WQR is OUT! And I don’t mean from the closet (though, what would it mean to have a book come out of the closet…)

…or the humanities? I got a really nice note from a student in a class from last semester, which read in part: “Thank you so much for leaving the [our] course open on d2l. I’m working on a project for my Urban Politics class, and the documents on racial capitalism were a lifesaver. I think about your class more than just about any other class I’ve already finished. I often think about what it means to, as Melamed put it, work for the well-being of the widest conceivable collective. I’ve even started to write the novel I proposed for my final! I’m so grateful for everything you taught us.” (B, English major, Fall 2025). I share this not to toot my horn, but to offer student testimony about what teaching from a Community Organizing Humanities perspective can do for students.

As I admit in Wynter’s Queer Revolution, I really did write the book for me, to hold myself to account as a pedagogue, to figure out what to teach toward in the interregnum. It worked. Each of my humanities classes, from first year writing to this senior seminar the student above mentions, is built around producing–or at least aiming at contributing to produce–communitarian revolutionary collective subjectivites. It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing either.

If you have read the book, I really do want to know what you think, public comments to private emails.