Author: Stephen Collis
Year: 2012
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Non Fiction
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Somewhere at the core of almost every intellectual discipline is an attempt to explain change--why and how things change, and how we negotiate these transformations. It is the most ancient of philosophical questions, but in this collection of essays, award-winning poet Stephen Collis investigates the Occupy movement as it takes up the cause of social, economic, and political change.
Dispatches from the Occupation opens with a series of short essays on the Occupy movement as the author witnessed it, and participated in it, firsthand. Here are "dispatches" from the day-to-day unfolding of the occupation in Vancouver, short manifestos, theoretical musings, and utopian proposals. The global Occupy movement has only just begun, so this book presents an important first report from the front lines.
The middle section of the book is a long meditation on the idea of change as it moves through intellectual history. Change follows certain patterns, and its articulation can be compared across the humanities and sciences. Here the idea of "social change" is set in the wider context of change as one of the timeless ideas and problems of philosophy.
Dispatches from the Occupation closes with a reflection on the city of Rome, written in the shadows of the Pantheon. Collis traces the trope of Rome as the "eternal city," from its imperial past to the rebirth of Roman republicanism during the French Revolution and the era of modern social movements.
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