Adrienne Maree Brown | |
---|---|
Born | El Paso, Texas, US | September 6, 1978
Occupation | Writer |
Alma mater | Columbia University |
Genre | Afrofuturism, science fiction, non-fiction; creative non-fiction |
Subject | Activism; Community Organizing; Afrofuturism; Black Feminism; Facilitation; Social Justice; Climate Justice |
Website | |
adriennemareebrown |
Adrienne Maree Brown, often styled adrienne maree brown (born September 6, 1978), is a writer, activist and facilitator. From 2006 to 2010, she was executive director of the Ruckus Society. She also co-founded and directed the United States League of Young Voters. [1]
Brown describes her thought as postnationalism, and others have described it as Black feminism or womanism. She also supports, among others, the Black Lives Matter and prison abolition movements.
Much of her work as a writer is based on the writings of science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Her first book, Emergent Strategy, was published in 2017. Other books include Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, published in 2019, and We Will Not Cancel Us, published in 2020.
Brown also runs podcasts and has released a music project. Additionally, she works as a doula.
Brown was born on September 6, 1978, in El Paso, Texas, to a mixed-race couple who met at Clemson University in South Carolina. [2] She is the eldest of three children. Her father was in the military and she spent much of her childhood abroad in Germany (see United States military deployments), as well as in Georgia, New York, and California. [3] As mixed-race children, Brown and her sisters experienced racism in school. [2]
Brown attended Columbia University where she studied African American Studies, political science, and voice. [3] She was at the university when Amadou Diallo was killed by police officers in 1999. She cites this time as being pivotal to the development of her political consciousness, especially regarding issues of policing and race. [2] She identifies as bisexual and has recounted experiences with homophobia and sexual assault. [3]
After graduating from Columbia, Brown began working with the Harm Reduction Coalition in Brooklyn, and served as a social justice facilitator at the Social Forum. [2] [3]
She moved to Detroit in 2009 after being invited to consult with Detroit Summer in 2006, and after dating Detroit-based rapper Invincible. [3] [4]
From 2006, Brown worked with social justice organizations in Detroit. [2] [3]
In 2006, Brown served as a consultant with Detroit Summer, based out of the Boggs Center. [5] From this Brown developed a strong relationship with Grace Lee Boggs, whom she counts as a mentor. [2] [3] [6] Brown was a major figure within the Allied Media Conference as a host and facilitator. [7]
Between 2006 and 2010, Brown also worked as the executive director of the Ruckus Society. [3] She co-founded and directed the League of Young/Pissed Off Voters. [2]
Of her work in Detroit, Brown wrote, "Our actions have to be towards the world we want. We need to be guerilla gardening and turning people's heat and water on. We need to be the guerillas putting up solar panels in the hood. That's what Detroit has taught me." [8]
Brown has supported Democratic candidates in presidential elections, encouraging her readers to vote for Joe Biden [9] and Barack Obama. [10]
Brown describes her thought as postnationalism. [11] [12] Others have described it as Black feminism or womanism. [13] [14]
She has also expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement. [15] In her book We Will Not Cancel Us, she expresses support for the prison abolition movement. [16] [17]
Brown is currently a contributor to YES!, a magazine focused on solutions journalism. [18] Brown previously contributed to Detroit-based newspaper The Michigan Citizen , and was a sex columnist for Bitch magazine. [19] [20]
Brown has published extensively on sex, [21] healing, self-care, trauma, [22] and science fiction. [23] Much of her work as a writer is based on the writings of science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler. [14] Her own writing style has been said to belong to the Afrofuturism genre. [4]
In 2010, she published the Octavia Butler Strategic Reader with Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In 2013, she received a Detroit Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler-based science fiction writing workshops. [5] In 2015, she collaborated with Walidah Imarisha and Sheree Renee Thomas to edit and release Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, a collection of 20 short stories and essays about social justice inspired by Butler. [4] [24] [25]
Her first book, Emergent Strategy, which examines sustainable social change, was released in 2017 by AK Press to critical acclaim. [19] [26] [27] Brown defines emergence as "the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions" and describes emergent strategy as a "life-code" which is effective both in organizing and personal life. [28]
Emergent Strategy has given way to a series of essays published by AK Press on sustainable transformative justice, including the November 2020 release We Will Not Cancel Us And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice and Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, out May 2021. [29] [30] The 2020 book We Will Not Cancel Us considers questions of harm, accountability, and transformative justice, speaking primarily to an audience of activists and others organizing around prison abolition. [16] [17]
Brown has contributed to many anthologies focused on justice, transformation, and feminism, including How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office: The Anti-Politics, Un-Boring Guide to Power (2004), Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement (2012), Dear Sister (2014), and Feminisms in Motion (2018), How We Fight White Supremacy (2019), and Beyond Survival (2020). [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36]
In Beyond Survival (2020), Brown writes What is/isn’t transformative justice (2020), where she pleads for transformative justice rather than “public takedowns” of individuals who engage in wrongful behaviour. Brown expresses her discontent over public takedowns occurring online whereby persons who commit relatively small harm, such as “saying something messed up” or significant harm such as sexual assault, are publicly torn to shreds. Brown claims this process cultivates a “fear-based adherence to reductive common values”. What is rather needed, she pleads, is transformative justice, as this will truly benefit society. She describes transformative justice as: “justice practices that go all the way to the root of the problem and generate solutions and healing there, such that the conditions that create injustice are transformed”. To pivot towards transformative justice, Brown offers three solutions. [37]
First, Brown pleads we listen to others who have wronged us with “why?” as a framework. She claims it is gratuitous to qualify such persons as being “shady, evil, or psychotic”. According to her “the percentage of psychopaths in the world is just not high enough to justify the ease with which we assign that condition to others”. By asking “why?”, Brown claims we are humanizing those who have harmed us. By posing this question we may understand that grief, abuse, trauma, mental illness, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, and loneliness explain peoples’ actions. These answers may scare us, as they make us realize we are possible of the same transgressions. Nevertheless, asking “why?” remains necessary to attain transformative justice. [38]
Second, Brown proposes that we ask ourselves “what can/we learn from this?” when we’ve been harmed by others. According to Brown, “If the only thing [we] can learn from a situation is that some humans do bad things, it’s a waste of [our] precious time – [we] already know that”. Therefore, we must ask ourselves “What can this situation teach me about how to improve our society?”. In this respect, Brown uses the example of Bill Cosby. The defamed comedian is a mass rapist, which is now known. However, had we believed the first woman who came forward and told her story vis-à-vis Cosby, potentially 40 other rapes could have been prevented. Thus, Brown stresses the need to identify perpetrators of harms, to prevent them from re-offending, and “ensure they experience interventions that transform them”. [39]
Third, Brown suggests that we ask ourselves “how can my real-time actions contribute to transforming this situation (versus making it worse)?”. According to Brown, this question is crucial in the age of social media where “we can make our pain viral before we even had the chance to feel it”. She writes that mainstream takedowns and public shamings often happen even before we’ve gotten the facts, which is equally true for interpersonal grieving. Brown underscores that while persons in positions of power must be called out when necessary, calling someone to try to resolve a dispute, when you have cellphone number, can be more beneficial. In real-time, there is space for silence, reflection, growth, and resting, which is absent on social media. For these reasons, Brown suggests trying to get mediation support, thinking of the community, and seeking justice, to address conflict. [40]
Brown ends her piece by stressing that we shouldn’t be pack hunting an external enemy. We are responsible for each other’s transformation and “not the transformation from vibrant flawed humans to bits of ash, but rather the transformation from broken people and communities to whole ones”. [41]
Brown's anthology Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good was released in February 2019, [42] According to Catherine Lizette Gonzalez, on the news site ColorLines, the book "demonstrates how activists can tap into emotional and erotic desires to organize against oppression". [21] The book appeared in April 2019 on The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction, where it was number six. [43]
In September 2021, Brown published the novella Grievers, her first long-form work of published fiction. [44]
On March 25, 2021, Brown released an EP titled The Sabbatical Suite. It consists of five songs written on sabbatical in 2020, over beats by her musician friend J-Mythos. She has called it "a small odd intimate music project". [45] [46] She also provided background vocals on the 2023 album Javelin by Sufjan Stevens. [47]
Alongside Autumn Brown, Brown runs the podcast, How to Survive the End of the World, which seeks to learn "from the apocalypse with grace, rigor and curiosity" and is currently in its 5th season, as of 2021. [48]
In June 2020, Brown and Toshi Reagon began hosting the podcast Octavia's Parables, which gives an in-depth dive into Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents . [49]
On June, 23, 2022, Brown appeared on "On Being with Krista Tippett" on an episode called "We are in a time of new suns”. [50]
Brown also works as a doula. She identifies as a "radical doula", because she sees it as part of her activism. [51]
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction author and a multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
Transformative justice is a spectrum of social, economic, legal, and political practices and philosophies that aim to focus on the structures and underlying conditions that perpetuate harm and injustice. Taking up and expanding on the goals of restorative justice such as individual/community accountability, reparation, and non-retributive responses to harm, transformative justice imagines and puts into practice alternatives to the formal, state-based criminal justice system.
