Sunday, April 14, 2024, 3.00pm to 4.15pm EST time (Please check your own time zone).

Join editor Abigail Susik, historian Sean Lovitt, and author Johanna Isaacson for a discussion about the volume, Resurgence!: Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964-1967.

Register for the event here.

Resurgence! was published in 2023 by Eberhardt Press, a small community print shop and publishing house in Portland, Oregon specializing in radical and surrealist material.

This book launch explores the history of the Resurgence Youth Movement in New York during the 1960s and the radical surrealism of its co-founder, Jonathan Leake. Edited by Abigail Susik, with essays by Penelope Rosemont, Maggie Wrigley Leake, Paul Leake, Sean Lovitt, and Abigail Susik, this 224-page book contains selections from all twelve issues of the rare, ultraleftist, anti-racist magazine Resurgence. The volume also includes selected chapters of Jonathan Leake’s remarkable unpublished memoir, “Root and Branch: A Radical Sixties Odyssey” (1992) — a very exciting addition given the historical importance of Leake’s chronicle. Much of this material has never been published before.

Our discussion will consider the collaborative, DIY nature of the publishing process for Resurgence! as well as the tale of how Jonathan Leake and his rare archives came to our attention. Like the book itself, this conversation will feature photographs, zine pages, ephemera, and other fascinating documentation from the history of the RYM and Leake’s personal archive.

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Abigail Susik explores the intersection of international surrealism with anti-authoritarian protest cultures. She is author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, 2021), 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). She is editor of the forthcoming volume Animation and International Surrealism: A Movement of Dynamic Art,1920-Present (Bloomsbury, 2025) and coeditor, with Paul Buhle, of the forthcoming book Bugs Bunny and the Blues: Selected Writings on Surrealism and Popular Culture, 1965–2008 (PM Press, 2024).

Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (Common Notions Press, 2022) and The Ballerina and the Bull: Anarchist Utopias in the Age of Finance (Repeater Books, 2016).

Read Johanna’s review of Resurgence! here.

Sean Lovitt teaches at Rutgers University-Camden and researches anarchist history. His 2020 dissertation, “Mimeo Insurrection,” explores literary responses to the 1960s “long, hot summers” of riots in the underground press and other independent publications. His recent writing includes “Teenage Anarchists” in Resurgence! edited by Abigail Susik and published by Eberhardt Press. Currently, he is developing a research project on communes, cafes, and other alternative spaces created by social movements.