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Crossing the theory/practice divide
Jacob Lesniewski
Exploring political natality and the natality of political theory
Romand Coles
In view of the contribution this book aims to make to both political theory and political practice, we solicited two reviews, one from an organizer/scholar and one from a political theorist of radical democracy. We present them here as a mini-Critical Exchange.
Crossing the theory/practice divide
It's not often that an academic book crosses the theory/practice divide to inform both in the ways that Paul Apostolidis' Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy does. As your reviewer is an organizer for Arise Chicago workers' center and a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, it's an especially rare and welcome instance for me when this kind of work focuses on the description and analysis of resistance to the current political, social, cultural and economic structures that exclude immigrant workers from full participation in a well-regulated, humane labor-market democratic politics. Although activists, organizers and other participants in the struggle for workers' rights and justice for immigrants may initially be daunted by deeply theoretical discussions of items, such as Gramscian notions of hegemony and Foucauldian biopolitics, the insights and claims of this critical ethnography, which documents and analyzes narratives of immigrant workers who were part of a workplace struggle in eastern Washington, are important for more reflective and reflexive practice.
Of paramount importance to the tasks of advocacy and organizing among immigrant workers are three insights the work offers. First, we are reminded that the narratives and stories of struggle that the immigrant workers tell each other, allies and policymakers are the building blocks of nascent social movements. Second, we are reminded that the narratives are not unambiguously tales of resistance, nor do they merely rearticulate dominant ideologies and discourses. For these stories to have power, they have to be broadly understandable by appealing to already established myths and frames, while at the same time being inexplicable enough to call into question those same ideologies (Polletta, 2002). Finally, Apostolidis' use of genealogy as a methodological tool for organizing the narratives of the workers he interviewed is perhaps the most important part of the work. Genealogical approaches to the stories of...