A Poetics of Resistance

Reading & Book Signing

The Zapatistas' famous "¡Ya basta!"—Enough already!—was the first uttering of a new story: a story about unbinding the ties of official history, uncovering buried seeds of popular resistance, and revealing the glimmerings of a truly insurgent modernity. Combining narrative history, literary criticism, ethnography, and media analysis, A Poetics of Resistance provides a refreshing take on Mexico's Zapatista movement by examining the means, meanings, and mythos behind the Zapatista image.

The first "postmodern revolution" presented itself to the world through a complex web of propaganda in every available medium: the colorful communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos, the ski masks, uniforms, dolls, murals, songs, and weapons both symbolic and real. By proliferating a profound and resonant set of myths, symbols, and grand historical gestures calculated to reflect their ideologies, organizing methodologies, and cultural values, the Zapatistas helped set into motion a global uprising, and the awareness that behind this uprising is a renewed vision of history. Jeff Conant's engaging and innovative examination of the Zapatistas' communication strategies will be an important tool for movements everywhere engaged in creating a world where many worlds fit; in demolishing History in order to construct histories; and in unseating not only the powerful, but Power itself.

Jeff Conant's new book A Poetics of Resistance: the Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency (AK Press, 2010) examines the cultural politics of the Zapatista movement of Chiapas, Mexico, focusing on the Zapatistas' persuasive use of symbolic language and colorful imagery to bring their struggle to the world's attention. Conant lived and worked in Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1990s; the book draws from his rich experiences there, as well as from a decade working in social justice and international development.

As the coordinator and lead author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health (Hesperian Foundation, 2008), Conant has collaborated with grassroots development initiatives in many countries to promote just and ecological community development. As a researcher and independent journalist he has published articles and contributed to reports on water privatization, resource colonization, food sovereignty, ecological sanitation, environmental injustice, climate crisis, and related issues. He won a 2010 Project Censored Award for his coverage of the World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey. He is a Fellow with the Oakland Institute, a coordinating committee member of La Red VIDA (the InterAmerican Network for the Defense of the Right to Water), a permaculturalist (one practicing "an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies), and is currently involved in efforts to promote climate justice at the grassroots as well as at the international level.