BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: BURNOUT
The emotional experience of political defeat
My book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat is coming out with Verso in spring 2024.
Structured around eight concepts – melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma and mourning – the book explores emotional experiences of left-wing political defeat, disillusionment and depletion in historical perspective.
Confronting the psychological toll of political struggle, Burnout looks at how activists, organisers and revolutionaries in various left-wing groups, organisations, parties and liberation movements have made sense of or worked through the emotional impacts of their political experiences, whether collectively or in isolation.
From exiled Paris Communards who diagnosed themselves with pathological nostalgia to civil rights movement activists battling weariness, from Bolsheviks suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’ in the aftermath of the October Revolution to traumatised Chilean socialists who were victims of political repression under Pinochet, Burnout analyses the psychic aftermaths of cycles of struggle, the emotional fallout of defeated movements, the on-going strains of day-to-day organising ‘spadework’ and the corrosive interpersonal tensions that can emerge within political groups.
Although negative emotions are the subject of the book, my intention is not to prompt despair in the reader but to figure out ways to confront, overcome or ameliorate such feelings to make it less difficult for struggles to continue.
‘Don’t mourn, organise!’ – IWW labour activist Joe Hill’s famous dying words have been repeated in the contexts of many historical struggles. Burnout asks if it might be possible to mourn and organise, seeking ways to keep fighting against oppressive and exploitative social conditions even when victory seems remote. It also insists on the possibility, indeed the necessity, of acknowledging the significance of psychological questions within left-wing movements, claiming that doing so need not reduce social problems to individual ones in the process.
You can preorder the book here.
If you’d like a review copy let me know and I can pass on the request to Verso. If you’d like to get in touch to organise an event or interview you can reply to this or email me at hannah.proctor@strath.ac.uk.
I’m planning to be in the US on a research trip next spring - I’ll definitely be visiting New York and the Bay Area and possibly some other places (including Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Charlottesville, Austin and LA - tbc) - I would LOVE to do some talks/events during that trip so if anyone in any of those places would be up for hosting something please get in touch.
