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Retort is a community of about forty writers, teachers, artists, and activists, all self-styled opponents of capital and empire, which has been based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. [1] [2]
Retort is a gathering of antinomians. It is not a typical collective; there is no explicit program. Retort is a motley crew - writers, artists, teachers, artisans, scientists, poets - joined in a web of sustaining friendships, who share an antagonism to the present order of things. Retort has been meeting on a regular basis for the last two decades, for the most part to eat and drink together, but also to discuss politics, history, aesthetics, and the terms and tactics of root-and-branch opposition to capital, empire and the various versions of barbarism currently on offer. There is a deep appreciation of old cafes and city taverns, competing with a tendency to favor the open air - rambles, the back country, tidepool picnics, wild swimming. The gathering has produced broadsides and pamphlets for particular occasions, and from time to time they also organize more public events - readings, conviviums, evenings of film, and so forth. There are collaborations of many kinds within the milieu.
The name "Retort" acknowledges that the project is engaged in a wider conversation whose terms and assumptions they reject, and that Retorters stand on ground, rhetorical and otherwise, not of our own choosing. Some feel forced to spend much of the time - far too much - in rebuttals, demurrers, rejoinders. In a word, retorting. The name gestures to an obscure non-sectarian 1940s journal of that title, which at first, (new) Retort thought seriously about reviving. It was edited and published out of a cabin in Bearsville, a hamlet near Woodstock, New York. Retort's printing press had belonged to the eloquent Wobbly agitator Carlo Tresca, before he was assassinated on the streets of Manhattan, perhaps by agents of Benito Mussolini. The journal Retort was anti-statist, anti-militarist and published essays on art, politics and culture. Poetry too - the first issue published the Kenneth Rexroth poem that begins:
Retort Press also published Prison Etiquette: The Convict's Compendium of Useful Information [3] compiled by war resisters, specifically those imprisoned for refusing to collaborate either with the state or with the Anabaptist "peace churches" who had agreed with the US government to self-manage the rural work camps for conscientious objectors. Finally, a retort is like the alchemist's vessel that ferments, distills, transforms. It's fragile, it needs fire, there may be problems with the underlying theory, but there's occasional magic.
Retort's broadsheet Neither Their War Nor Their Peace [4] was produced for distribution at demonstrations against the impending US invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. It was later expanded into the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, [5] written by Iain Boal, [2] T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts and published by Verso Books.
The broadsheet "All Quiet On The Eastern Front" [6] was part of Retort's installation at the second Seville Biennial.
Associated members include English geographer Michael Watts, Irish social historian Iain Boal, [1] [2] British art historian T.J. Clark, radical attorney Joseph Matthews, labor historian Cal Winslow, editor Eddie Yuen, economic geographer Richard Walker, art historian Anne Wagner, Victor Serge translator James Brook, microbial ecologist Ignacio Chapela, poet and writer Summer Brenner, broadcaster and editor Sasha Lilley, Balkan anarchist Andrej Grubačić, and Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti. [7]
Exile or banishment, is primarily penal expulsion from one's native country, and secondarily expatriation or prolonged absence from one's homeland under either the compulsion of circumstance or the rigors of some high purpose. Usually persons and peoples suffer exile, but sometimes social entities like institutions are forced from their homeland.
Philip the Arab was Roman emperor from 244 to 249. He was born in Aurantis, Arabia, in a city situated in modern-day Syria. After the death of Gordian III in February 244, Philip, who had been Praetorian prefect, achieved power. He quickly negotiated peace with the Persian Sassanid Empire and returned to Rome to be confirmed by the Senate. During his reign, the city of Rome celebrated its millennium.
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging. One other man, Giles Corey, died under torture after refusing to enter a plea, and at least five people died in jail.
Marcus Velleius Paterculus was a Roman historian, soldier and senator. His Roman history, written in a highly rhetorical style, covered the period from the end of the Trojan War to AD 30, but is most useful for the period from the death of Caesar in 44 BC to the death of Augustus in AD 14.
The Watts riots, sometimes referred to as the Watts Rebellion or Watts Uprising, took place in the Watts neighborhood and its surrounding areas of Los Angeles from August 11 to 16, 1965.
