This proposal arose in the wake of Elizabeth and Ines Soto’s sentencing to fifty years in prison for their participation in the anti-ICE protests at Prairieland, Texas. In the trial that led to these exorbitant sentences, the Sotos’ production and distribution of zines were used as evidence in their conviction. At the same time, Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to thirty years for transporting zines. Our panel responds to this crisis in local publishing and the gross misuse of state power for the suppression of activist print culture by recalling the history of grassroots print culture in the US and re-activating the strategies and modes of resistance employed by these print cultures.
The panel is concerned primarily with the small press or grassroots text-object as an object which confronts issues of state or institutional power. This topic has conceptual concordances with materialist approaches to the study of literature, as well as a broad overlap with the field of contemporary media studies. Works in conversation with the materialism of the small press and zine production and its interactions with larger systems of power include Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Nick Thoburn’s Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing and Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture.
Each of our four presentations will be allotted twelve minutes to present in order to provide ample time for discussion at the end of the session. We begin with Eliza Browning on “The Materiality of Group Material: Print Circulation and Collective Political Action,” which examines the archives of Group Material, an artist collective that operated out of New York from 1979 to 1996. The group, established as a radical alternative to institutional art spaces, produced forty-five projects and exhibitions addressing a range of social and political issues, including public arts funding and the AIDS epidemic. Browning investigates how the collective relied upon print media to publicize and circulate their activities among their local community and eventually advocate for political change on a national scale.
Our next presenter, Autumn de Leon, picks up on similar themes of interaction between material textual culture and the art world in their presentation “Covert Design in Small Press Production.” de Leon examines Sky Syzygy’s 2024 artists’ book gender liberators, an anthology of writing by trans and trans-adjacent authors. Syzygy’s book incorporates the tension between the alternative and the (institutionally) artistic within its pages, tactically embracing the design aesthetics of both zines and the fine press. Emerging from the tension between the book’s differing qualities is an argument for a materially produced activist authority.
Our third panelists, Aleksandra Kamińska and Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, co-present on the “Transnational Legacy of American Riot Grrrls: Liberation through Grassroots Publishing Praxis.” With a throughline of small-press cultures, feminisms, and their significance to queer activism that ties their presentation to de Leon and Browning, Kamińska and Malinowska examine Girls and Queers to the Front, a wave of Polish activists and artists who imported American practices and adopted them to the local context, simultaneously challenging Western hegemony and the prevailing narratives about minorities in Central Eastern Europe, affirming the necessity of self-publishing and freedom of movement for feminist and queer resistance.
Our final presenter, Nicole McCleese, concludes our panel with “#Solidarity with Minneapolis: Slow Style, Literary Textures, and Materialities of Slow Narratives in Global Women Writers Graywolf Press Publications.” Picking up on themes of the impact of American print culture transnationally, McCleese’s talk examines the work of global women authors who have published with the US, Minneapolis-based press Graywolf Press. Through the lens of narrative theory on slow style, she asks: What are slow narratives in the context of Graywolf Press writers? How can conversations in contemporary narrative theory on the forms of fictionality and non-fiction inform critiques of the “fictionality” of federal government narratives about Minneapolis specifically?
Each presentation attends to the central question of how small local presses or zines respond to state or institutional power and how materialist textual production acts as a site of resistance to hegemonic State or institutional power.