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Hard Times are Fighting Times

Alice Proujansky
Gnomic Book
ISBN 978-1-957301-02-0
217 x 280 mm

Most families don’t have their parents’ FBI files in dusty boxes. Alice Proujansky’s does. Hard Times are Fighting Times describes the legacy of Proujansky’s parents’ participation in radical leftist groups like Weatherman, the Native American Solidarity Committee and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee that sought to overthrow imperialism and capitalism through organizing and revolution. Proujansky began work on Hard Times are Fighting Times in 2017, photographing her parents’ propaganda archive, surveillance records, family snapshots and current lives, describing their activism, and subsequent turn toward family life, from an intimate distance. She writes, “My parents fell in love while planning a 60,000-person demonstration in 1976. The story of their activism is the story of me. Radicals like my parents believed that another world was possible, that together they could forge a more just future for humanity. Their utopian dreams of Marxist-Leninism, feminist rigor and fairness are deeply compelling – but also intensely rigid.” The book reads in two directions and interweaves three independent storylines: The Family, The Archive and a slideshow entitled ‘The Question That You Ask, A History of Native American Sovereignty and Resistance’