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South End Press Celebrates 25th Anniversary of Publishing from a Progressive Political Perspective
Chomsky, Zinn, Marable, and hooks to participate in special lecture series
Independent book publisher South End Press is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a lecture series timed to coincide with Small Press Month. Authors Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Manning Marable, and bell hooks will participate in the March 2002 series in Cambridge and New York City.Publishing political books from a progressive perspective, the Press joined a very small cohort of similar publishers in the late 1970s. Its primary innovations-giving equal attention to race and gender in addition to the left's historic preoccupation with class and economics and supporting political writers to write more accessibly-hit a chord with an activist readership much influenced by the cultural transformations of the 1960s and since. A critique of corporate media has been a hallmark of South End Press's list since its 1979 publication of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, the distribution of which had been suppressed in an earlier edition.
From the start, the Press organized itself as an egalitarian collective with decision-making organized so as to eliminate power hierarchies. From then until today, all job descriptions combine editorial with business tasks. The Press also has made a practice of inverting traditional racial and gender hierarchies with people of color and women making up the majority of its staff. South End Press survived its early years through enormous donations of labor, deferred royalties, and substantial donations from progressive individuals and organizations. As a testament of its success, for more than a decade it has been almost completely supported by sales.
South End Press author Howard Zinn reflects on South End's ability to survive the consolidation of the publishing industry in the last decade: "When I think of heroic publishers refusing to be swallowed up by the mega-publishers, and refusing to go out of business, against all odds, I think of South End Press. I am astonished that this intrepid collective of editors has managed to turn out so many extraordinary books over the years, the kind of books disdained by mainstream publishers, and welcomed enthusiastically by the rest of us. The South End catalog is unique."
South End Press recently released Power Politics by Arundhati Roy, the internationally acclaimed author of The God of Small Things. Other recent top sellers include Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks, All Our Relations by Winona LaDuke and Sweatshop Warriors by Miriam Ching Louie.
South End Press Anniversary Lecture Series - March 2002
Monday 11
"MANUFACTURING CONSENT IN THE TIME OF WAR" is a lecture by Noam Chomsky, at 7 p.m. at the Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street, Cambridge. Free; (617) 547-4002.
Monday 18
"WAR, TERRORISM, AND THE MEDIA" is a lecture by Howard Zinn, at 7 p.m. at the Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street, Cambridge. Free; (617) 547-4002.
Monday 25
Manning Marable
7pm at The Riverside Church, South Hall, 490 Riverside Drive, New York, NY
Friday 29
bell hooks
7pm at The Cooper Union, Wollman Auditorium, 51 Astor Place, New York, NY