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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

Building Radical Hope in the Immigrant City

A Conversation with Jess Andors and Dan Rivera
by  Jess Andors & Dan Rivera  

In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson captures how the idea of narrative is inextricable from the intertwined problems of economic collapse, poverty, divestment, and racism. By shining a light on small victories in the places in the country where progress is not expected like Lawrence, Massachusetts, the book tells people in similar places that progress is possible.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

The Deserving Poor

by  Michelle Wilde Anderson  

In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson chronicles the fights to save four places that are usually put on the undeserving, unworthy side of the line. This Book Symposium aims to elaborate on the stories the book tells, with authors Helaine Olen, Julia Mendoza, Sheila Foster, Jess Andors, and Dan Rivera each reflecting on different towns and individuals featured.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

It’s Hard to Save a Town

by  Helaine Olen  

Michelle Wilde Anderson’s The Fight to Save the Town offers a compelling portrait of residents of Stockton, California, Lawrence, Massachusetts, Detroit, Michigan, and rural Josephine County, Oregon in their fights against the decline of their hometowns. She focuses her attention on the hardy souls who attempt to push back against ongoing neglect and the people who fight to keep libraries open and teens away from drugs. But we must remember that individual victories—when, that is, they occur—can’t fully compensate for decades of neglect, and that the fight to save a town is often harder than it sounds.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

Writing for Abolitionist Futures

by  Julia Mendoza  

In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson addresses how local governments and nonprofits can create collective ecosystems of care despite decades of “austerity, spatial inequality, and citywide poverty.”  These ecosystems of care are essential not only to building an abolitionist world without police and prisons, but to creating a world with life-affirming social infrastructures that address all systems of inequity.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

Seeing Like a Chocolate City:
Reimagining Detroit’s Future Through Its
Past

by  Sheila R. Foster  

In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson captures how the rise and fall of Detroit maps onto so many other important cultural, political, social, and economic moments of the twentieth century. As Anderson rightly notes, many of the ways in which the city’s history is commonly told represent a “white gaze on Detroit.” What this narrative often leaves out is the critical role of the Black middle and professional class in stabilizing or holding up the city during the period often associated with the city’s decline.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)