For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artists—such as Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Britoo Jinorio, Silvana Straw, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among others—explore the terrain between art and theory. In Conversations Across Borders, Gómez-Peña has gathered the most challenging and captivating of these conversations, revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world.

Both bold and humorous, these conversations address issues of timely concern to artists, including border culture, new technologies, urban hipsterism, and globalization gone wrong. Conversations Across Borders explores dialogue as a performative act, as a radical space for initiating and testing the boundaries of critical culture. Together, these texts propose a distinct set of critical practices that are invigorated by the endangered art of conversation.

“Gómez-Peña’s commitment to force North America to adjust to the South, to acknowledge the hemisphere’s cultural imbalance, places him among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists.”

—Village Voice Literary Supplement

Conversations Across Borders was published by my padrino Richard Schechner and edited by Canadian theorist Laura Levin. It contains an anthology of very bold (and performative) conversations I’ve had in the last 10 years with rebel curators, pioneering artists, cultural anthropologists, art historians, activist writers—in essence a wide variety of intelligent, engaged and fierce contemporary art practitioners and theorists. It also contains gorgeously provocative never before published photos. My Canadian sister Laura Levin and the amazing team of Seagull books made sure that the book functions both as an accessible (and activist) treatise on theory as well as a beautiful art/ifact.

—Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gomez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978. His performance work and 10 books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over eight hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency.

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre at York University in Toronto. She is the editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto (Playwrights Canada Press) as well as a number of collections on performance, art and public space (in Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Performance Research). She is Vice President of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and editor-in-chief of Canadian Theatre Review. A director, dramaturg and performance deviser, she recently has collaborated on several transnational performance projects that investigate the intersections of performance, geography, and digital technologies,

Elaine Katzenberger is the Executive Director of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, an editor, and past friend and collaborator with Pocha Nostra.

On Thursday, December 1, 2011, Nelson George stopped by City Lights Bookstore to read and discuss his new novel, The Plot Against Hip Hop (Akashic Books).

Noted historian Thaddeus Russell dropped by City Lights Bookstore to read from his new book, A Renegade History of the United States. The book tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free.

In vivid portraits of renegades and their “respectable” adversaries, Russell shows that the nation’s history has been driven by clashes between those interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing their own desires—insiders versus outsiders, good citizens versus bad. The more these accidental revolutionaries existed, resisted, and persevered, the more receptive society became to change.

Russell brilliantly and vibrantly argues that it was history’s iconoclasts who established many of our most cherished liberties. Russell finds these pioneers of personal freedom in the places that usually go unexamined—saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, and even behind the Iron Curtain. He introduces a fascinating array of antiheroes: drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women’s liberation, including “Diamond Jessie” Hayman, a madam who owned her own land, used her own guns, provided her employees with clothes on the cutting-edge of fashion, and gave food and shelter to the thousands left homeless by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; there are also the criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America’s sexual culture.

Among Russell’s most controversial points is his argument that the enemies of the renegade freedoms we now hold dear are the very heroes of our history books— he not only takes on traditional idols like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, but he also shows that some of the most famous and revered abolitionists, progressive activists, and leaders of the feminist, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the vibrant energies of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the drag queens who founded Gay Liberation.

This is not history that can be found in textbooks— it is a highly original and provocative portrayal of the American past as it has never been written before.

Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, stopped by City Lights Bookstore to read from historian Howard Zinn’s The Bomb (published by City Lights).

Imagine how nuclear weapons would be viewed today if Germany had used them in World War II. Because they would not have changed the outcome of the war, Ellsberg claims they would be branded “criminal, murderous” tools of Nazi desperation.

This excerpt is taken from a discussion on Howard Zinn’s The Bomb, featuring Daniel Ellsberg, recorded at City Lights Bookstore, on September 29, 2010.

As an active WWII bombardier returning from the end of the war in Europe and preparing for combat in Japan, Howard Zinn read the headline Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan and was glad—the war would be over. “Like other Americans,” writes Zinn, “I had no idea what was going on at the higher levels, and had no idea what that ‘atomic bomb’ had done to men, women, children in Hiroshima, any more than I ever really understood what the bombs I dropped on European cities were doing to human flesh and blood.”

