Freedom is at the heart of America’s official narratives of political identity, the core principle of its creedal liberal nationalism. If America was born in liberty—individual and collective sovereignty, self-possession, free-trade—the struggles to realize that principle’s unfulfilled promise, we are often told, have shaped its subsequent history and set the horizon of its political aspirations. The manifest contradictions of a settler slaveholding republic would be progressively overcome through shared commitment to the constituent principle of freedom itself, thereby converting even struggle, opposition, and dissent into validating affirmations of the creed’s legitimacy.

Elizabeth Anker’s Ugly Freedoms offers a thoroughgoing and distinctive repudiation of this exceptionalist emplotment of American freedom. Freedom, Anker argues, is not contradicted by such practices as colonial appropriation, enslavement, sexual violence, and ecocide, so much as it is practically embedded and vivified through them. The dense historical entanglements of freedom and domination—from enslavement on the sugar plantations of seventeenth-century Barbados to the neoliberal disfigurations of urban life in postindustrial Baltimore—require a different theoretical orientation to freedom’s complexities as a practice, and a dramatic expansion of the relevant archive for exploring them. Ugly Freedoms skillfully succeeds in both of these tasks, setting out new paths for political theoretical exploration, while also raising important questions that the book invokes but does not fully confront or resolve.

The ugly freedoms referred to in the book’s title unfold on two different registers, one negative, the other affirmative. On the negative register, Anker explores practices of freedom that are inseparable from subjugation, violence, and harm. The latter are not the unintended effects of freedom practices, Anker argues, but constitutive of them. While these entanglements of freedom and violence are sometimes disavowed by freedom’s champions, Anker pays special attention to episodes where the internal connection between freedom and violence are not only openly affirmed, but positively relished. The celebratory coupling of water torture and the “Battle Cry of Freedom” during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, which opens the book, offers a brutal and indelible example that echoes across the subsequent chapters. On the negative register, Ugly Freedoms provides a theoretical vocabulary for understanding and engaging with such adjacent constructs as “Herrenvolk democracy” (Kenneth Vickery), “white freedom” (Tyler Stoval), and “cruelty as citizenship” (Cristina Beltrán), while also illuminating the widely varied sites where the practical entanglements of freedom and violence can be explored. These include the colonial circulations of the commodity of sugar (chapter 1), contested narratives of slave emancipation in US popular culture (chapter 2), the neoliberal restructuring of the postindustrial city (chapter 3), and the consumer sovereignty of gated communities in contexts of worsening drought and climate crisis (chapter 4).

If Anker’s explorations of ugly freedom’s negative register deepens our understanding of the practical entanglements of freedom and violence across multiple sites and contexts, it is on ugly freedom’s positive register that the distinctiveness of the book’s contributions—and its inventive provocations for contemporary political theory—come most clearly into view. Building on scholarship in Black studies, queer theory, and Indigenous studies, Anker explores the flip side of ugly freedom’s brutality in affirming wayward practices, unrefined affective orientations, opaque gestures, and interstitial acts that are usually obscured and undervalued as instances of lauded freedom. Extending Theodor Adorno’s reflections on the “critical generativity of ugliness,” Anker argues that “unheroic,” “disturbing,” “minor,” or “compromised” acts that arise out of deeply ambivalent situations of “obstructed agency” or “deep dependence” must be seen as instances of political attunement and free world-making capacities (pp. 11-13). “The challenge,” she succinctly writes, “is to flesh out the multiple and wide-ranging possibilities of action besides heroic agency or passive domination that extend beyond liberal configurations and may not seem preferable or even desirable within standard analytics of resistance” (p. 83).

