Book Review: Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement, by Erin Pineda

• Author: Deva Woodly
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221082639
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 985

of Arendt’s archival “heroes” (107), uniquely exemplified in Honig’s analy-

sis by Arendt’s exclusion of Ali from her discussions of civil disobedience in

the 1970s. The example suggests the ways in which exclusion can clarify the

value of refusal.

Honig’s notes are extensive and need to be read. I would have liked a bib-

liography. The book’s intended audiences include political theorists, feminist

scholars, and classicists, although the latter may put up some resistance. But

this potential resistance simultaneously illustrates the ways in which, as

Honig says, “refusal is generative” (107).

Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement, by Erin Pineda.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 280 pp.

Reviewed by: Deva Woodly, Politics, The New School, New York, New York, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221082639

Erin Pineda’s luminous Seeing Like an Activist is a theoretical and tactical

reexamination of the political meaning of civil disobedience as it was prac-

ticed in mid-twentieth-century Black civil rights movement. However, it is

also much more. Pineda makes a major methodological and conceptual inter-

vention by seeking to change the problem space of political theory’s engage-

ment with politics. Pineda contends that political theorists must wrestle with

the fact that theorizing does political work and that the ways that theorists

approach problems of injustice can “perform racial power—lending racial

states normative validity.” When theorists “adopt the state’s interest in main-

tenance and stability as its own normative end,” “center the white citizen by

treating racial injustice as aberrational rather than constitutive,” and “when

[they] obscure racial hierarchy behind the language of constitutional democ-

racy,” they “see like a white state” (17–18). In this book, Pineda offers the

antidote: “seeing like activist[s] (4).”

Pineda’s claim is at once bold and accurate, well supported in both her deft

text and in the empirical world at large. Pineda is writing in the tradition of

Carole Pateman and Charles Mills in contending that the kind of democracy

that liberalism has engendered in practice (which, importantly, is not the only

possible form of democracy nor even the only possible form of liberalism, as

defenders of that tradition who recognize systemic, racialized inequality like

Jacob T. Levy, have argued) is built on a racial and sexual contract that embeds

unjust hierarchy into our commonsense notions and formal institutions.