During the war, Zinn had taken part in the aerial bombing of Royan, France, and in 1966, he went to Hiroshima, where he was invited to a “house of rest” where survivors of the bombing gathered. In this short and powerful book, the backstory of the making and use of the bomb, Zinn offers his deep personal reflections and political analysis of these events, and the profound influence they had in transforming him from an order-taking combat soldier to one of our greatest anti-authoritarian, anti-war historians. – City Lights

Daniel Ellsberg is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers.

Howard Zinn (1922 –2010) was raised in a working-class family in Brooklyn, and flew bombing missions for the United States in World War II, an experience he now points to in shaping his opposition to war. Under the GI Bill he went to college and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. In 1956, he became a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, a school for black women, where he soon became involved in the civil rights movement, which he participated in as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and chronicled, in his book SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Zinn collaborated with historian Staughton Lynd and mentored a young student named Alice Walker. When he was fired in 1963 for insubordination related to his protest work, he moved to Boston University, where he became a leading critic of the Vietnam War.

In his liftetime, Zinn received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He is perhaps best known for A People’s History of the United States. City Lights previously published his essay collection A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.

Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City

Rebecca Solnit was joined by Aaron Shurin at City Lights Bookstore on December 2nd, 2010 to discuss her book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California Press).

Editor Alia Malek in conversation with Karen Korematsu

On September 20th, 2011, City Lights welcomed Alia Malek and Karen Korematsu to discuss the new book: Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice published by Voices of Witness (a nonprofit division of McSweeney’s Books).

A groundbreaking collection of oral histories, Patriot Acts tells the stories of men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the War on Terror. In their own words, narrators recount personal experiences of the post-9/11 backlash that have deeply altered their lives and communities. The eighth book in the Voice of Witness series, Patriot Acts illuminates these experiences in a compelling collection of eighteen oral histories from men and women who have found themselves subject to a wide range of human and civil rights abuses—from rendition and torture, to workplace discrimination, bullying, FBI surveillance and harassment.

Alia Malek is an author and a civil rights lawyer. Born in Baltimore to Syrian immigrant parents, her reportage has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, The Columbia Journalism Review, and WashingtonPost.com. Her first book was A Country Called Amreeka.

Karen Korematsu is the founder of the Fred Korematsu Civil Rights Fund, sponsored by ALC. She is the daughter of Fred Korematsu, who challenged the internment orders during WWII. Mrs. Korematsu-Haigh shares her father’s passion for social justice and continues to help support the new Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education at the Asian Law Caucus in development and outreach.

Clarence Lusane reads from The Black History of the White House

On January 20th, 2011, City Lights welcomed Clarence Lusane reading from and discussing his latest book, The Black History of the White House.

About The Black History of the White House:

Official histories of the United States have ignored the fact that 25 percent of all U.S. presidents were slaveholders, and that black people were held in bondage in the White House itself. And while the nation was born under the banner of “freedom and justice for all,” many colonists risked rebelling against England in order to protect their lucrative slave business from the growing threat of British abolitionism. These historical facts, commonly excluded from schoolbooks and popular versions of American history, have profoundly shaped the course of race relations in the United States.

In this unprecedented work, Lusane presents a comprehensive history of the White House from an African American perspective, illuminating the central role it has played in advancing, thwarting or simply ignoring efforts to achieve equal rights for all. Here are the stories of those who were forced to work on the construction of the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the determined leaders who pressured U.S. presidents to outlaw slavery, White House slaves and servants who went on to write books, Secret Service agents harassed by racist peers, Washington insiders who rose to the highest levels of power, the black artists and intellectuals invited to the White House, community leaders who waged presidential campaigns, and many others. Juxtaposing significant events in White House history with the ongoing struggle for civil rights, Clarence Lusane makes plain that the White House has always been a prism through which to view the social struggles and progress of black Americans.

Clarence Lusane is an Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of International Service at American University where he teaches and researches on international human rights, comparative race relations, social movements and electoral politics.

He is also an author, activist, scholar, lecturer, and journalist. For more than 30 years, he has written about and been active in national and international anti-racism politics, globalization, U.S. foreign policy, human rights and social issues such as education and drug policy. He has spent two years living in London conducting research on racism and human rights in Europe, and working with European institutions and NGOs.

His previous books include, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century,; Hitler’s Black Victims: The Experiences of Afro-Germans, Africans, Afro-Europeans and African Americans During the Nazi Era; Race in the Global Era: African Americans at the Millennium; No Easy Victories: A History of Black Elected Officials; African Americans at the Crossroads: The Restructuring of Black Leadership and the 1992 Elections; The Struggle for Equal Education; and Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs.