The Portuguese translation of Shake the City is released by Brazilian publisher Sobinfluencia Edições this coming week. Below is the preface I wrote for this edition.
A writer naturally hopes that their words reach a global audience, but anyone who expects it is being foolish. Even those with massive publishing deals can often struggle to get their books translated, and most books are never read in any language other than the one in which it was originally written. Perhaps a more equitable arts and culture industry would provide more opportunities for writers to get their books in front of new eyes and minds, for their ideas to be part of a robust and ever-deepening global cultural-intellectual commons. But that simply isn’t the world we live in.
When I received word that Sobinfluencia wanted to translate Shake the City into Portuguese, it of course came as a wonderful surprise. First, it meant that the book had already reached readers beyond my reasonable expectations. Second, it meant that they were at least as thrilled by its ideas as I was, that they believed others would engage with them too.
The comrades at Sobinfluencia have shown impressive sensitivity toward the original text and its translation. The arcs and arguments of this book are now translated into Portuguese, now available to the people of Brazil, with their own rich and remarkable lineages of class struggle and musical explosions. It leaves me humbled, grateful, and immensely proud.
In light of this, I wish I could write of more hope in this preface. Unfortunately, the devastated landscape I wrote of in the original English edition still looms in front of us. Governments – most notably in Europe, but around the world too – continue to swing in the direction of authoritarianism. Most nations are content to dither and waffle over the evident destruction of climate change. None seriously countenance the idea of a just ecological-industrial transition.
Pay enough attention walking through city streets, and you can see the evidence of post-pandemic shellshock on your neighbors’ faces. People are slower to believe in a way out, quicker to mistrust and fear. The atomization of daily life by big tech, the attenuation of what little remains of collective labor by the ubiquitous algorithm; these are accelerated by the introduction of artificial intelligence. Many vocations and occupations long since subject to proletarianization (including my own) will be further destabilized, their practitioners further immiserated. Which is to say nothing of ideas and aesthetics that will be further homogenized. Artists, writers, and music makers will find it increasingly difficult to make a living; those who can will face greater pressure to conform to arbitrary definitions of marketability.
And now, a fresher hell: the wholesale destruction of Gaza, renewed mass slaughter and displacement of the Palestinian people. Real estate developers openly promote plans to turn whole sectors of Gaza into cookie-cutter luxury apartments and beach resorts. Their transformation of built history into smooth space is mirrored in the push to remove Palestinian artists from streaming services, to ban them from concerts and music festivals around the world. Moments and temporal spaces that might disrupt colonial entitlement are wiped from the public sphere. For too many governments and institutions, the only sound that should accompany genocide is silence.
Even the sections of this book I would revise seem to further bear out a bleak forecast. At the time Shake the City went to press, I was certain that the choice faced by Gabriel Boric’s left-wing government in Chile was similar to that of Salvador Allende fifty years ago. That is to say it was a choice between mobilizing the masses and bending the levers of the state toward its fundamental transformation on one hand, or being drowned in blood by the forces of reaction at home and abroad on the other.
As it looks now, this was a perversely optimistic assessment. Boric in power has proven a pale shadow of Boric on the campaign trail, bolstered as he was by the estallido social and its flourish of popular power. It is a tragically familiar story, already played out in the cases of Syriza in Greece and many others. The parliamentary road to socialism remains riven with pitfalls, not all of them so dramatic as the events of 1973.
What does this mean for the arts? What does it mean for the popular creativity that was unleashed during the height of the estallido, the mass musical expressions that took over city streets and squares? In some ways, it bears out much of what Shake the City argues in the negative. If music needs space and time to reach beyond the confines imposed upon it by contemporary capital, then the setbacks and disorientations of the movements that created them cause these spaces and times to atrophy, shrinking rapidly and pushed to the margins of society, often vanishing entirely overnight.
The artists’ mutual aid organizations and networks of working musicians that allowed the Plaza Bernardo Leighton to be flooded with hundreds performing “El Pueblo Unido…” still exist. Their next steps a matter of debate, and it is difficult to imagine them scaling up on the events of 2019 anytime soon. Just as it is difficult to imagine the fascist Modi swept from power in India, an end to the apartheid regime of Israel, or an end to the order that impoverishes us with sky-high rents and shatters social bonds in London and Los Angeles.
We must imagine, though. We don’t have a choice. Some say pessimism smothers hope. Personally, I think hope is toothless unless we understand it as a finite resource, unless we stare down the reality that makes it feel impossible. In this regard, arts and music remain materially and psychologically essential, particularly when pulled away from privatized spheres, made and experienced in an organic, collective way.
It can sound more fanciful than strategic, and many of the ideas attempting to support it are just that, provoking scoffs and eyerolls rather than inspiring rationed hope. Past all the pernicious New Age bullshit, however, is the undeniable fact. Study after study, in fields ranging from musicology to mental health to urban planning, find that group participation in making and performing music nurtures thoughts and feelings of possibility, of self-determination and autonomy. The challenge is not to ignore these instances, still less to designate them with a condescending label of “interesting” before disregarding them entirely. Rather, we must look for opportunities to grow and expand these moments, while also avoiding their capture by institutions that would make them safe for consumption and mass subjugation.
We are headed into dark times. Quite often, singing will be all we can muster. It is the raw material of utopia. We cannot afford to ignore it.