A great power is a sovereign state that is recognized as having the ability and expertise to exert its influence on a global scale. Great powers characteristically possess military and economic strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence, which may cause middle or small powers to consider the great powers' opinions before taking actions of their own. International relations theorists have posited that great power status can be characterized into power capabilities, spatial aspects, and status dimensions.
Michael J. Watts is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 2016. He is a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left.
The Ugly American is a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that depicts the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps in Southeast Asia.
Henriette Caillaux was a Parisian socialite and second wife of the former Prime Minister of France, Joseph Caillaux. On March 16, 1914, she shot and killed Gaston Calmette, editor of the newspaper Le Figaro.
The American Geographical Society (AGS) is an organization of professional geographers, founded in 1851 in New York City. Most fellows of the society are Americans, but among them have always been a significant number of fellows from around the world. The society encourages activities that expands geographical knowledge, and the interpretation of that knowledge so that it can be useful to geographers and other disciplines, especially in a policymaking environment. It is the oldest nationwide geographical organization in the United States. Over the century and a half of its existence, the AGS has been especially interested in three regions: the Arctic, the Antarctic, and Latin America. A signature characteristic of the AGS-sponsored exploration was the requirement that its expeditions produce tangible scientific results.
The Australia First Movement was a fascist movement, founded in October 1941. It grew out of the Rationalist Association of New South Wales and the Victorian Socialist Party, and was led by former Rhodes scholar Percy Stephensen and Adela Pankhurst. It has been alleged that writer Miles Franklin was also involved in the AFM as she attended three AFM public meetings in December 1941, and had long time literary associations and friendships with Stephenson, Herbert and Dark, however historian Jill Roe has documented Franklin's clear opposition to the political views of the AFM in her 2008 biography of Stella Miles Franklin.</ref> which was inspired by the activities of retired businessman, William John Miles, who had campaigned during the 1930s under the "Australia First" slogan.
Timothy James "T. J." Clark is a British art historian and writer. He taught art history in a number of universities in England and the United States, including Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.
The Aragonese Crusade (1284–1285), also known as the Crusade of Aragon, was a military venture waged by the Kingdom of France against the Crown of Aragon. Fought as an extension of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302), the crusade was called by Pope Martin IV in retribution for Peter III of Aragon's intervention in Sicily, which had damaged the political ambitions of the papacy and France.
Mormons have numerous significant instances of violence throughout their history as a religious group. In the early history of the United States, violence was used as a form of control. According to Mormon history, their members have faced persecution and forceful expulsion from where they have settled, such as being driven from Ohio to Missouri and from Missouri to Illinois during the lifetime of church founder Joseph Smith. Soon, those that followed one of Smith's successors Brigham Young settled in the Utah Territory and became the largest denomination of the Latter Day Saint movement, the LDS Church. Church history records that their migrations were accompanied by acts of violence that included massacres, home burnings, and pillaging.
Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of technics and the commons, based as an independent scholar in Berkeley, California and London.
Pietro Tacchi Venturi was a Jesuit priest and historian who served as the unofficial liaison between Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader of Italy from 1922 to 1943, and Popes Pius XI and Pius XII. He was also one of the architects of the 1929 Lateran Treaty, which ended the "Roman Question", and recognized the sovereignty of Vatican City, which made it an actor of international relations. A claimed attempt to assassinate Venturi with a paper knife, one year before the treaty's completion, made headlines around the world. Venturi had begun the process of reconciliation by convincing Mussolini to donate the valuable library of the Palazzo Chigi to the Vatican.
Diplomacy comprises spoken or written communication by representatives of state, intergovernmental, or nongovernmental institutions intended to influence events in the international system.
Welcome to the Desert of the Real is a 2002 book by Slavoj Žižek. A Marxist and Lacanian analysis of the ideological and political responses to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Zizek's study incorporates various psychoanalytic, postmodernist, biopolitical, and (Christian) universalist influences into a Marxist dialectical framework.
Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
Joseph Russell Smith was an American geographer. He worked in the Department of Geography and Industry at the University of Pennsylvania and later the Columbia Business School where he chaired the economic geography program. From 1941 to 1942, he was president of the American Association of Geographers.