AK Press is a worker-managed, independent publisher and book distributor that specializes in publishing books about anarchism and the radical left. Operated out of Chico, California, United States, with a branch in Edinburgh, Scotland, the company is collectively owned.
Toshi Reagon is an American musician of folk, blues, gospel, rock and funk, as well as a composer, curator, and producer.
Parable of the Sower is a 1993 speculative fiction novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler. It is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth heavily affected by climate change and social inequality. The novel follows Lauren Olamina, a young woman who can feel the pain of others and becomes displaced from her home. Several characters from various walks of life join her on her journey north and learn of a religion she has envisioned and titled Earthseed. The main tenets of Earthseed are that "God is Change" and believers can "shape God" through conscious effort to influence the changes around them. Earthseed also teaches that it is humanity's destiny to inhabit other planets and spread the "seeds" of the Earth.
Parable of the Talents is a science fiction novel by the American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 1998. It is the second in a series of two, a sequel to Parable of the Sower. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Lilith's Brood is a collection of three works by Octavia E. Butler. The three volumes of this science fiction series were previously collected in the now out-of-print omnibus edition Xenogenesis. The collection was first published under the current title of Lilith's Brood in 2000.
Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses.
Earthseed is a fictitious religion based on the idea that "God is Change". It is the creation of Octavia E. Butler, as revealed by her character Lauren Oya Olamina in the books: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.
Fledgling is a science fiction vampire novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 2005. It was the author's final book published before her death in 2006.
Survivor is a science fiction novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler. First published in 1978 as part of Butler's "Patternist series", Survivor is the only one of Butler's early novels not to be reprinted after its initial editions. Butler expressed dislike for the work, referring to it as "my Star Trek novel."
Wild Seed is a science fiction novel by American writer Octavia Butler. Although published in 1980 as the fourth book of the Patternist series, it is the earliest book in the chronology of the Patternist world. The other books in the series are, in order within the Patternist chronology: Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984), Survivor (1978), and Patternmaster (1976).
Bloodchild and Other Stories is the only collection of science fiction stories and essays written by American writer Octavia E. Butler. Each story and essay features an afterword by Butler. "Bloodchild", the title story, won the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. It was first published in 1995. The 2005 expanded edition contains the additional stories "Amnesty" and "The Book of Martha".
Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, she and James Boggs, her husband of some forty years, took their own political direction. By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American, Black Power, and Civil Rights movements.
Climate fiction is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works of climate fiction may take place in the world as we know it, in the near future, or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. Climate fiction typically involves anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.
"The Evening and the Morning and the Night" is a science fiction novelette by American writer Octavia Butler. It was first published in Omni in May 1987, and subsequently republished in The Year's Best Science Fiction ; in Best New SF 2; in Omni Visions One; in The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy By Women; in Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora; in Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century; in Crucified Dreams; in Butler's collection Bloodchild and Other Stories, and as a chapbook from Pulphouse Publishing.
Walidah Imarisha is an American writer, activist, educator and spoken word artist.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an American writer, independent scholar, poet, activist and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. Gumbs advocates for other POC queer women and is commonly known as a “Black Feminist love evangelist,” but she also describes herself as a "Queer Black Troublemaker." In her experimental triptych, Gumbs explores the implications of humanity’s struggle with ecological disruption and Black feminist theory and refusals.
The term Chicanafuturism was originated by scholar Catherine S. Ramírez which she introduced in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies in 2004. The term is a portmanteau of 'chicana' and 'futurism'. The word 'chicana' refers to a woman or girl of Mexican origin or descent. However, 'Chicana' itself serves as a chosen identity for many female Mexican Americans in the United States, to express self-determination and solidarity in a shared cultural, ethnic, and communal identity while openly rejecting assimilation. Ramírez created the concept of Chicanafuturism as a response to white androcentrism that she felt permeated science-fiction and American society. Chicanafuturism can be understood as part of a larger genre of Latino futurisms.
Junauda Juanita Petrus-Nasah is an American author, filmmaker, performance artist, and "pleasure activist". Her debut novel, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, was a winner of a Coretta Scott King Honor Award.
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