East End Acts Book Club, 2025

The East End Acts Book Club
January – December 2025
Last Tuesday of Every Month
St. Matthew’s Clubhouse, 450 Broadview Ave.
Free | Sign Up Below
Accessibility: Please Contact Us If You Have Any Needs or Concerns Regarding Access!

About the East End Acts Book Club

The East End Acts Book Club began in the spring of 2024 as a place for folks to co-create a community centered around reading towards resistance in the East End. Now for 2025, East End Arts is coming on board to support this program by presenting the club on the last Tuesday of every month at St. Matthew’s Clubhouse. The EEA Book Club follows a “Reading Towards Resistance” theme. It is an anti-colonial book club dedicated to building community through collective reading and critical conversation. Rooted in the belief that stories shape our understanding of the world, we gather to explore complex ideas, challenge oppressive narratives, and imagine liberated futures. Together, we create a reflective space for learning, questioning, and envisioning collective liberation.

For the 2025 Season, it is divided into three themed sections:

  • Jan-April: Black Thought and Pan-African Resistance
  • May-August: On Labour and Interconnected Movements
  • September-December: Indigenous Resurgence and Land Back

Led by local members of East End Acts, people from all walks of life are invited to join this monthly club. Scroll down to learn about the 2025 lineup of books (more to come as the books are confirmed!)

2025 Book Lineup

Over the course of the next several months, we will read the following incredible books, selected by the lead facilitator, Claudia:

  1. Tuesday January 28th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: Ghost Season, by Fatin Abbas
    Book Description: A mysterious burnt corpse appears one morning in Saraaya, a remote border town between northern and southern Sudan. For five strangers on an NGO compound, the discovery foreshadows trouble to come. South Sudanese translator William connects the corpse to the sudden disappearance of cook Layla, a northern nomad with whom he’s fallen in love. Meanwhile, Sudanese American filmmaker Dena struggles to connect to her unfamiliar homeland, and white midwestern aid worker Alex finds his plans thwarted by a changing climate and looming civil war. Dancing between the adults is Mustafa, a clever, endearing twelve-year-old, whose schemes to rise out of poverty set off cataclysmic events on the compound.Amid the paradoxes of identity, art, humanitarian aid, and a territory riven by conflict, William, Layla, Dena, Alex, and Mustafa must forge bonds stronger than blood or identity. Weaving a sweeping history of the breakup of Sudan into the lives of these captivating characters, Fatin Abbas explores the porous and perilous nature of borders—whether they be national, ethnic, or religious—and the profound consequences for those who cross them. Ghost Season is a gripping, vivid debut that announces Abbas as a powerful new voice in fiction.
  2. Tuesday February 25th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, by La Marr Jurelle Bruce
    Book Description: Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly.” So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as “rage,” and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositions, political principles, and existential orientations that he calls “mad methodology.” Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.
  3. Tuesday March 25th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
    Book Description: The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author’s girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves’ garden do not bloom. Pecola’s life does change—in painful, devastating ways.With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child’s yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison’s most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.
  4. Tuesday April 29, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK:     Assata: An Autobiography, by Assata Shakur
    Book Description:     On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder.This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou.Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.
  5. Tuesday, May 27th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: I Hope We Choose Love, by Kai Cheng Thom
    Book Description:     What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author’s characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse. 
  6. Tuesday, June 24th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: Coming Out as Dalit, by Yashica Dutt
    Book Description: Dalit student Rohith Vemula’s tragic suicide in January 2016 started many charged conversations around caste-based discrimination in universities in India. For Yashica Dutt, a journalist living in New York, this was the moment to stop living a lie, and admit to something that she had hidden from friends and colleagues for over a decade—that she was Dalit. In Coming Out as Dalit, Dutt recounts the exhausting burden of living with the secret and how she was terrified of being found out. She talks about the tremendous feeling of empowerment she experienced when she finally stood up for herself and her community and shrugged off the fake upper-caste identity she’d had to construct for herself. As she began to understand the inequities of the caste system, she also had to deal with the crushing guilt of denying her history and the struggles of her grandparents and the many Dalit reformers who fought for equal rights. Woven from personal narratives from her own life as well as that of other Dalits, this book forces us to confront the injustices of caste and also serves as a call to action.
  7. Tuesday, July 29th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK:  Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, by Chanelle Grant and Elene Lam
    Book Description:     In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.

  8. Version 1.0.0

    Tuesday, August 26th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK:     Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, by Harsha Walia
    Book Description:     Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, ruling-class, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalism and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world.Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial exclusion. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how far-right nationalism is escalating deadly violence in the United States, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.

2025 Book Club Dates (with Book Choices Coming Soon if they are not announced yet):

  • Tuesday January 28th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday February 25th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday March 25th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday April 29, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday, May 27th, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday, June 24th, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday, July 29th, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday, August 26th, 6:30-8:30PM
  • *Monday, September 29th, 6:30-8:30PM (not on a Tuesday this month, to accomodate for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation)
  • Tuesday, October 28th, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday, November 25th, 6:30-8:30PM
  • DECEMBER TBD (to accommodate for Winter Holidays), 6:30-8:30PM

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Support Local Bookstores

Joining us for the EEA Book Club? You can borrow these books from the Toronto Library, or if you’re interested in purchasing copies of them, consider supporting one of our many amazing east end book stores!

Accessibility

All meetings as part of the EEA Book Club will take place in-person at St. Matthew’s Clubhouse, a fully-accessible venue with accessible washrooms. If you have specific accessibility requirements to participate in this program, we encourage you to reach out to Program Manager at East End Arts, Mahmoud Ismail, mahmoud@eastendarts.ca  

Health & Safety

Participant & staff safety are of utmost importance to East End Arts and East End Acts, and will be a priority during this program! Please note the following:

  • If you are feeling unwell, we ask that you please postpone or cancel your visit to our Clubhouse.
  • Masks are not mandatory inside our Clubhouse, however we continue to operate a mask-friendly space, and we will have disposable masks available for those who would like to wear one.
  • We continue to ask all of our participants and visitors to practice good hand hygiene practices.
  • Enhanced cleaning routines remain in place in our Clubhouse.
  • Hand sanitizer will be available on site at all times.

About East End Acts

Community members from the Toronto-Danforth & Beaches-East York neighborhoods mobilizing to create political and social change. Learn more about them on their Instagram account @eastendacts

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