Ebrahim Ghavami

Rachel Corrie’s determination to make a better, more peaceful world took her from Olympia, Washington, to the Middle East, where she died in 2003 while trying to block the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home in the Gaza Strip. A twenty-three-year-old American activist, Corrie also possessed a striking gift for poetry, writing, and drawing. Let Me Stand Alone, a selection of her journals and letters as chosen by her family, reveals her story in her own hand, from her precocious reflections as a young girl to her final e-mails.

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor Adrienne Maree Brown finds the answer in something she calls “pleasure activism,” a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism.

The nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spread printing across Asia to bring Bibles to the colonized. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications revolution: the maritime public sphere expanded from Istanbul to Yokohama. From all corners of the continent, curious individuals confronted the challenges of studying each other's cultures by using the infrastructure of empire for their own exploratory ends.