A thousand pox upon the head of traditional history books. Leaving aside all matters of sexism, classism, imperialism, and plain old fact suppression, they’re usually a pretty boring read on top of it all. But the writing’s on the wall: Celebrate People’s History is releasing its own version of “how we got here”’s greatest hits — and the book release party is Sat/20.
Josh MacPhee has been making unsung history the writing on the wall since 1998. Though technically he sees himself as an anarchist, MacPhee is the putative head of the poster collective CPH, having commissioned over 100 original radical history posters over the years. Those prints have made their way around the world, to classrooms and street corners. The signs join a legacy that MacPhee identifies — in Celebrate People’s History‘s introduction — as having begun with Cuba’s Organization in Solidarity with the People’s of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL)’s work during the ’60s, and which stretches to include the pieces done locally by artists of the Mission School and the Billboard Liberation Front.
What’s special about the CPH pieces among this line of populist propaganda are a proactive focus on history’s shining moments, those points in time where people came together and resistence against hegemony held. MacPhee’s book includes posters of Harriet Tubman’s historic crossing of 750 escaping slaves over the Combahee River in South Carolina in 1863 (with the aide of Union troops, the only female-led military action in the history of the country) and the 2003 city shutdown of San Francisco in response to the bombing of Baghdad.
This is how the book looks. Right page: duo-tone poster. Left page: typed-out version of its text. The codification on the pages make the triumphs seem more real, somehow — like most things do when they are written down.
MacPhee writes that he felt the need to bind the posters together to make visible the “broader sweeps of the past,” and the evolution of radical social movement. The end product may be a lot less exciting than seeing a CPH poster on your corner’s electrical box, but it is a gas to see them neatly placed on pages, next to their message codified into uniform typeface.
In the wake of sit-lie’s triumphant refutation of the freedom of public space and in a time where some are questioning poor people’s right to even live in this city, I think the questions below, posed by MacPhee in his introduction to the book, is pretty pertinent:
Can our streets become active galleries of ideas and information we can use to understand who we are and where we come from? Can these galleries evolve and change, instead of calcifying, fading, and cracking, and make room for new ideas, images, and conversations?
Here’s hopin’…
Celebrate People’s History book release
Sat/20 7 p.m., free
Center for Political Education
522 Valencia, SF
(415) 431-1918