The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements by Kimberley Kinder (review)

Taking stock of bookstores that double as hubs of leftist dissent, Kimberley Kinder's The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements highlights the potentiality of activism funneled through print retail and also acknowledges its limitations. In the monograph's opening anecdote and most representative case study, Kinder recounts her interview with Leslie James Pickering, who repaired to upstate New York after serving as a spokesperson for the radical environmentalist group Earth Liberation Front. Pickering pursued social justice activism in Buffalo, where he found himself or his message unwelcome at the "local libraries and community centers" that soon stopped hosting his screenings of "documentaries on topics like the Black Panther Party and the Attica Prison Uprising" (1). He and his wife aimed then to create a self-sustaining activist enterprise by founding a radical bookstore, Burning Books. Pickering's trajectory from Earth Liberation Front spokesperson to "activist-entrepreneur," one who makes a small business the site of a social movement repertoire, demonstrates how activists without durable spaces in which to effect change chafe against the constraints of public-sector venues. What is needed, therefore, are spaces like radical bookstores that afford activists their autonomy.

In teasing out the rationale for and the means by which activists ground their work in a print-based retail space, Kinder delineates the opportunities for voicing dissent that are unique to radical bookstores. In its focus on the built environment of such bookstores, Kinder's argument uncovers the structures that uphold political activism, reminding us that these structures are not only abstract. Kinder attends to the materiality of activism in a print-retail space to make legible how, within these "counterspaces," radical politics is institutionalized, publicized, and performed on the ground. Specifically, Kinder's meticulous analysis maps out how radical bookstores create space for political activism even as they simultaneously must negotiate market fluctuations and government oversight.

Despite the existential threat that online retailers and chain stores pose to independent booksellers, Kinder finds that activist-entrepreneurs can leverage tax exemption to compete under print capitalism. For example, the burgeoning phenomenon of running a small bookstore as a nonprofit has in some respects recuperated a moribund industry, though radical bookstores that operate as nonprofits must contend with the disarming effect of "501(c)(3) tax status [which] comes with prohibitions against some types of organizing" (237). Unfortunately, this new lease on life may be only temporary for nonprofit bookstores, as they remain subject to the unpredictability of public and private funding and also vulnerable to the vagaries of the real estate market. Indeed, beyond the prospect of some corporate entity yet cannibalizing the residual market share that independent bookstores occupy, gentrification may extort from small retailers increases in rent that grow so exorbitant shopkeepers must either shift spaces or fold. To be sure, the author warns that any new bookstore opening in an impoverished metropolitan location may be complicit in its own eventual eviction by inadvertently inaugurating the area's redevelopment. Nonetheless, the radical bookstores that manage to survive gentrification certainly merit Kinder's inspection.

Clues as to the viability of radical bookstores are abundant in Kinder's thick descriptions that explain how these spaces offer a kind of asylum. She outlines how activist-entrepreneurs attempt to turn the tension of a potentially fraught encounter between themselves and a heterogeneous public into the release of convergence when patrons and proprietors meet literally and figuratively on common ground. The author spotlights within these spaces the subtle and overt visual petitions in store displays that are meant to blunt if not entirely ward off consumer avoidance of controversial subjects. And when controversy cannot be avoided, rules of conduct to forestall hate speech and bullying may be posted conspicuously to designate the radical bookstore as a "safe space." Although Kinder admits that such rules are difficult to enforce, she argues convincingly that the attempt still has value. Additionally, she shows us how radical bookstore owners...