Christopher Coquard Books

"The Same Old Mistakes Again and Again" is the third comic in the 15-part Seeds of Spring series. Naguset spends precious time with her brother Mu'in before he is deployed to active military duty, and he tells her more of the story behind her name. At school, she helps a friend cope with cruel bullying. A century earlier and half a world away, young Peter stands up to bullies of his own at military school, and later finds solace in nature, letters, and banned books. In this innovative serial graphic novel, Naguset, a modern Canadian Mi'kmaq teenager, exchanges books and mix tapes with her pen pal, Chris. Her imagination sparks when he sends her a biography of the 19th century Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The story juxtaposes Naguset's personal and political coming-of-age in her loving family home with Kropotkin's rocky upbringing in a princely palace. These two stories of eventful lives and bold hearts are interwoven with Kropotkin's theories of freedom, Mi'kmaq vocabulary and social history, and an uplifting punk soundtrack, creating a unique reading experience bound to inspire readers to think in new ways about the issues of our time.

In this innovative graphic novel, Canadian Mi'kmaq teenager Naguset exchanges books with her pen pal Chris, sparking her imagination with a biography of anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The narrative intertwines their coming-of-age stories, exploring themes of freedom, social history, and Mi'kmaq culture, all set to a punk soundtrack.

Essays on the revolutionary Russian anarchist's ideas about mutual aid, sex, and participatory democracy for the twenty-first century. Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) was one of the great thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a Russian anarchist, philosopher, economist, historian, geographer, and scientist, Kropotkin had a range of contributions that was as divergent as it was holistic. Kropotkin's critical thought on issues such as mutual aid and anarchism have become tenets of multiple twenty-first-century social movements. As the foundations of neoliberalism shake and neo-fascist movements spawn around the world, the practice of mutual aid, the theories of anarchism and participatory democracy, and critique of social Darwinism have seldom been as important as they are today. Many activists and scholars are using Kropotkin's ideas to challenge these authoritarian threats and to work toward an egalitarian future. Kropotkin Now! is the culmination of an international effort to investigate Kropotkin's ideas and to imagine new alternatives on the centenary of his death. Contributors engage Kropotkin's work in diverse contexts, including evolution and mutual aid, cyborgs and feminist technoscience, Kropotkin's treatment of "the sex question," urbanization, building dual power, and more.