Medicine Stories - Essays for Radicals

In this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice. Calling for a politics of integrity that recognizes the complicated wholeness of individual and collective lives, Levins Morales delves among the interwoven roots of multiple oppressions, exposing connections, crafting strategies, and uncovering the wellsprings of resilience and joy. Throughout these twenty-eight essays—twenty-one of which are new or extensively revised—she exposes the structures and mechanisms that silence voices and divide movements. The result is a medicine bag full of techniques and perspectives to build a universal solidarity that is flexible, nuanced, and strong enough to fundamentally shift our world toward justice. Intimately personal and globally relevant, Medicine Stories brings clarity and hope to tangled, emotionally charged social issues in beautiful and accessible language.


Praise

"Morales’s book is an excellent tool for understanding some of the dynamics of social justice movements and should be part of activists’ survival kits against despair." — Nylca J. Muñoz Sosa, Monthly Review

“Perhaps the most directly significant contribution of Medicine Stories...is Levins Morales’s framing of oppression as the most widespread and systematically reproduced source of trauma.... Medicine Stories maps the intimate and collective pathways of survival that communities and individuals find in the face of violence and injustice....” — Corinne Lajoie, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies

“A poetic, deeply personal memoir of the intellect and the soul. Aurora Levins Morales embraces genres, political movements, and spiritual awakenings to tell one multifaceted story of a life searching for justice and serenity, in community, in society, and with one's own body.” — Sarah Schulman

“Twenty years ago I first read Medicine Stories and had my mind blown by the elegant, virtuosic way Aurora Levins Morales imagined a theory interweaving childhood sexual abuse survival, Indigenous sovereignty, anticlassism, and deep Latinx queer anticolonial ecological justice. Twenty years later, her analysis is even more rich and full of fruit, revising and expanding her work to encompass Standing Rock and the global fight for water and land liberation, survivorhood, and disability justice. Aurora demands the impossible and the only thing that is possible: everything.” — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

"Aurora Levins Morales's work should absolutely be supported. She has an impeccable progressive and visionary politic. Her prose has the literary eloquence of a pure poetry. A necessary and timely read." — Cherríe Moraga, author of Native Country of the Heart