Last week Vancouver was immersed in smoke from forest fires across Northern and Southern British Columbia. The smoke seemed to speak, without speaking, about our present uneasy condition. On this occasion, The Mainlander has decided to publish the long-delayed online version of a small chapbook, ‘Five Images of a City Without Buildings,’ originally published in 2012 by the artist collective coupe.
In recent years we have seen a massive bolstering of the capacity of the Canadian state to contain poor and oppressed communities. These shifts have worked to target, criminalize and incarcerate those who most actively resist neoliberal and colonial policies. This neoliberal “containment state” is grounded in new ways of criminalizing people and communities, an increase in police and police power, and an expanding prison industrial complex.
These caretakers and residents should not be facing an injunction or a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by a corporate energy giant. Given the federal government’s failure to respond to residents, to Indigenous communities at the source of Tar Sands destruction and along the proposed pipeline route, and to municipal concerns, we laud these protectors for their bravery in taking a stand against Kinder Morgan.
Today The Mainlander and the SFU Institute for Humanities are co-hosting a panel discussion with Chris Dixon, a longtime writer, educator and non-hierarchical/anarchist organizer. Dixon will be discussing his new book Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements, followed by responses from Harjap Grewal, Lisa Freeman and Gary Kinsman. The following interview was originally conducted In August 2014 for The Annares Project. See here for a link to tonight’s event.
