Arise! - (American Crossroads) by Christina Heatherton

About the Book

"Arise! uncovers a social history of global radicalism. Christina Heatherton considers how early twentieth-century radicals like Black American artist Elizabeth Catlett, Mexican revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magâon, and Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai found inspiration, refuge, and solidarity in the actual and imagined spaces of Revolutionary Mexico. From farm worker strikes in California's Imperial Valley and internationalist art collectives in Mexico City to Kansas's Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where radicals built a "university" behind bars, she argues that internationalism was forged across space and through unanticipated alliances"--

Book Synopsis

An international history of radical movements and their convergences during the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a global event that catalyzed international radicals in unexpected sites and struggles. Tracing the paths of figures like Black American artist Elizabeth Catlett, Indian anti-colonial activist M.N. Roy, Mexican revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magón, Okinawan migrant organizer Paul Shinsei Kōchi, and Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai, Arise! reveals how activists around the world found inspiration and solidarity in revolutionary Mexico.

From art collectives and farm worker strikes to prison "universities," Arise! reconstructs how this era's radical organizers found new ways to fight global capitalism. Drawing on prison records, surveillance data, memoirs, oral histories, visual art, and a rich trove of untapped sources, Christina Heatherton considers how disparate revolutionary traditions merged in unanticipated alliances. From her unique vantage point, she charts the remarkable impact of the Mexican Revolution as radicals in this critical era forged an anti-racist internationalism from below.

From the Back Cover

"Arise! is one of the most thrillingly original books I have read in many a year. Combining theoretical sophistication, prodigious research, and breathtaking global reach, the book offers profound, sometimes startling connections that put an entire era of worldwide revolution in a brilliant new light."--Marcus Rediker, coauthor of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

"Finally! The Mexican Revolution is restored to its rightful place as an integral act of modernity in modern history and a beacon of liberty to oppressed people throughout the world. This book demonstrates that the struggles of Mexico's peasantry, railroad workers, feminists, muralists, and others inspired and informed revolutionary movements on six continents for decades to come."--Paul Ortiz, author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States

"Imaginatively constructed, historically rich, theoretically deft, gorgeously written, and revolutionary in its ethos and politics, Arise! shows how our histories and struggles, here and across the globe, are deeply interconnected. This is a staggeringly good handbook for imagining a more just future."--Laleh Khalili, Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London

"This lucid and compelling account shows the Mexican Revolution as a beacon for the most important global radical movements of its time. Like the other great revolutions of the modern era, the Mexican Revolution contained multitudes, and Arise! introduces them to us, not only as inspiring figures from the past, but also as harbingers of a better future."--Angela Zimmerman, author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South

"Christina Heatherton's extraordinary history of radical politics across the globe is the book we urgently need. Set against the backdrop of the twentieth century's first revolutionary conflagration, the Mexican Revolution, Arise! tells the story of global capitalism's polyglot gravediggers and their struggle to overcome difference and distance to build a better world. We are living through a time when race, ethnicity, and nationality are presented as impermeable and intractable, but Heatherton culls multiple archives to present a different history forged through solidarity and struggle. In gorgeous prose, written with conviction and authority, Heatherton distills how the circuits of capital and empire created tremendous wealth and power for some but also tremendous enemies and powerful struggles that conjoined the oppressed in an international struggle from below."--Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

"'Arise, ' the first word of the song 'The International, ' composed in the aftermath of the Paris Commune (1871), commands us to action, just as this book alerts us to the why and the what that make radicalism global, international, planetary, and universal. The book is a workers' story of construction: making a flag, making a map, making a university, making love, making a dress, and making history. The men and women--Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón, Dorothy Healey, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Shinsei Kōchi, Alexandra Kollontai, and M.N. Roy, to name only a few--are brilliant, brave, and colorful; the ideas are respectful, wise, fresh, tender, and indomitable; the spirit of the writing throughout is as free as the Mexican muralists and as glorious as the hymn that gives this book its title. You can hear in the background the roar of Pacific breakers, the clang of the closing prison gate, the factory whistle, the rhythmic rattle of a continental freight train. The reverberations continue: 'Awaken and arise, ' they say! Here is history for the hungry soul."--Peter Linebaugh, author of Red Round Globe Hot Burning

Review Quotes

"This gripping book illuminates how radical movements have the power to expand intellectual and political horizons and build international solidarity."-- "LSE Review of Books"

"Arise! . . . emphasize[s] that organizing need not begin with ideological consistency. Instead, radical possibility can be made by paying attention to the place and conditions of the people who find themselves together."-- "Public Books"

"Arise! connects a buried history of internationalist struggle . . . and enables us to reinterpret this period in a new light."-- "Spectre"

"An invitation to seriously and collectively reflect on the political role that the writing of history has in the context of the multifaceted planetary crisis that we face today."-- "Hispanic American Historical Review"

"Heatherton weaves together the threads of a historical web that emanated from revolutionary Mexico, filling in crucial gaps and connecting diverse narratives. In doing so . . . [she] places it in the pantheon of history's great revolutions."-- "El Pais"

"For at least a century, leftwing activists, thinkers, and writers of every variety have been trying to connect the skeins of activity by the left across continents and varied populations. . . . In Arise!, Christina Heatherton offers--in our troubled world with so many defeats for the left and popular movements--a vindication of sorts. . . . It is a grand sweep, richer in details than this reviewer can easily convey."
-- "The Progressive Magazine"

"It is not only [its] insistently transnational orientation that sets . . . Heatherton's book apart. . . . It is [its] hopefulness, [its] radical faith in the undying capacity of human beings to come together to defy the color line and overturn relations of exploitation and abuse -- even, and especially, in the most disorienting of historical conditions. . . . Arise! exemplif[ies] a new kind of revolutionary history, suited to a new era of struggle in the US-Mexico borderlands and beyond."
-- "Jacobin"

"This magnificent book is an example of what happens when poets write history--or more precisely, when revolutionary poets write histories of revolution." -- "Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams (Twentieth Anniversary Edition): The Black Radical Imagination"

"A provocative discussion of the importance of revolutionary Mexico in the left radical and revolutionary movements of the early twentieth century. . . . [Heatherton] has expanded the meaning and impact of both manifestations of the human desire for social justice and revolutionary freedoms."-- "Counterpunch"

About the Author

Christina Heatherton is Elting Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College, Connecticut. She is coeditor of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter.