LiP magazine

LiP: Informed Revolt
Editor Brian Awehali
Categories Political
Frequency Quarterly
Circulation 25,000[1]
Publisher LiP Magazine
First issue January 1, 1996
Final issue 2007
Company LiP Magazine
Country USA
Language English

LiP: Informed Revolt was an award-winning American alternative magazine that took on various incarnations after its founding in 1996 by former Britannica.com Books (and later, Technology) editor Brian Awehali. It began in Chicago as a zine, distributed mostly at local bookstores and coffee shops, then began publishing online in 2001 before eventually evolving into a full-format North American periodical in 2003. It was run by an all-volunteer staff until 2007, and was devoted to politics, culture, sex and humor, and took a satirical, analytical, and often biting approach to what it called "a culture machine that strips us of our desires and sells them back as product and mass mediocracy."

Contributors to the magazine included activists, cultural critics and literary figures, including Vandana Shiva, Tim Wise, Julia Butterfly Hill, Mark Crispin Miller, Martín Espada, Rebecca Solnit, David Solnit, Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jeff Chang, damali ayo, Chip Berlet, Michael Eric Dyson, Mary Roach, Boots Riley, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Heather Rogers, Timothy Kreider, Iain Boal, Jeff Conant, Neal Pollack, Neelanjana Banerjee, Antonia Juhasz, Bruce Levine, Josh MacPhee and Christopher Hitchens.

The magazine also regularly featured excerpts from contemporary and historical authors, including Susan Faludi, Mary Roach, Derrick Jensen, Eduardo Galeano, Winona LaDuke, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen, Mark Crispin Miller, Voltairine DeCleyre, Robin D.G. Kelley, Albert Camus, Dorothy Allison, Eduardo Antonio Parra, Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, Christian Parenti, Leslie Savan, Mark Zepezauer, John Ross, and Noam Chomsky.

LiP: Informed Revolt ceased publication in 2007. An anthology of the magazine's best collected works, Tipping the Sacred Cow: The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt was published by AK Press in 2008.

In an interview published on ZNet in October 2007, editor Brian Awehali was asked what the magazine and anthology were trying to communicate, and answered:

I describe the magazine and book as 'a literary fusillade devoted to a marvelous revolt for the overthrow of miserabilism.' I could have also described our chosen target as the crippling mass apparatus of dichotomized, linear, alienating and anthropocentric white supremacist patriarchal capitalist oligarchy, but for me, and for the magazine's approach, "miserabilism"—a Surrealist trope—is just a less tedious, more sufferable way to effectively describe the same complex of ideas.

Our primary emphasis was on divergence. LiP was meant to be a vehicle for imagining how to get a better world, using a variety of premises, especially unusual or unfamiliar ones (regardless of left/right orientation, though most of ours fell on the left), while avoiding common limiting assumptions. We deliberately avoided any programmatic focus, and instead spent most of our efforts challenging unfounded assumptions, and examining the propositional content, coercive framing, or simple illogic of prevailing (or in some cases emerging) political discourse.

Editorial and production team members

Awards and nominations

LiP: Informed Revolt received the following awards and nominations:

References

  1. ↑ LiP Magazine′s self-described "pass-through" readership peaked at 25,000. Source: LiP Magazine: Advertising in LiP.

External links