Rehearsing the Future Book Launch

We are excited to host the Michael Doan for his new book Rehearsing for the Future on Tuesday October 27th at 6pm. Come and support the book and learn about about Detroit History. We welcome the Boggs Center to celebrate their legacy with the communty.

There are free and book tickets at this link. The event will include a rich conversation with the author Michael Doan and Professor Stephen Ward about the book, a Q & A sessions and book signing line. We appreciate you attendance and support of the book. We proud partners of AK press, we are grateful for their continued publication of book that point to our history and culture.

About the Book:

Rehearsing the Future explores the work and legacy of James and Grace Lee Boggs, two of the most influential American radical thinkers of the twentieth century. Grace Lee Boggs earned a PhD in philosophy in the 1940s, though facing obstacles to an academic career as a young Chinese American woman, she left and became a political organizer in Detroit, where she met and married James Boggs, an autoworker, labor organizer, organic political theorist, and Black man from Alabama who moved North during the Great Migration. Over the course of more than forty years of partnership, study, and participation in labor, civil rights, Black Power, anticolonial, and feminist movements, the Boggses articulated a philosophy of long-term revolutionary strategy they called “dialectical humanism.” Rejecting state socialism and traditional Marxism, dialectical humanism instead attributes social change to the conscious, collective self-activity of people engaged in place-based organizing with a view to transforming everyday life and ways of relating to one another. Above all, it emphasizes that revolution is not a fixed program but must evolve as ideas, movements, and institutions are changed through collective practice.

Through their life work and publications, James and Grace Lee Boggs modeled how to do philosophy from within movements. In Rehearsing the Future, Michael Doan presents the intellectual history of dialectical humanism, the far-reaching theory and practice that continues to mobilize communities and organizers around the world, inspiring forms of activism such as visionary organizing and emergent strategy. This book is for scholars and activists interested in the theoretical underpinnings of today's movements.

Michael D. Doan is a Canadian-born father, educator, activist, and philosopher. He joined the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership in 2016 while working with Detroit Independent Freedom Schools and Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University.