Joel Wendland-Liu
LATEST ARTICLES BY Joel Wendland-Liu
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Culture
‘Positive Obsession’ review: Riveting biography offers intimate look at Afrofuturist icon Octavia Butler
October 28, 2025New book explores the personal journals of the novelist, offering deeper look at her struggles for recognition, her working style, and her views on American political realities.
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Culture
‘Why Fascists Fear Teachers’: How far-right attacks education to destroy democracy
October 16, 2025The author explains how controlling education through attacks on teachers and schools is meant to control how Americans think.
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Culture
Silence and terror: Analyzing poems by Genevieve Taggard and Richard Wright
September 16, 2025Both poems explore social conflict, challenging the reader to confront systems of oppression, arguing that neutrality in the face of injustice is impossible.
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Culture
Analyzing Edwin Rolfe’s poem ‘Unit Assignment’
September 5, 2025The poem conveys an atmosphere and mood in which the work of community organizing is elevated as an event worthy of a poetic theme.
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Culture
‘My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria’ review: The freedom fighter tells her story
July 29, 2025Andrée Blouin was a freedom fighter who helped to mobilize thousands of Congolese women to the cause of Belgian Congo independence. This is her story.
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Culture
Infuriating and beautiful: ‘Get on the Job and Organize’ is lesson for balancing radical vision with practical discipline
June 23, 2025The book delivers a powerful, if uneven, account of labor organizing in modern America.
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Culture
Towards socialism? Lauesen’s ‘Long Transition’ resurrects an infantile disorder
March 20, 2025Torkil Lauesen presents a subjectivist revision of theory despite claiming objectivity.
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Culture
‘Night Flyer’ book review: Grounding the mythos of Harriet Tubman with her political influence and worldview
February 20, 2025Mile presents a “faith biography” explaining that “Tubman was heroic, but she was not a superhero beyond the reach of our understanding, identification, and compassion.”
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