Year of the Ox

Read André Dao's introduction to Year of the Ox.

THIS BOOK SHIPS ON 10 OCTOBER

ISBN: 9780645761689

One of the things that draws me to historical materialism is that it is a theory of causality, a method for looking into history to identify the internal dynamics of a particular period: its structures, laws, movements, tonalities. I’m compelled by this mode of thought because it helps us to understand how we might intervene in the world – it is a method oriented toward action.

If historical materialism strives to produce a scientific account of the forms and laws that govern the social world in a state of perpetual transformation, does poetry aspire to a form of knowledge that reaches for something beyond those laws? Aimé Césaire answers in the affirmative in a manifesto he penned in 1944 called Poetry and Knowledge that opens with the words: ‘Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.’

But the poetic image capable of breaking down the barriers erected by the violence of the commodity form must take their cues from the streets: moments of collective resistance and the incredible groundwswell of feeling that both is, and overflows, the word solidarity. Or, as Joshua Clover puts it, ‘revolutionary poetry arises from struggle; it is the gift that struggle brings us.’ A material imagination depends upon material actions; each extends the possibility of the other.

Year of the Ox moves between the present and various Oxen years in the zodiac cycle as a way of reading history through the poetic form. It is an attempt to think at the intersection of historical materialism and poetic experience to feel the shape of compounding crises and the forms our shared resistance.

–Andrew Brooks