Why We Left, the Remix
Out fresh in paper today with a new 10th anniversary preface--and still hungry.
A clean new edition of my book Why We Left drops today, in paper, with a new preface and a beautiful new cover.
Thank you, University of Minnesota Press, for the Woody Guthrie-inspired guitar scrawled with the title, for the callback to my Okie roots, and for the wraparound ocean. “We weren’t fit for the whale road,” is what I heard early one morning when I was working on a new multi-modal fabric / paper reckoning with this archive of memory. This, I gathered, is why we acted so unaccountably when we came to Turtle Island, the Brooks, and all the other poor white Anglos who washed up in the 17th and 18th centuries. The ocean and all that pushed us to it broke our humanness.
So much has changed since Why We Left first came out in 2012 / 2013, as I share in the new preface. The book owes its second life to the mounting catastrophes of the last decade, but more importantly to the many people who have continued to press for reckoning with our pasts and their harms and legacies. I have found fellow travellers since then in people like my colleague Professor and Dr. Esme Murdock, new chair of American Indian Studies at SDSU, whose work everyone should know, and my colleague Dr. Desmond Hassing (Choctaw), who did me the great favor of doing a U Minnesota Press podcast episode with me. Give it a listen here.
These stories continue to bring me new fellow travellers as well, like Elspeth Hay, a public radio reporter and podcast host who is finishing a book on nut trees, the commons, and the racialized history of subsistence food staples. I’m hungry to connect with other people who are trying to do what I am calling “back/land reckoning,” which I set out in a recent talk, see slide shot below:
Readers of this series will see in this slide the influence of emergent strategies, the idea that the humanities too can be about getting into right relationship with change. Why We Left is back, and I’m here for it. If you want to do some reckoning, holler. I’ll go with you.