These explorations of ugly freedom’s positive registers, which Anker pursues across a similarly diverse archive as the negative, although interestingly focused more on engagements with contemporary art, cinema, and television, are at the center of the book’s effort to generate “alternative representations of political agency, collective action, and freedom” better suited to political contexts exhausted of heroic capacities of romantic revolutionary transformation (p. 34). In the “labial freedom” of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby; the emancipatory conflagration of Lars von Trier’s Manderlay; the micropolitical detachments and disidentifications of The Wire; and, most suggestively, the transhuman collaborations of the microbiotic, skin shedding, and geochemical enactments of political subjectivity, Anker finds reorienting exemplars of small insurgent practices that lurk below the radar of political perceptibility and valuation, but nonetheless sustain daily acts of “resistance.” However, this overused and theoretically overburdened term, Anker rightly suggests, is itself insufficient to the practices of ugly freedom she excavates in the book.

Anker’s stimulating reorientation of theoretical investigation toward neglected or hidden modes of agency, experience, and political subjectivity sometimes suggests that the ugly freedoms she catalogues are in some way preparatory or prefigurative work for larger and more recognizable movements of collective struggle and popular manifestation. She likens ugly freedoms, for example, to James C. Scott’s influential work on “hidden transcripts” as “daily calisthenics that sustain resistance to arbitrary power,” and to Angela Davis’s “dress rehearsals for larger acts of worldmaking” (p. 145). However, the outline of connections between the micropolitical and the macropolitical, the trivial insubordinations of daily life and larger forms of collective resistance, while suggested in a few passages, never comes into clear or sustained focus. Indeed, Anker sometimes suggests that the very attempt to conceptualize the dynamic relationship between the interstitial and minor acts she affirms and more legible or “heroic” forms of transformative collective action, is itself an effect of the debilitating image of freedom she is trying to demystify. “Rather than a majestic singular experience of sublime awe,” she writes, we should turn to “ordinary, trivial navigations of social interactions, built environments, small apartments, or polluted waterways” (p. 151).

The argument of chapter 3—“Thwarting Neoliberalism: Boredom, Dysfunction, and Other Visionless Challenges,” which centers on a compelling rereading of The Wire—demonstrates the book’s ambiguities on this question, as it examines forms of agency and resistance to imperatives of neoliberal governmentality that “take shape without galvanizing visions of a better world to guide them” (p. 118, emphasis in original). The “impasse of vision,” as Anker describes it, is not something to be overcome, but something to be dwelled within and affirmed. The disconnection between the ugly freedoms described in that chapter—the eye-rolling noncompliance of Baltimore middle-school teachers subjected to self-improvement workshops—and “larger acts of worldmaking” seems definitive of the ugly freedoms themselves (p. 126). In illuminating minor acts of detachment and wayward disaffiliation as neglected modalities of freedom, Anker limns forms of agency and experience disencumbered of the “cruel optimism” of visionary dreams of collective transformation (Lauren Berlant), impossibly high aspirations for collective empowerment, that, when unattained, as they must be, lead to a deepening sense of failure and pessimistic disaffection. This detachment, however, also risks neglecting how larger social solidarities, subversive collaborations, and forms of collective resistance can emerge out of and resonate with the unrefined and unrecognized ugly freedoms that Anker so illuminatingly explores.

One danger with the isolating focus on ugly freedoms, if constitutively disconnected from the resonance and mutual implication of the micropolitical and the macropolitical, is that the celebration of the minor and the compromised, the trivial and slight, while avoiding the coils of cruel optimism, risks converting a lack of collective power into a virtue, or redescribing political incapacity as a triumph. It may be true that “a lack of vision is not the same as a lack of agency” (p. 26), but foreclosing the exploration of complexly intersecting and amplifying dynamics of political agency across the different scales and distributions of collective life may present a missed opportunity. Anker seems to anticipate and perhaps indirectly address this concern in the book’s reiterated invocations of collective action, unruly collaboration, and world-making transformation, but the connections, if any, between ugly freedoms and larger collective struggles are more indicated than explored, further extensions of the paths for theoretical inquiry laid out in the book, rather than paths undertaken in the book itself. Ugly Freedoms is an exciting and persuasive study that challenges contemporary political theorists to rethink their approaches to the historical problem spaces of freedom. Doing so, it also opens up productive lines of inquiry that critically reflect back on its own guiding premises.