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Dispatches: On Trump & the Image, by David Levi Strauss

With a Foreword by Michael Taussig

One hundred short essays all written during the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidential term.

“I wish I could get all my news from David Levi Strauss’s Dispatches. Anchored by a single strong image, they are a breath of fresh air (and sometimes an arrow to the heart). Succinct, informative, and calls to action when the news is bad, which these days… it usually is.” — Lucy Lippard, legendary art critic and political activist, author of
Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, The Lure of the Local, and Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West, among many other books

“David Levi Strauss has written a fiercely original book for an age in which power increasingly governs through images, spectacle, speed, and manufactured forgetting. Dispatches teaches us how to see what authoritarian culture and power want hidden and how to read the images through which it captures our attention, colonizes consciousness, and demands our allegiance. Its great achievement lies in transforming the turbulence of the present into a public critical pedagogy of seeing, remembering, and resisting. Moving brilliantly across politics, art, technology, and everyday life, Strauss exposes the cultural machinery through which authoritarianism enters everyday consciousness and fascist politics acquires the force of common sense. Urgent, lucid, and intellectually fearless, this is criticism as a form of democratic resistance, confronting a historical moment in which regimes of pedagogical terrorism are producing the fears, desires, hatreds, and forms of identification on which fascist politics feeds. Dispatches reminds us that learning how to see differently is crucial to reclaiming the capacities to judge, resist, and imagine a future in which democracy once again becomes possible.” — Henry A. Giroux, a founding theorist of critical pedagogy, carrying on the work of Paulo Freire, author of many books, including American Nightmare: The Challenge of U.S. Authoritarianism and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics

Co-published with Rail Editions, The Brooklyn Rail

ISBN: 9781570274473
Paperbound, 364 pages, 6″x9″, color images throughout
$22.95