Rehearsing the Future Book Launch

Come out to celebrate the Michael Doan's the deep thinking about the Boggses Legacy which continues to inspire young activists in Detroit! We are excited to host the Michael Doan for his new book Rehearsing for the Future on Tuesday October 27th at 6pm. Come and support the book and learn about about Detroit History. We welcome the Boggs Center to celebrate their legacy with the communty. There are free and book tickets at this link. The event will include a rich conversation with the author Michael Doan and Professor Stephen Ward about the book, a Q & A sessions and book signing line. We appreciate you attendance and support of the book. We proud partners of AK press, we are grateful for their continued publication of book that point to our history and culture. About the Book: Rehearsing the Future explores the work and legacy of James and Grace Lee Boggs, two of the most influential American radical thinkers of the twentieth century. Grace Lee Boggs earned a PhD in philosophy in the 1940s, though facing obstacles to an academic career as a young Chinese American woman, she left and became a political organizer in Detroit, where she met and married James Boggs, an autoworker, labor organizer, organic political theorist, and Black man from Alabama who moved North during the Great Migration. Over the course of more than forty years of partnership, study, and participation in labor, civil rights, Black Power, anticolonial, and feminist movements, the Boggses articulated a philosophy of long-term revolutionary strategy they called “dialectical humanism.” Rejecting state socialism and traditional Marxism, dialectical humanism instead attributes social change to the conscious, collective self-activity of people engaged in place-based organizing with a view to transforming everyday life and ways of relating to one another. Above all, it emphasizes that revolution is not a fixed program but must evolve as ideas, movements, and institutions are changed through collective practice. Through their life work and publications, James and Grace Lee Boggs modeled how to do philosophy from within movements. In Rehearsing the Future, Michael Doan presents the intellectual history of dialectical humanism, the far-reaching theory and practice that continues to mobilize communities and organizers around the world, inspiring forms of activism such as visionary organizing and emergent strategy. This book is for scholars and activists interested in the theoretical underpinnings of today's movements. Michael D. Doan is a Canadian-born father, educator, activist, and philosopher. He joined the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership in 2016 while working with Detroit Independent Freedom Schools and Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University. “Rehearsing the Future is an extraordinary achievement. Michael Doan has given us a richly illuminating book that breaks new ground in our understanding of James and Grace Lee Boggs and their abiding call to create the next American revolution. Through its careful and critical excavation of their ideas, this book opens up space for us to learn from and with James and Grace Lee Boggs. The book shows how the Boggses came to their conception of revolution as a new stage in the development of humanity, and it gives us a way to see this vision of revolution at work today, in the continuing efforts of activists, organizations, and communities engaged in place-based, visionary organizing. Doan has done much to advance the legacy and lineage of James and Grace Lee Boggs.” —Stephen M. Ward, author of In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs “Rehearsing the Future unearths the foundations of popular political tendencies of our time. If you are inspired by emergent strategies, visionary organizing, or the notion that we need to transform ourselves to transform the world, this exploration of their theoretical, political, and philosophical roots in the evolution of dialectical humanism offers both critical grounding and a portal beyond ossified debates between state and non-state strategies into approaches that put the power to shape society into our hands. Essential reading for anyone seeking a way through and beyond the contradictions of the current conjuncture.” —Andrea J. Ritchie, author of Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies “This is an important book for anyone engaged in creating more just and joyful futures. It weaves together strands of history, philosophy, and ideology to show not only why ideas matter, but how ideas grow, mature, and change in relation to concrete practice and informed reflection. Readers are welcomed into a conversation with James and Grace Lee Boggs as they move through the social movements of the 20th century, probing how to advance our common humanity in a country that is economically and technologically overdeveloped and politically and socially underdeveloped. Their lives and the evolution of their thinking described here give us a firm foundation to explore the possibilities of new, creative ideas and actions that are critically needed if we are to secure a future for ourselves and our children.”—Shea Howell, cofounder of Detroit Summer, the Boggs Center, and Riverwise Magazine