Not Another LibGuide

To the Editors of The Political Librarian,

Can we talk about Nicole A. Cooke’s “We Will Not Be Erased: A Militant Manifesto for Libraries.”? Cooke’s essay is rhetorically and emotionally urgent: the violence of censorship regimes! the exhaustion of racialized labor! and the profession’s long-standing reliance on “neutrality”! It invokes a strong and powerful lineage—Octavia Butler, Robin D. G. Kelley, Ruha Benjamin, adrienne maree brown, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and the inimitable Ella Baker —to insist that “neutrality is complicity,” “abolition is necessary,” and “care is not optional.” I share many of these commitments, such as they are and must be for any vision of a free world. This is likely why Dr. Cooke cited my work (specifically the article “Policing the Library: Security, Surveillance, and the Carceral State” in an issue of the established LIS journal Library Trends).

But I do not exist.

Nor does the article she references.¹ Like so many of the ideas and thinkers in this piece, I am an apparition² (one might even say a hallucination): summoned and present only insofar as we can be used to further an argument and prop up Cooke’s professional reputation and the continued commodification of critical ideas in our field. While this is certainly an embarrassing citational mistake, I feel I am an allegory of the essay itself. Just as the bibliography imagines an author who cannot be found, the manifesto repeatedly conjures “militancy” as an aesthetic and a credential. It takes radical vocabularies originally forged against imperialism and state violence, and reissues them as professional rhetoric: a “militant framework for LIS,” a set of institutionalizable “applications,” and a legitimating tone for the profession.

I write not to argue that the essay goes too far, nor to demand a retraction because of sloppy citation practices (or poorly hidden generative AI usage). Rather, I am here to name how the manifesto is functioning: the appropriation of radical language for institutional and professional ends that ultimately neutralize the very traditions it invokes. In that way, it functions as counterinsurgent: not in the crude sense of deliberate suppression or violent reprisal, but as absorption through capturing insurgent language and shifting it into professional and institutional legitimacy. A real manifesto has an enemy it is willing to name and confront, but this manifesto is little more than fancy words. If library workers (gleefully or otherwise) embedded in capitalist institutions can unironically claim the mantle of militancy (however watered-down and impotent it might be) for themselves and their work without any revolutionary consciousness or commitment(s), they can ignore what a truly radical worldview or transformation would demand of them. This is where I must begin.

Cooke opens by declaring: “This manifesto—our manifesto—is born of fire.” She names fire as the literal violence of racial terror, queer uprising, and imperial war. That framing forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: if the manifesto is “born of fire,” what is it oriented against? In revolutionary traditions, militancy is not a synonym for moral intensity and it isn’t a defensive maneuver or stance—it is a relation to struggle. Militancy is an organized antagonism against the state, racial capitalism, empire, colonial governance, and the infrastructures that sustain them.³ Militancy names a willingness to confront power with force—material, embodied, consequential—at risk of imprisonment, destruction, and death. It names a commitment that does not seek institutional recognition, in fact is not born of institutions. Rather, militancy is animated by a desire and will to overcome the structures and systems—including libraries—that produce and maintain domination. It is fundamentally antagonist, not reformist; insurrectionary, not institutional.

We also need to be honest about a distinction the manifesto consistently obscures: the distinction between reform and revolution. These are not points on a continuum, not simply a matter of how far or how fast one is willing to go; they describe fundamentally different relationships to existing structures of power. Reform asks the system to improve itself: to be more inclusive, more equitable, more humane. Revolution recognizes that the system’s capacity to absorb these demands is precisely what sustains it—that inclusion and equity, when administered by the state and its institutions, function as mechanisms of legitimation, not transformation. Reform and revolution are not complementary strategies but rather are opposed orientations: one reproduces the conditions of domination by making them more tolerable, and the other seeks their destruction.

Further, to declare that libraries are “frontline spaces in the struggle against fascism, white supremacy, and censorship” without reckoning with the fact that libraries have also been instruments of these forces is not a radical analysis, it is simply professional mythology: the construction of an origin story in which the institution is fundamentally good, temporarily corrupted, and redeemable through better values.

Perhaps this is why the background and scene of militancy that Cooke stages are so institutionally legible, offered primarily as professional affect and programmatic action: “We are planting seeds with every drag story hour, every zine workshop, every critical information literacy session, every refusal to comply with surveillance requests.” These acts can be meaningful, can bring joy and possibility and protection to our communities, and, in the current climate, may be genuinely risky. But calling them militant, especially without naming the institution’s structural role in the maintenance of empire, turns the word into an affective intensifier—a vibe—rather than understanding militancy as an inherently antagonistic and revolutionary orientation (and one that requires clear commitments to resistance against the forces that would subdue and subjugate us). It is important to note that this is a classic mechanism of capture that we see time and time again in libraries: radical language becomes a professional mood that can be safely applauded, and incorporated while requiring very little from us (and doing very little to affect meaningful material change).

I emphasize that this is not a minor semantic quibble, or debate—it is how institutions neutralize and domesticate insurgent language. The capture becomes further explicit, even parodic, in the wildly nonsensical table Cooke has generated: Cooke’s Radical Lenses Framework for LIS,⁴ which converts critical lineages into a variety of “LIS Applications,” ready to be disseminated via conference presentations, integrated into lesson plans and proficiency standards, and recorded on resumes and CVs. I encourage everyone to look at the table closely and try to make sense of it if you can. These thinkers are each assigned a parenthetical label and then arranged in a matrix that forces their work into row-by-row equivalence, as though Lorde’s theorization of the erotic as a form of knowledge and power occupies the same conceptual space as Baker’s decades of grassroots organizing in the rural South, as though these are merely different flavors of the same theoretical or professional insight. The table, moreover, has the unmistakable quality of AI-generated slop: the perfectly parallel syntax, the confident emptiness, the production of symmetry where none exists, the way it sounds like scholarship without bearing the weight of any actual thought. 

That the manifesto’s central framework appears to have been generated by the same technology that fabricated my existence in the bibliography is not incidental; it’s the whole plot and it showcases a clear problem at the heart of this work (beyond how insulting it is to call something “militant” that was so clearly AI-generated). This is what happens when abolitionist and Black radical traditions are reframed as a professional framework or practical formulation and when their political content is reorganized into individual and institutional competencies: we get something like revolutionary theory as professional development opportunity, a framework one can apply within the workplace. Inevitably, the institution becomes the gravitational center; radical traditions become “lenses” for improving institutional practice. This is professionalization’s power:⁵ it oversees the conversion of critique into discourse and legitimacy, producing profession(s/als), practices, and governable subjects rather than antagonistic disruptions.

This dynamic is perhaps clearest in the imagination (“By positioning imagination as a professional competency…”) and care (“Embedding care as a core institutional value…”) sections. At a glance, these passages say all the right things: the manifesto has all the right references and these passages showcase the cadence of radicalism, the vocabulary of resistance, and the posture and affect of someone who knows what to say and how to say it in a way that will appeal to many. But if I look closer the sentences dissolve: they do not describe a confrontation with power and they do not mean anything that would disturb the institutions they are spoken from within—if they even mean anything at all. These are not accidental word choices; they locate and enclose revolutionary practices inside the same systems and structures they are meant to resist. That is how institutions metabolize critique into legitimacy: they learn to speak the language of liberation while keeping the possibility and actuality of change safely enclosed within professional parameters. This is a manifesto that is already perfectly legible and amenable to state power.

The abolition section stands out as one of the most politically consequential and frustrating examples of the recuperative tendencies within this piece. Cooke insists that abolition is not a rhetorical flourish: as she says: “Abolition is not an option; it is a necessity if libraries are to resist becoming agents of state violence.” Truly, abolition is not an option; it is a necessity. Yet, the phrase “resist becoming” quietly preserves institutional innocence and obfuscates complicity by making state violence a future risk rather than a structural condition and current reality. An abolitionist analysis,⁶ however, pushes us to name the library not as a space outside of violent and carceral logics or one that might become violent but as an existing node in governance and control: eligibility regimes, access management, compliance cultures, campus and municipal policing entanglements, and the daily maintenance and reproduction of accumulation and extraction. 

And so what would abolition actually and truly demand in such a context? We must absolutely reject punitive practices, refuse collaboration with police and other agents of the state, and organize and support mutual aid networks. But as someone who has studied the carceral architecture and practices of libraries, the problem is not that they sometimes call the police; the problem is that libraries are already doing the work of policing before any call is made. Every behavioral policy that regulates how bodies may occupy space, every fine structure that punishes poverty, every surveillance system that tracks what patrons read and where they move, every design choice that makes a library inhospitable to those who have nowhere else to go—these are carceral functions performed by the institution itself. Abolition cannot be simply “applied” as a professional lens without destabilizing the institution’s or our profession’s very self-conception. When abolition is reduced to policy reforms and coalitional language without a structural understanding of our own positioning within these systems,⁷ it becomes what institutions can tolerate: abolition as interpersonal ethic or little more than window-dressing, not abolition as fundamental rupture.

Again, this is a familiar institutional move: “liberation” is recast as a role libraries can “reclaim,” and “militancy” is offered as a professional framework that helps the institution recalibrate and endure. This is also what I mean by “counterinsurgent.” Counterinsurgency is not always clearly visible and it isn’t just policing; it is the production of legitimacy and authorization. It works by translating antagonism into policeable policy and inspirational rhetoric, by offering our profession and institutions a way to speak the language of radicality and assuage our moral spirits while neutralizing its capacity to threaten the institutional order. In the context of libraries—institutions entangled with the state, with racial capitalism’s political and knowledge economy, and with imperial infrastructures of information, accumulation, and extraction—any so-called “militancy” that does not name an enemy and does not risk a break with the way things are or institutional legitimacy becomes a form of pacification: it channels insurgent desire into professional renewal and personal validation.⁸

I could go on, but a genocide continues outside our little realm of librarianship. There’s more to unpack in the manifesto than I have time or room to contend with.

To end: I don’t know Dr. Cooke, but I do know our profession and the imperial institutions we’re a part of. None of this requires cynicism about Cooke’s intent, but it does require precision and clear-headedness about the institutional form and the nature of our field. A manifesto delivered from within professional prestige circuits (including the American Library Association conference stage, no less) cannot simply declare itself militant. Militancy requires naming an enemy and refusing the institution’s innocence. If we want to invoke abolitionist, anticolonial, and revolutionary traditions, we must be willing to say what those traditions demand: not merely better professional values or even better workplaces, but confrontation with the institution as an apparatus of governance, extraction, and legitimacy. Little that the manifesto asks of its adherents would jeopardize their professional standing, their institutional positions, or their relationship to the state apparatus of which libraries are a constitutive part. This can’t go unacknowledged, yet it is a reality that the manifesto is unwilling or unable to understand.

I offer this critique in the spirit of refusing the profession’s easy comfort: not the older comforts of neutrality or intellectual freedom, but the newer comfort of institutionally recognized (ie. domesticated, toothless) radicalism. If we are going to use the word militant, let it name what it has historically named—organized antagonism, strategic resistance, and a willingness to risk something and fight for liberation.

Sincerely,

Angela Balestreri

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1. I am not alone in my spectrality. Even if the other thinkers and writers she cites are real, not all of their citations are (and certainly there is a amorphous quality to the way she uses our ideas even if they have been drawn from our actual work). I raise this not to score a point, but because the error is diagnostic: it reveals how citation is functioning here—as atmosphere of authority rather than accountable relation. ↩︎
2. If even the bibliography produces ghosts, it becomes harder to take the essay’s claims to abolition and militancy as anything other than rhetorical posture. The manifesto repeatedly treats radical traditions as a resource—as names, phrases, and vibes that can be summoned to lend heat and legitimacy to a professional argument. The “militant” becomes a register: a way of sounding radical while remaining, in practice, institutionally governable. ↩︎
3. The word militant has a history that does not belong to librarianship or LIS, that is fundamentally foreign to it. It belongs to a long lineage and tradition, from the anticolonial combatants in Algeria and Vietnam, to the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, to the Zapatistas and the Naxalites, to the American Indian Movement and the centuries-long fight of Indigenous peoples against colonialism, to the labor militants who fought Pinkertons on picket lines, to the queers who struck back at Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria, and many others across time… not with programming initiatives but with actual weapons and material stakes. ↩︎
4. Available soon as a two-day professional development workshop or with an organizational culture consultant, who will inevitably charge a premium to help your library see itself through Cooke’s Radical Lenses™ ↩︎
5. Professionalization is “that which reproduces the professions” (and is also a “state strategy”), as we know (Moten & Harney, The Undercommons). ↩︎
6. e.g., Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s insistence that abolition is a project of dismantling carceral governance while building life-affirming infrastructures. ↩︎
7. Dylan Rodriguez expresses this sharply in his discussion of the “ensemble of “holistic” counterinsurgency that works through entrepreneurial, public-facing, media-friendly, DEI-adjacent funding-and-research streams that often reference and expropriate abolitionist and abolition-proximate thought and praxis (including concepts and grounded practices like transformative/restorative justice, decarceration, and the term “abolition” itself)” (“On University Abolition,” American Quarterly 2025) ↩︎
8. Meaning it makes people feel good about themselves and their perspectives and practices, while demanding nothing of them or anyone else. Even the powerful refrain “We will not be erased—from collections, from hiring committees, from unions, from conference stages” is little more than a professional survivalist slogan when it is not paired with a structural account of how the library itself participates in the production of erasure and the subjugation of the marginalized it claims to care about (and might even someday begrudgingly “include”). ↩︎