


Synopsis
Statues are falling like bowling pins and the saucy boys are here to pick up the pieces. The past is a living breathing thing so why should we mark it with static icons of Confederates, slave dealers, and imperialists? Tear them all down we say. Continuing on, we ruminate on the recent emergence of the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle leading into a broader discussion of alternative social and political spaces in history. By telling stories of ancient communities in southern Mesopotamia, the Paris Commune, the maroon societies of the Americas, and the Pueblo People of the American southwest we suggest that the centering of these sorts of stories can lessen the hegemony of traditional histories, broaden our sense of the possible, and reveal a past that doesn’t just honor the dead in monument form, but “serves the living.”

To hear Episode 13 Alternative History click on the following link:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/alternative-history/id1505429529?i=1000478582544
Sources Referenced and Items of Interest
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/25/against-the-grain-by-james-c-scott-review
Ed Kabotie, An Alter-Native View of American History

Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/civil_war_france.pdf
Tim Lockley, “Runaway Slave Colonies in the Atlantic World” (2015)
Sarah Mervosh, Simon Romero, and Lucy Tompkins, “Reconsidering the Past, One Statue at a Time” (New York Times, June 16, 2020)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/us/protests-statues-reckoning.html
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” (1874)
http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEENietzscheAbuseTableAll.pdf
“To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the lazy bones in the garden of knowledge uses it… That is, we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to use history only insofar as it serves living.”
Friedrich Nietzsche