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Contributors' Notes for Radical Teacher 117: Teaching about Capitalism, War, and Empire.

Students come to understand this 1925 novel not just as a document of immigrant life, but as "an artifact that performs cultural work, that is engaged in – and continues to be an object of – ideological struggle."

Contributors' Notes for Radical Teacher Vol. 111, Teaching and Resistance in a Time of Trumpism.

This essay explores the way writers address the formation and fate of the contemporary American working class in an age of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, the essay examines Russell Banks's 1985 novel Continental Drift, which interweaves the stories of two characters who pull up stakes and head to Florida in search of a better life: an oil furnace repair man from New Hampshire and a young, single mother from Haiti. In bringing together these two narratives, Banks's novel insists that the story of the White, U.S. working class in an increasingly post‐industrial, globalized era is also a story of the hemispheric, migratory underclass, composed in large part by poor people of color. Following the fate of questing workers in an ultimately fruitless search for well‐being and wealth, Continental Drift stresses the urgency of class consciousness in a neoliberal world, even as it finally insists that the historic legacies and still ongoing dynamics of slavery, colonialism, and the geographically and culturally uneven dimensions of capitalist development make such consciousness in and of itself insufficient to establish a sense of solidarity among laboring peoples from disparate racial and national contexts.

Introductory essay for Radical Teacher Issue 111, Teaching and Resistance in the Time of Trumpism.

Though Alain Resnais' documentary film about the French National Library, All the World's Memory (Toute la Memoir du Monde), is meant to celebrate the library's scope and organization, anxiety seeps into its cinematic "language": dim black-and-white footage, a restlessly prowling camera, close-ups that cut off object from context and detail from whole, discontinuous cuts, choppy bullet-like comments, and darkly foreboding orchestral music. It's a beautiful film, but what does it say about Resnais' feelings about the library? Certainly awe, but also high modernism's anxiety about proliferating knowledge. "Man," the authoritative male voice-over proclaims, "fears being engulfed by this mass of words."

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, art that aims to actively challenge the social order continues to spark controversy and encounter resistance. In one recent instance, the University of California at San Diego threatened to revoke the tenure of Ricardo Dominguez, a professor of visual art, who developed what he calls "transborder immigrant tools"—recycled cell phones loaded with GPS software that point border-crossers to caches of fresh water in the desert. Dominquez has called the phones, which feature an audio application that plays inspirational poetry to migrants, a "mobile Statue of Liberty."

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, art that aims to actively challenge the social order continues to spark controversy and encounter resistance. In one recent instance, the University of California at San Diego threatened to revoke the tenure of Ricardo Dominguez, a professor of visual art, who developed what he calls "transborder immigrant tools"—recycled cell phones loaded with GPS software that point border-crossers to caches of fresh water in the desert. Dominquez has called the phones, which feature an audio application that plays inspirational poetry to migrants, a "mobile Statue of Liberty."

The introduction for issue 117: Teaching About Capitalism, War, and Empire in a Time of Covid-19.

We were inspired by Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the rapid spread of Occupy across the United States and beyond. The commune-like camp sites, the general assemblies and use of the people's mic, the marches and demonstrations, the provocative refusal to issue demands, the proliferation of working groups and spokes councils, the creative explosion of revolutionary slogans and art, the direct condemnation of corporate finance and of the massive inequalities that structure our society, the "free university" teach-ins, the campaigns against foreclosure and debt—all these elements of Occupy gave us new hope that radical change might happen in our time.

Let there be light and the military talking picture / Jonathan Kahana and Noah Tsika -- Death in life : documenting survival after Hiroshima / Franny Nudelman -- I saw it! The photographic witness of Barefoot Gen / Laura Wexler -- Speculative ecology : Rachel Carson's environmentalist documentaries / Daniel Worden -- Participatory documentary : recording the sound of equality in the southern civil rights movement / Grace Elizabeth Hale -- After the fact : postwar dissent and the art of documentary / Sara Blair -- Working photography : labor documentary and documentary labor in the neoliberal age / Joseph B. Entin -- Counterdocuments : undocumented youth activists, documentary media, and the politics of visibility / Rebecca M. Schreiber -- At Berkeley : documenting the university in an age of austerity / Michael Mark Cohen and Leigh Raiford

Seven friends and colleagues remember Richard Ohmann.