Maybe you just moved to Oakland, hardly know anyone, and you have no idea what to make of the city. Or you’ve lived here your whole life but what you’ve read about where you live never quite captures what you experience, day-in and day-out. Perhaps you spend all your time thinking about Oakland, wrestling with the city’s history, legacy, and future, but you’ve fallen into an intellectual cul-de-sac, opening the same doors over and over again. Or maybe you’re just vibing.
Most of us at ORB have this question in common: how do you really know this place? Can you?
Enter: the Oakland Review of Books syllabus. The term syllabus might conjure nightmares of fluorescent lighting and pressures to produce and, well, school, but this syllabus is one in name only. All bets are off: novels, academic monographs, poetry anthologies, yes, as you expect, but also movies, tv shows, a song you heard once, an article that the New York Times published that still gets you heated because it got everything so wrong. A set of photographs you found in someone’s garage sale and uploaded to Flickr 15 years ago. Mutual aid instructions, communist treatises, an old BART map. You might be thinking, so this is an archive, and we say, sure, but it’s an archive you can read, listen to, watch, click on, and most importantly, add to.
You can find it here, in its first and most gestational form. It will gestate forever, and there are no limits to what it could include.
ORB is not in the business of canon creation. We want to bring knowledge out of the shadows, out of the ivory tower, out of the vacuum that emerges in the aftermath of displacement and rended social reproduction. The threads of Oakland’s history and future are too varied and too tangled for any single perspective to capture the vastness of this place and its local and global reverberations. We will never capture it in its entirety. The point is to attempt. To nurture rootedness in a place – for the old and fresh roots alike – is to wrestle with the preconceived narratives and imaginaries of that place and demand something more real, more immediate, more complicated, more more.
Go forth and submit. Maybe add a blurb if you want, telling us what it is about your submission that is so crucial for understanding how Oakland works. We’ll throw it in the syllabus itself, probably, unless it has nothing to do with life here, in which case, what are you doing here? Categories, organization, legends, etc will emerge over time, as needed. The syllabus will have syllabi.
We wouldn’t be doing any of this if we ourselves didn’t have strong opinions and overstuffed bookshelves. Here’s our first stamp:
Aaron Bady: Stories about Oakland’s past usually focus on what was lost, or what used to be there but now isn’t (which is doubly true for memoirs, which are so often nostalgic edging around lost youth). What I love about What You Don't Know Will Make a Whole New World (retired superstar librarian Dorothy Lazard’s Oakland memoir) is how the great work of her professional life brings the past back to life: After helping so many people in the Oakland Public Library’s Oakland history room rediscover their town, communities, and ancestry, Lazard’s recalls her youth in the Town at the moment when so many of its young people were first declaring themselves to be Black (and discovering a new kind of community in the power of that declaration); it’s subtle, gentle, and deceptively simple, but I think it exemplifies a kind of archival work that is never satisfied with leaving the past in its boxes and files, but strives to bring it to life, to take a question without an answer and make of it, a whole world.
Annie Lloyd: It’s a classic for a reason, but Robert O. Self’s American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Post-War Oakland is the first piece of history I read about Oakland that took its overall development really seriously and understood the dialectical relationship between its Black history and the area’s most reactionary elements. It’s history like this that, for me, helps to ground things like the 2024 recalls in a long regional trajectory.
Britt H. Young: To me, the East Bay brought to the forefront a relationship to food that’s deeply provincial, seasonal, and grounded. Today, the food scene is especially interested in the localvores of history too—Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley and Wahpepah’s in Fruitvale showcase Ohlone culinary ingredients and techniques—including, of course, foraging, now a quintessential Bay Area activity and ethos. Ten Speed Press, not coincidentally located in Berkeley, produces some of the country’s most celebrated cookbooks. One of their weirdest, and most classic outputs is All That the Rain Promises and More by David Arora, a pocket guide to mushroom hunting that keeps you so grounded, all you’ll care about is what’s literally underground, in mycorrhizal networks.
