Other Worlds Here: Honoring Native Women’s Writing in Contemporary Anarchist Movements

Other Worlds Here: Honoring Native Women’s Writing in Contemporary Anarchist Movements examines the interaction of literature and radical social movement, exploring the limitations of contemporary anarchist politics through attentive engagement with Native women’s literatures. Tracing the rise of New Anarchism in the United States following protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, interdisciplinary scholar Theresa Warburton argues that contemporary anarchist politics have not adequately accounted for the particularities of radical social movement in a settler colonial society. As a result, activists have replicated the structure of settlement within anarchist spaces.

All is not lost, however. Rather than centering a critical indictment of contemporary anarchist politics, Other Worlds Here maintains that a defining characteristic of New Anarchism is its ability to adapt and transform. Through close readings of texts by Native women authors, Warburton argues that anarchists must shift the paradigm that another world is possible to one that recognizes other worlds already here: stories, networks, and histories that lay out methods of building reciprocal relationships with the land and its people. Analyzing memoirs, poetry, and novels by writers including Deborah Miranda, Elissa Washuta, Heid E. Erdrich, Janet Rogers, and Leslie Marmon Silko, Other Worlds Here extends the study of Native women’s literatures beyond ethnographic analysis of Native experience to advance a widely applicable, contemporary political critique.