Three days with Ashanté Reese
Why you should pre-order Gather, Ashanté Reese's latest book
Despite living in the same town and working at the same university, I never get to see enough of Ashanté Reese. Last week, I saw her three times.
1. On Monday, I got to watch a lovely interview between her and Alicia Kennedy.
With SXSW we got asked to open Food Tank’s All Things Food:
At the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact’s meeting in Austin, we had a closing conversation about the importance of spaces of gathering. (No video of that, sadly.)
One of the ideas I’m most keen to celebrate in Ashanté’s book is that there are spaces of communal cooking and eating and discussion which can both receive and create the political demand for transformation within cities. Those spaces of gathering are where politics happen in ways that exceed the state, where the infrastructure for care and mutual aid are built, and where solidarities are forged that come to matter when chronic polycrisis becomes acute.
If you’re keen to find out more: adrienne maree brown covers cook, eat, talk in Detroit, I’ll be writing about the Brazilian MTST’s involvement with the PAA in my own book next year, but you definitely want to get your hands on Ashanté’s Gather.