Abigail Susik

In her wide-ranging research devoted to modern and contemporary art history and visual culture, Abigail Susik focuses on the intersection of international surrealism with antiauthoritarian protest cultures. She is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, 2021), editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967 (Eberhardt Press, 2023), and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (Manchester University Press, 2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (Penn State University Press, 2022). With legendary radical Paul Buhle, she coedited the anthology of writings by Franklin Rosemont, Bugs Bunny and the Blues: Selected Writings on Surrealism and Popular Culture, 1965–2008 (PM Press, 2025). Her edited collection, Surrealism and Animation, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in summer 2025.


Unfree Labour?: Struggles of Migrant and Immigrant Workers in Canada

SKU: 9798887440866
Author: Franklin Rosemont, Edited by Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle
Series: PM Press / Charles H. Kerr Library
ISBN: 9798887440866
Published: 01/28/2025
Format: Paperback
Size: 6 x 9
Pages: 384
Subjects: Popular Culture, Art Criticism & Theory, and Politics



Praise

“There isn’t much Franklin Rosemont did not know, and what he knew he knew from the inside out. I noticed this in the first few months of our decade-long friendship and collaboration. Whether it was the politics of working-class culture, jazz, rock, blues, hoboes, comics, cinema, ecology, psychoanalysis, poetry and poets, art and artists, Chicago and Paris, or Surrealism and Surrealists, he saw things from inside the belly. He read, listened, and felt from a warm, churning, vulnerable place and turned the experience into prose with such elegance and clarity, it hit you in the pit of your stomach. Gut punch or tickle attack, either way you’re left breathless. Don’t take my word. Open this book and start on page 1.”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“However much the ruling ideas of a society come from its ruling class, such dominance does not extend to our dreams. In this marvelous book the great surrealist writer, artist, and rebel Franklin Rosemont captures across an incredible terrain the ways in which the wild, the funny, the insurgent, and the uncanny animate what is loved in popular culture. He shows how the imagination, collective and individual, challenges miseries, conformities, and oppressions and finds its audience.”
—David Roediger, Foundation Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas, and author of many books including Working Toward Whiteness

“Ahead of the game, yet unapologetically behind the curve, Franklin Rosemont’s writings on popular culture have always been needed. But they seem required reading, now, more than ever. Without recourse to humor, irreverence, and play, how else is the current moment to be outlived? The editors have done a stellar job of drawing together gems from his prodigious output, originally spread across countless volumes, tracts, pamphlets, and posters. They don’t need any polishing, but this volume makes them shine somehow brighter.”
—Joanna Pawlik, senior lecturer in Art History, University of Sussex, and author of Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism, and Politics, 1940–1978


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