Glenn Poppe: Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing explores how we might reclaim our attention and redirect it together, which is what I think this syllabus is all about. Her call to “resist in place” originates from the Rose Garden and epitomizes for me a view from Oakland, rooted in both intimate proximity to and critical distance from the technocapitalist core.
Marthine Satris: The Brethren by the Bay by Robert Baylis is not a piece of literature, I can’t recommend it on those merits. But it has photographs and stories of my family members born and raised in Oakland during the early decades of the early 20th century, and it reminds me that Oakland is made by the people who have lived here. That port cities are full of travelers, like the missionary ancestors in these pages who made Oakland their homebase for evangelizing in China and door-knocking around the neighborhood. That there’s a lot of churches here (Brooklyn, which was annexed to become East Oakland, was named for the ship that brought 19th century Mormon settlers to Oakland), and people here who go to them, even if I don’t. That my mom spent summers in the 1950s riding the bus down MacArthur with her grandmother back to her place in Deep East Oakland, because the freeway wasn’t built yet and neither was the Coliseum. I wasn’t born in Oakland, but my children were and my grandfather was, and none of us individually define this city, we only contribute to it. Oakland is always becoming, and it’s always many different cities, which criss-cross each other in the bodies of the people walking it into being.
Pauline Kerschen: Decades after Gertrude Stein located Everybody's Autobiography at 13th Avenue and 25th Street, another daughter of the East Bay worked her own upbringing among the eucalyptus into another gut renovation of the English sentence. Lyn Hejinian's My Life spins a simple procedure—45 sections of 45 sentences for 45 years of life—into a mirror ball of reflection on how odd it would be if we always meant what we said, and how we are nonetheless built out of what we say to each other. The open structure invites our own lives to fill the gaps. Marvelously, this is an autobiography that truly aspires to be everybody's.
Tommy Craggs: I’m going with Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, a book that is not about The Town but nonetheless is fully of The Town. Robinson was born and raised here, a child of the Second Great Migration; he was radicalized here, or more exactly he was radicalized somewhere in that ionized space between the poles of West Oakland and Cal Berkeley; he had a job in the probation department here, alongside his future wife, Elizabeth, doing something like restorative justice at a time when, in her telling, the department could be a bulwark against the cops. I picked up Black Marxism not long after moving to Oakland, and it was impossible not to read each through the prism of the other. The place felt like an elaboration of the book’s project, the project like an expression of the place. At the heart of either is a story about Black flight and Black revolt and the new ways of knowing that those conditions can produce. The book never mentions Oakland, but it is as good a map of The Town’s psychic terrain as you’ll find.
Xander Lenc: Early archival records of Oakland, including the city’s official act of incorporation, often make reference to “Portois map of Contra Costa.” To Oakland historians, the map is something of a legend: despite its obvious historical importance, it appears to have disappeared off of the face of the earth. In a short but brilliantly paranoid article titled The First Map of Oakland: An Historical Speculation as Solution to an Enigma, Jack J. Studer argues that the missing map is evidence of a broader conspiracy. During the Gold Rush, the Bay Area was flooded with cheats and charlatans who recognized that it was easier to mine gold from starry-eyed argonauts than California riverbanks. Among them was Horace Carpentier, who quickly began squatting on land owned by the Peralta family (a prominent Caliofornio clan whose latifundium spanned most of the East Bay) and selling it off parcel by parcel. While Carpentier held up the Peraltas in court (where they eventually went bankrupt), he leaned on his friends in the new state legislature to incorporate a new city on the Peralta’s land by the name of Oakland, which would weaken the Peralta’s hand. According to Studer, Carpentier hired a drifting Belgian mountebank posing as a Paris-educated architect to throw together a deeply flawed map overnight in the hopes of fast-tracking incorporation. The resulting product was apparently so obviously-fraudulent, suggests Studer, that Carpentier must have destroyed all existing copies to cover his tracks. To me the article’s attempt to use a missing document to retell the city’s municipal origin story is pure Oakland: an obsessive quest to find meaning and coherence where others simply see an unfortunate lacuna.