Raving Radicals Bathed in Blax: A 21st Century Proletarian Novel - Paperback

by Daniel K. Buntovnik (Author)

Join Daniel K. Buntovnik as he takes you to meet Witherslapt Gobseckowitz, Pedrocco Pastrana, Paty Guzman, Izzy Zamora, Tisha Ulroy, and Franky Ford. These six unruly millennials happening to share an interest in raves, radical literature, and social justice form the Radical Book Club: an informal faction operating within a left-wing activist group called Socialist Alliance, whose leader suspects the uppity twentysomethings of using their "club" as little more than a cover for recreational drug use and organizing underground dance parties. In short, a serious liability to party-building discipline. When a bungled police raid on an unpermitted warehouse rave leads the Homeland Intelligence Agency to draw a tenuous connection between the Marxian micro-sect and a vast criminal underworld, the leadership's concerns seem vindicated. Seizing the incident as a pretext to quash social movements, the H.I.A. begins targeting domestic dissidents for extraordinary rendition. After losing one of their own, it's clear peaceful protest ain't gonna cut it. But it isn't until advocates of Marxism are officially designated legitimate targets in the War on Terror and the Book Club is forced to team up with Rroma clans and a Santa Muerte-worshipping drug cartel, that the radical ravers realize what it really means to become true "social justice warriors" as they go down the path of revolutionary armed struggle: a path that leads to strange sojourns in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa... and outer space. As a leftist riposte to the society that produced films and books like The Turner Diaries (1978), Red Dawn (1984, 2012), and those of Tom Clancy (1984-2003), RAVING RADICALS aims to reinvigorate the long dormant tradition of the proletarian novel and infiltrate this reactionary literary landscape. Though rooted in the antiquated tradition of the proletarian novel, which saw its heyday in the 1930s, RAVING RADICALS BATHED IN BLAX is more than a simple plea for a revolution-it is a fantastic social vision. In the present period when so many of us are feeling disenchanted and disillusioned with politics, revolutionary social change is oft-perceived to teeter precariously close to the abysmal realm of the impossible. Envisioning it thus necessitates a fogging of the boundary between feasible and infeasible. Bolstered by this Todorovian fantastic element as well as the quasi-magic realism of Sun Ra's afrofuturist "myth-science", RAVING RADICALS exhibits the infusion of proletarian literature with new elements: in an unrelenting process of "border thinking", Buntovnik takes the reader on a wild mental journey not only through the subversive thought of subaltern subjects issued from within the imperial core (Marxists, anarchists, drug cartelists, conspiracy theorists), but performs a critical symbiosis, infusing all of these with a range of Euro-decentralizing linguistic artifacts and decolonial modes of thought drawn from all regions of the Global South (i.e. Africa, Asia, and Latin America), including, but not limited to, Afrocentricity, Rromanipen, Zapatismo, and Santa Muertismo. Some call it a satirical geopolitical thriller. Others, a postmodern proletarian novel. Yet, in truth, Daniel K. Buntovnik's RAVING RADICALS BATHED IN BLAX represents the avant-garde of a newly emergent kind of art which we might more aptly call "transmoproletlit" (from trans + modern + proletarian + literature). Attention(!): Transmodernity differs from postmodernism in that it aims to transcend the modern without pretensions of an already existing social rupture with the violent civilizing mission of modernity.