “ethical spectacle.” Of extraordinary relevance to the dark carnival of contemporary politics, this new edition of the book formerly known as Dream sets out an electrifying new vision of progressive politics that is both persuasive and provocative. Stephen Duncombe is Professor of Media and Culture at New York University and author and editor of six books on the intersection of culture and politics. Duncombe, a life-long political activist, co-founded a community-based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan which won an award for “Creative Activism” from the Abbie Hoffman Foundation, and is currently co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, a research and training organization that helps activists create more like artists and artists strategize more like activists.

In March 1987 a radical coalition of queer activists converged on Wall Street ... their target, 'Business, Big Business, Business as Usual!!!' It was ACT UP's first demonstration. In November 1999 a radical coalition of environmental, labor, anarchist, queer, and human rights activists converged in Seattle-their target was similar, a system of global capitalism. Between 1987 and 1999 a new project in activism had emerged unshackled from past ghosts. Through innovative use of civil rights' era non-violent disobedience, guerrilla theatre, and sophisticated media work, ACT UP has helped transform the world of activism. This anthology offers a history of ACT UP for a new generation of activists and students. It is divided into five sections which address the new social movements, the use of street theater to reclaim public space, queer and sexual politics, new media/electronic civil disobedience, and race and community building. Contributions range across a diverse spectrum: The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, Jubilee 2000, Students for an Undemocratic Society, Fed Up Queers, Gender Identity Center of Colorado, Triangle Foundation, Jacks of Color, National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, Lower East Side Collective, Community Labor Coalition, Church of Stop-Shopping, Indy Media Collective, Black Radical Congress, The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory, Adelante Street Theater; HealthGAP, Housing Works, SexPanic! and, of course, ACT UP itself.

Describes the 1924 crime spree of female armed robber Celia Cooney, a poor, Brooklyn waitress who held up a series of local grocery stores armed with a small gun and wearing a fashionable bobbed hairdo and stylish fur coat, and reveals how politicians and journalists used her story as a cultural, social, and political statement of the times. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.