Mark your calendar for the 2025 Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair (ACAB), September 27th and 28th on Cherokee land in Asheville, NC.
Over the course of five years (plus a pandemic interruption), ACAB has grown far beyond our initial aspirations, with each interation more ambitious than the last. At the end of the 2024 bookfair, we reflected on how—without intention—the bookfair had become a national gathering, anticipated and attended by comrades living thousands of miles away. While this is a source of joy for us, the scale also complicates our collective efforts. We quietly joked about “degrowthing” the bookfair, subverting the more-is-better assumption of endless expansion; but after Hurricane Helene, it truly became necessary for us as organizers to envision a lighter, more regionally responsive bookfair.*
In 2025, we intend to focus on the unique contributions organizers, thinkers, and actionists living in the South and Appalachia can bring to anarchist and autonomous movements. We invite comrades in the region to gather for a weekend to nourish our connections and stoke our resistance in the struggles that lay before and ahead of us. Falling on the one-year anniversary of the historic storm that laid waste to these mountains, we invoke this iteration of ACAB as an opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned from a year of responding to both ecological disaster and the ongoing disasters of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and state power. How can anarchism provide a compass for building the worlds we desire as forces of oppression tighten and the pace of collapse escalates?
Please plan to bring good ideas, good friends, and good trouble!
* ACAB remains an event that welcomes attendees from anywhere, we just want to be clear that the gathering we’re planning in 2025 will be more modest in scale, with content largely tailored to our region.
