If We Were Kin: Race, Identification, and Intimate Political Appeals
Oxford University Press, 2023
Available for order here.
If We Were Kin is about the we of politics—how that we is made, fought over, and remade—and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. While reigning frameworks in the study of politics leave forms of identification sedimented in the background as a priori identities or prop them up front as a part of a mechanistic and calculated game, political identification cannot be captured by these frameworks and is a far more significant and profound political process than they allow.
While If We Were Kin stakes a wider claim about the centrality of identification to politics, it attends most closely to its deeper registers, and in particular to attempts by political actors within racial and gender justice and queer and trans liberation movements to get people to shift or reshape their foundational identifications. Drawing on the political thought of Sylvia Rivera, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and grassroots LGBTQ activists in Southerners On New Ground, the book identifies a distinct lineage of calls which challenge the atomized and hierarchical racial formations that structure political life in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom. Traced through activist archives, political speeches, and original interviews, these appeals demand not only a rethinking of fundamental assumptions in the study of politics, but provide critical resources for understanding the way power works in struggles to constitute a we, how commitments towards or away from racial justice are cultivated through battles over identification, and the dangers and possibilities of identificatory appeals.
Reviews
“In If We Were Kin, Lisa Beard has crafted a work of urgent beauty, offering readers a powerful exploration of identification and the many ways people come to understand themselves politically. Drawing on a vibrant tradition of Black, Latinx, queer, and trans activism, organizing, and theorizing, Beard moves from civil rights and Black Lives Matter activism to rural southern LGBTQ+ kinship organizations, to migrant justice struggles to far-right political campaigns, crafting a rich and ideologically capacious account of identificatory appeals and what such appeals make possible. Through both methodology and archive, Beard reminds us that the struggle to forge a larger and more just sense of who we are is the democratic challenge of our time.”
— Cristina Beltrán, author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity and Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy
“Beard brilliantly invites our exploration of these activists’ kin, their people. Reading this book, I felt like I was sitting around a breakfast table with them, wanting another biscuit, but not willing to interrupt the conversation.”
— Pat Hussain, co-founder of Southerners On New Ground
“Lisa Beard offers eloquent and compelling readings of an archive of antiracist (and) queer/trans political speech in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. If We Were Kin shows how an array of visionary activists tune into the frequency of intimacy as they craft calls to political identification that foreground rather than elide the structural violence of racism. An illuminating and thought-provoking read for scholars and builders of social movements alike.”
— Emily L. Thuma, author of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence